Have you thought about what your cell phone is made of?
“Sand, oil and rocks, really special rocks.
And that’s it.
Now you can imagine, take sand oil and rocks, and give them to the Senate, and say please build a cell phone out of this. We laugh, of course, there’s not a chance that this could happen.
Einstein is in there, the GPS and its relativity. Without relativity, in a week the GPS would drop you either in the Chesapeake or in the Lake Erie, it would get lost; Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and quantum mechanics is in the design of that thing (the phone), and Alfred Wegener, we use continental drift to find the ores that go into the special rocks, that thing (the phone) is a triumph of science and engineering, plus design and marketing.”
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3 takeaway messages for a quick read:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it warms the planet (humans have burned so much fossil fuels, causing global warming)
Everyone is affected around the world (poor people in hot places are the most vulnerable)
The world is better off switching to a renewable energy system sooner than later
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In this video, Dr. Alley shares with us some thoughts on energy, environment, and sustainability. He will take us through climate change and sustainability, where energy is the biggest issue, and lead us ways into a brighter future. *
This is worth remembering though: we can’t go back to being hunter gatherers, we can’t go back to the age of whale oil and trees, the total US whale oil production is central, 10000 whalers at the peak, it’s equal to about a week of recent use of oil imports.
10,000 people 100 years to get a few tanker loads. That was it. The idea that we go back is just completely absurd.
But we have whales and trees because we burn fossil algae and fossil trees.
This is a cartoon, published in the Magazine Vanity Fair in the year 1861, and it is the grand ball given by the whales in honor of the discovery of the oil wells in Pennsylvania. And this is before the civil war, “the oil wells of our native land may they never secede” , “oil’s well that ends well.”[1]
“Grand Ball Given by Whales” (Vanity Fair, 1961). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
In very round numbers, the fossil fuels accumulated a few hundred million years, we are burning them in a few hundred years; we are burning them about a million times faster than they were saved for us.The rate at which new ones are made is essentially zero for our purposes. Nature will make new ones, give it millions of years, they’ll come back, will they come back fast enough for us to be even vaguely useful, will they come back as fast as trees and whales? Absolutely not. They are gone.
So there is not a choice between renewable energy system and a fossil fuel energy system; we either start the switch while we still have some fossil fuels on the ground, or we start to switch after the fossil fuels are gone.
But the fossil fuels will go. And this is not an “if”, it’s simply a “when”. And whether it’s in our lifetime or whether it’s in our kid’s or grandkid’s, that’s sort of the end’s of it. It pretty clearly can’t go past that.
And, it emits CO2. We have known for well over a century, before Einstein, before Bohr, before Wegener, before the physics in your cell phone, we knew that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and it warms the planet.
[1] “Oil’s well that ends well” is referring to All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare. The cartoon is making a pun saying that everything has turned out great for the whales with the discovery of oil wells; in other words: whales are celebrating the discovery of oil wells because they are happy that no more whales would be killed for whale oil.
* Note: the titles for this post and the video are by GreenÜ; Dr. Alley’s original presentation title is “some thoughts on energy, environment, and sustainability.” We are grateful for Dr. Alley’s permission to publish content from his speech and use graphics from his presentation slides and we greatly appreciate his help in editing the post.
About the Speaker
Dr. Richard Alley is the Evan Pugh Professor of the Department of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University . He is one of the world’s leading climate scientists who studies how climate has changed in the past and how likely an abrupt change would be in the future. Dr. Alley examines ice sheets and glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and Alaska in order to build a record of the Earth’s climate over the past hundreds of thousands of years. Read more…
GreenÜ 