No way to stop the climate change we have unleashed
Graeme Maxton says we cannot manage the limits of nature
We want to live in a world without limits. Like long-distance runners and racing drivers, humankind is always trying to overcome limits to achieve more.
Even so, there is a maximum speed we can run, even drug-enhanced. There is a maximum speed cars can drive before they begin to fly. We don't understand where many of these limits lie, simply because we haven't reached them yet. One day we will reach them, and we will understand then that they cannot be overcome.
When we talk about boundless oceans, endless horizons and infinite possibilities, this is merely poetic. While possibilities may be many, they are never infinite. Even our universe has limits. Our imagination is also limited, by everything we currently understand. It is impossible to conceive anything more.
When we reach natural limits, even the best technology cannot overcome them. We only think they can be overcome because we have not encountered many so far, and because the limits we have breached until now were man-made, or not really limits at all.
Some of nature's limits are known. Nothing can travel faster than light, for example, at 300,000 kilometres per second in space.
These are natural limits. Man-made limits, however, are changeable. They can be overcome.
In nature, warning signals often appear only when change is unavoidable
Our technological advances support the idea that we can push the limits of nature. We can take energy from the wind, modify the contents of cells and split atoms.
But this understanding of the world and our ability to manipulate it has made us foolish, because our discoveries are rather modest. When we take energy from the wind, we simply capture what is already there. When we change the contents of cells, we are only copying nature. And when we split atoms, we are just looking inside.
When it comes to the natural world, there is much we do not understand. We have not explored most of the oceans. We do not even know what substance or force makes up more than 80 per cent of the universe.
We also keep changing our ideas. Theories about the origins of life and the birth of the universe have changed completely in the past 150 years. Despite this, we now think we have all the answers, or at least most of the important ones.
That may be natural; we are ambitious and already understand the limits of most of the structures we use every day, because we made them.
In nature, however, warning signals often appear only when change is unavoidable. When a typhoon forms, there is nothing anyone can do to stop the process. We can only wait, and see what damage it unleashes. Similarly, melting Arctic ice caps, receding glaciers and rising sea levels are the start of a transformation we will witness.
The changes we have unleashed already are unstoppable, certainly within any time frame that we really understand. The effects of our pumping large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere have become visible within a century, a flash of earthly time. It will take many hundreds of years before the effects have passed.
Nature is easily the most complicated system we know. We cannot survive without it. There is no other place, so far as we know, where the acidity of the oceans and the gases in the atmosphere are exactly as creatures like us require. We know too, that an average temperature rise of even a few degrees will change all this.
We have set a process in motion. Now we must do everything we can to stop that process, and quickly.
