Editor’s note: This commentary is by Daniel A. Young, of Hyde Park, who is a retired environmental engineer, with degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
[P]eople who study physics know that matter and energy are conserved. You have the same amount of each after a process is complete that you had before the process began. Neither is used up. They just become unusable.
The same people also know that order is NOT conserved. Disorder always increases at the expense of order in any process of change. You always have less order after a process is completed than you had before it began.
This means that in a changing earth, order is a critical commodity. If you don’t have enough order to begin with, you will run out. And when you are “out of order” things don’t work.
I have spent several years poring over the scientific literature, investigating the fundamentals of energy, order and activity, and how the basic rules of the game might affect the climate and the biology of our planet. I found that increasing disorder takes the diversity away from our beautiful ecosystems, and spreads uniformity in our biosphere and our climate systems; to the point where they no longer support diversity and complexity, but fade into drabness, sameness and uniformity, all characteristic of the disordered condition. We were warned by the early promoters of thermodynamic science about the tendency for disorder to emerge in ordered systems. But we are so blessed with a seemingly endlessly ordered planet that these warnings were almost irrelevant.
Disorder disperses away from its point of origin by radiating through our atmosphere at a maximum possible rate, and it leaves such elaborately ordered systems behind, that it seemed that we would never be affected by such insignificant matters. But as our ability to use tools and expend energy to destroy our ordered systems grows, and as our ability to isolate our systems increases so that our disorder can no longer escape from our environment; the tragic loss of order in our climate and ecosystems has become apparent.
Our world is becoming disordered, deranged, exhausted and uniform; and no amount of carbon dioxide removal is going to fix the situation. We had better find a way to resurrect the order that it once had if we want to continue to benefit from the diversity of our climate and ecosystems that we once enjoyed.
The dissipation of disorder is the source of all the order on earth, and we will continue to be blessed with it only as long as we allow it to continue. We must allow the disorder generated on earth to radiate through the atmosphere and escape into outer space or our ecosystems and our climate systems will cease to diversify and fail to function. And by the same measure, we must not destroy the order that has accumulated over the history of the planet or we will devastate its diversity and function.
If we are to maintain order, activity and diversity in systems on our beloved planet we must follow two cardinal rules.
• First: allow disorder to dissipate from the earth. Keep the pathways of dissipation open (in other words, keep greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere.)
• Second: Do no harm. Do not destroy the existing order (in other words keep your hands off our biosphere).
In our arrogance and hubris, we have ignored both decrees, and it now falls on the shoulders of our descendants to understand the error of our ways and to turn our creative genius to re-creating the order of our earth systems. We’re still trying to figure out how to balance energy flows in our earth system, and we still don’t understand how to preserve our ordered systems and enable the dispersion of our disorder. It’s time to get our act together and take an inclusive stance in understanding the predicament we have put ourselves in.
Scientifically curious people tend to want to focus on “the way things work,” as if they only worked one way. Even the most open-minded of us tends to think that if we know how an event happens, we can conclude that the same event doesn’t also happen in some other way. This is a very polarizing attitude, and it is decidedly not true. One of the peculiar things that can be deduced from the second law of thermodynamics is that things will work in every way they possibly can. That is, there is no “way things work”; they work in all possible ways. The second law is quite clear, if it can work both ways, it will.
The folks who base their understanding of climate change on energy balances and greenhouse gases are working with the first law of thermodynamics only, and in so doing they are ignoring second law effects. According to the second law, the energy from the sun will be transported across the surface of the earth by a myriad of diverse processes, all operating in parallel, and all producing disorder to be discharged to the emptiness of the universe. Ordered systems will remain behind as long as the earth can continue to dissipate enough disorder.
To make the system work, we must encourage the dispersion of disorder through our atmosphere and biosphere, and we must preserve the order left over after the disorder disperses. This is why it is important to eliminate greenhouse gases from our atmosphere, and why ecosystem restoration, soil carbon enhancement and regenerative agriculture are equally, or even more, important than carbon dioxide concentrations.
It is important to understand how the second law affects climate change and to revise our approach to mitigation accordingly. As we account for these as-of-yet incompletely understood factors in the climate change process we will have to revise our recommended remedial measures.
