How we may not be responsible for Climate Change (and the Coronavirus)
Covid-19 is probably the Earth trying to tell us something. It’s done so in the past — this might the other time.
Our Universe has been around for a little around 13.7 billion years. Perhaps the most widely accepted theory is that it formed after the “Big Bang”, a cosmological theory explaining the origin(s) of the Universe.
The Earth wasn’t formed too very long ago either. When the solar system settled into its current layout 4.5 billion years ago, gravity pulled swirling gas and dust, called “solar nebulae”, in to form a planet which we call “home” today.
Early Earth was hot. Really hot. Temperatures soared at 2000 °F. The planet was essentially a ginormous ball of molten rock. There was no air — just carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapour. Over hundreds of million years, the Earth cooled, the atmosphere thickened and life soon started to emerge.
And then just 20,000 years ago, the Earth was a large snowball covered in ice sheet several thousand metres thick. Although we call this the “Ice Age” period, geologists refer to it as the “Last Glacial Maximum” because it’s the most recent time when ice reached such a huge extent. Over the past million years or so, there have been 10 glacial maximums.
Scientists have determined that the variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun and shifting plate tectonics spurred this waxing and waning in Earth’s climates. Along with solar radiation levels, scientists believe that global warming and cooling are linked to tectonic activity. The shifting of the Earth’s plates creates large-scale changes to continental masses, triggering volcanic activity that releases carbon dioxide into the air.
And all this ties to a crucial concept in Chemistry: Entropy
Entropy means “disturbance” or “disorder”
In Chemistry, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that:
The entropy of the entire universe will always increase.
Why is it that we get older and never younger? Why does a room that’s been cleaned will always get messy in the future? Certain things happen in one direction and not the other — this is called the “arrow of time”. Denoted as ΔS, the change in entropy suggests that time itself is asymmetric with respect to the order of an isolated system (a system, here the universe, will become more disordered as time increases).
To better understand this often-confused topic, we’ll use an analogy:
Consider an ice cube. In its solid form, the ice molecules are closely packed together with very little space to move around i.e there is less chaos. If we take this same ice cube and place it at room temperature, it is observed that the ice molecules absorb energy from its surroundings, get excited and start to move further apart from each other (basically, it begins to melt). Now if you look at the molecules, they have much more freedom to move around i.e the chaos has increased.
Without humans, the Earth has suffered Global Warming (and cooling)
With humans, the Earth is suffering the same phenomenon
See the relation?
Nope?
You’re right — there isn’t any.
Global warming is a natural process that the Earth undergoes periodically, similar to an annual health checkup. Humans here are only speeding up the rate in which the Earth will suffer this phenomenon.
Consider a world without any humans on it — calm, peaceful; the world is greener and the sky is beautiful. But behind this veil, CO2 levels are increasing. Not so fast, but increasing nonetheless. At this rate, the Earth will show an increase of 0.5°C in probably half a millennium (the entropy of Earth is increasing slowly).
Come the Industrial Revolution, the exhaust from factories, the burning of fossil fuels are all added (and still are adding) CO2 into the air (the entropy is increasing at a much faster rate.
If ΔSₕ represents the change in entropy of Earth without humans and ΔSₐ represents the change in entropy of Earth with humans, then ΔSₐ >> ΔSₕ
I began by saying that we may not be responsible for climate change.
And yes, that’s true
But to a certain extent:
While we may not be solely responsible for climate change, we are definitely hastening the process by increasing Earth’s entropy at a faster rate. Eventually, the Earth won’t be able to withstand this and will employ its “cleansing methods” like it’s done so in the past (the Ice Age) and probably doing now with the recent Coronavirus pandemic.
