Mommie Dearest: Earth can be one mean mama

This beautiful photograph of Mother Earth was taken earlier this month by NASA astronaut Ron Garan, now in residence aboard the International Space Station. Mr. Garan is currently blogging from space on a site called Fragile Oasis, a site he shares with three other NASA veterans. I learned about Garan's efforts (and obtained this photo) from Denise Chow's April 21 article posted on OurAmazingPlanet.com. Chow writes that by "shining a light on Earth from space, Garan and his colleagues hope to mobilize people to improve the conditions on our fragile planet."

This is a wonderful goal and entirely appropriate for this Earth Day weekend.

We should work together to protect our home.

But we must also worry about how to protect ourselves from our home -- and this Earth Day season seems as good a time as any to remember this.

A lot of politicians and pundits are obsessed with "climate change." This used to be called "global warming," but "climate change" tests better in markets experiencing unusually cold weather, such as we've had in Chicago of late.

Climate change was before the U.S. Supreme Court just this week, in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, No. 10-174. The Court was reportedly skeptical about whether courts are proper places to address such complicated issues.

The Court's apparent skepticism seems quite appropriate to me. I am no climate change denier; the one constant of Earth's climate throughout time has been change. At different times in pre-history, Earth has been completely covered in ice and completely ice-free. Inasmuch as we weren't here yet, humans had nothing to do with these extremes. Climate fluctuations in the relatively brief time that humans have clung to this floating rock have been linked to any number of human tragedies, including the French Revolution, the Viking terror raids on Britain and elsewhere, and the collapse of the Mayan Golden Age. Humans were not driving SUVs during any of these events. If everyone switches to Priuses tomorrow, Toyota stock might soar, but climate change would continue.

Interestingly, while the courts, the EPA and the states wrestle with how best to regulate carbon dioxide (fingered, not so many years ago, by a still-nascent science as the key culprit in climate change), science may have moved on to another suspect: Soot. A nearly invisible layer of soot, released into the atmosphere from autos, trucks, airplanes and coal or wood-burning all over the world, is collecting in the Arctic, absorbing sunlight and contributing to record warmth (and ice melt) in that region. The AP reported just a couple of days ago that scientists now believe "that cutting the concentration of short-lived pollutants, such as soot, will reduce the rate of warming in the Arctic faster than cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which last far longer in the atmosphere." This one seems obvious in retrospect. Anyone who's watched the difference in the rate of snow melt on asphalt as opposed to grass could figure it out -- if they knew that soot was accumulating in the Arctic.

But if all the soot from every car and power plant in the world could be scrubbed from the sky tomorrow, climate change would still continue. The Earth may be our mother, but she's often an indifferent one.

And, of course, she might kill us at any time, too. Folks in Japan recently received a harsh reminder of this sad truth.

And earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes and even plain old ordinary volcanoes (e.g., Mt. St. Helens) aren't the worst things that Mother Earth can hit us with. The eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra, around 74,000 years ago, seems to have caused an immediate global winter followed by an ice age of a thousand years or so. Some scientists believe that the Toba eruption may have also caused the near-extinction of the human race. The event has been linked, by some, to a 'bottleneck' in human evolution.

There's a supervolcano in our own backyard which erupted 1.2 million years ago and 640,000 years ago. We call it Yellowstone National Park. Scientists recently announced that the "gigantic underground plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano might be bigger than previously thought."

The volcanic plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Yellow and red indicate higher conductivity, green and blue indicate lower
conductivity. Made by University of Utah geophysicists and computer scientists,
this is the first large-scale 'geoelectric' image of the Yellowstone hotspot.
Credit: University of Utah.

Eventually (though presumably not next week) Yellowstone will erupt again.

So let's celebrate Mother Earth on Earth Day and every day and do what we can to preserve our home. But let's not forget the need to keep learning how to figure out how best to preserve ourselves and our posterity from Mommie Dearest.