350 - What is going on here?

“On October 24th, people from 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis” Bill McKibbon

In Hartland, Devon we held hands at an event we named Hands Across Hartland. I will upload a couple of photos unless they are too large in which case I'll get them reduced in size and upload them soon.

350 has focused on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It appears that the 2007 IPPC findings were far too conservative. Prominent scientists are now proposing that we must not maintain CO2 above 350 ppm. Unfortunately for Gaia we are already at 387 and climbing at 2ppm/year.

By looking at several ice core samples, taken from both the artic and antartic, showing us temperature and CO2 content over the last 450k years, we can see that CO2 has never been so high. These samples allow us to look at the present and 4 previous interglacial warming periods. CO2 has never been higher than 300ppm and peaked at around 280 for 3 out of the 5 periods.
So it safe to say that we have never been here before and can only look at predictive models.

Another look at the ice core samples shows the almost 100% correlation between CO2 and temperature. Which drives the other is controversial. Maybe something else drives both. The prevalent view is the greenhouse theory that we must all be aware of. This means that CO2, in addition to other greenhouse gasses such as methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbon are driving up the temperature. Human driven carbon emissions are obviously significant. Those who hold out for a temperature driven alternative point out that as the ocean temperature increases vast amounts of CO2 are released. A little thought reveals that we would then have a very dangerous positive feedback mechanism wherein the greenhouse effect would continue to warm the oceans which then cause more CO2 which increases the greenhouse effect. Now, the question is: What will limit or stop this positive feedback?

In the past million years or so, vast amounts of trees performed that service by sequestering carbon, releasing water vapor and stimulating cloud cover which increased the deflection of the sun’s rays (albedo) effectively taking the place of the miles and miles of ice which had melted. With that negative feedback firmly in place and the orbital forcing factors favouring cooling, the downward cycle of Gaia’s temperature was assured.

Unfortunately, this natural development has been destroyed by humans. Millions of trees over thousands of years have been chopped as if they were useless to anything but to serve the greed of homo sapiens.

Delicate balance


Perhaps too late we have come to understand that the behavior patterns of Gaia, a living being are not as precise as the mathematical formulas and models we have built up to predict a machine’s behavior. All three of the Milankovitch cycles that affect climate, The eccentricity of our orbit around the sun, the amount of the Earth’s tilt, and the combination of the Earth’s wobble as it spins and where the wobble places the poles during Summer and winter, are imprecise and erratic. The cycles vary in intensity and in length. It is their interaction that alters the delicate balance of positive and negative forcings that drive the reversal of the warming and cooling of the planet. There is a warming combination which has occurred about every 100k to 112k years that appears to trigger a rise of temperature from an approximately 100K years of heavy glaciation to an approximately 12K years of warming. The primary amplification factor in these cycles of warming and cooling has been the Earth’s orbit. A more elliptical orbit amplifies the positive and negative feedback forces of the other two cycles. Unfortunately for us, at present our orbit is about as much circular as it has ever been and is moving toward a more circular state. As the orbit becomes more circular, the more difficult it is for the, in our case cooling, or negative feedback factors to force us into a cooling cycle.

So What?

Since we are part of nature, then isn’t what we do natural too? Yes, I’ll go there. However, we are the first beings spawned by Gaia that have a share in Gaia’s survival structures and cycles. We are the first Earth beings that have so far figured out how to survive as we eat out our environment. As our mentors have pointed out, we are now, and not by our conscious choice, co-creators with Gaia of our environment. Unfortunately, we are not ready and have not the wisdom to assume such power.

Our establishment scientists and religious leaders are still unable to grasp the significance and import of the fact that we are an outgrowth of a living, loving being. A being with the intelligence and ability to self-regulate. We assume that our lovely planet is dumb and what we see and measure is some chance combination of factors that we can grind up into our mechanistic paradigm. How about asking – why do we now have a ratio of over 80% cooling and only a little over 20% warming over an expanse of 120k years? Millions of years ago there was a lot more carbon and the oceans were far more expansive then now. Could it be that this oscillation of cooling periods with shorter warming periods is necessary to self regulate us toward maintaining a livable environment? We must remember that Gaia acts in, to us, long term increments.
We know that the sun’s output of heat and energy is expanding. All stars that we have studied have a life cycle of expanding energy until the become red giants then and spurt out planetary material. This knowledge led James Lovelock, as I have read, to question why the Earth was not hotter. What resulted was the Gaia Hypothesis and now Gaia theory.

The challenge of homo sapiens


In the past millenniums, creatures, warm and cold blooded beings, plant and mineral beings exercised their innate drive to expand their activity and awareness. It is only now that homo sapiens has pushed the envelope to an extent that we must now use the combination of our thinking function and our deep intuitive knowing to make wise decisions. With power comes responsibility. We have the science, we have the spirituality, we have the wisdom and we have the level of consciousness to not only survive, but share in the increasing health of Gaia.

Yes, there are detractors, there are greedy people and corporations without soul, but they cannot prevail over the loving grace of Gaia. It is the science of complexity and autopoisis that we find our latest understanding of the effect of the love streaming out from Gaia. As we become ever more conscious our descriptors will evolve and our feeling of connectedness will deepen. The power of Gaia’s love as it is expressed in our species is beautiful beyond imagination. Be that which you want to see.