This commentary is by Dan Young of Hyde Park, author of “Restoring Climate Stability by Managing Ecological Disorder,” a book analyzing the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of climate change.
It’s time to clear up some misconceptions about the way the Earth maintains its ordered and functional nature — biological, climatic, or otherwise.
Everything that happens on Earth generates disorder. You may recognize this as the Second Law of thermodynamics. An earth that couldn’t get rid of the disorder it created would soon drown in disorder, a condition so paralyzing that no more activity would be possible.
The scientific term for this condition is “equilibrium” or “heat death.”
Scientists describe the ordered and active, functional qualities of the Earth as a “steady state” system. Systems that are ordered and complex enough to support life are now called “far-from-equilibrium” systems, to differentiate them from the frequently misused term “equilibrium systems.”
Confusing these ideas leads to significant conceptual errors, such as the idea that climate change is equivalent to global warming and that greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are the cause of both phenomena. These terms are widely misconstrued.
Greenhouse gases entrap long-wave radiant energy, causing warming when the entrapped energy degrades into heat. Climate change, however, is something different. Climate is not global; it is regional. The three recognized climate zones — tropical, temperate and polar — are interdependent but separate. They are caused by the circulation patterns of the atmosphere, which distribute energy across the surface by mechanical fluid flow.
The climate changes when the patterns of flow change modifying atmospheric and surface conditions in the affected regions around the world.
Living systems, like the Earth, are active, functional, alive and complex because they actively discharge disorder. In doing so, they became ordered themselves. Entropy, also known as disorder, is transferable between systems. The system taking in entropy becomes disordered, while the system giving up entropy becomes ordered.
The secret to a healthy ordered system is waste. A living system must discharge entropy or it will become disordered and die. If the discharge of entropy is interrupted, or even reduced, the system will accumulate disorder in the form of entropy and become dysfunctional.
Systems exchange entropy and they become ordered and/or disordered as they do. This reality is a long way from the inevitable buildup of disorder in every system promoted by the founders of thermodynamics.
Another misunderstanding is based on the popular notion that biofuels can be substituted for fossil fuels to reduce the carbon dioxide load on the atmosphere. These biomass fuels are considered “green energy” because they are replaced by new plants growing in the open space left by the removal of the old, “unnecessary” materials.
This idea is fatally flawed. The removal of living biomass to replace fossil fuels is a vastly misunderstood idea that does more damage to the Earth and its environment than combustion of the fossil fuels they replace.
Living biomass provides ecosystem services that underpin the entire living network of the planet. The idea that it can be considered unnecessary undermines the whole carbon-circulating nature of the biosphere. Carbon removed from the biosphere to replace the energy derived from fossil fuels diminishes the ability of the Earth to support life, including plant, animal, fungal and other forms. The amount of plant biomass currently left on the planet will support only half of the human population that could have been supported before the Industrial Revolution.
In addition to other ecosystem services, living plant biomass provides cooling and order to the planet. According to the Second Law, entropy (disorder) is produced by every process. Photosynthesis, the process by which carbon dioxide is reconstituted into biomass, produces more disorder than order. If the Earth is to retain its ordered condition, the disorder produced by photosynthesis must be ejected from the Earth system.
Biomass accomplishes this magic by evapotranspiration, a process that is inseparably linked to photosynthesis. Water that is taken up by plant roots is vaporized, absorbing a tremendous amount of heat, which is carried aloft to be released when the water vapor condenses again high in the atmosphere. Liquid (or solid) water falls again to the ground, leaving behind the extracted heat, which is radiated into outer space and out of the Earth system.
Evapotranspiration not only relieves the Earth of heat, it relieves it of the disorder generated by the processes and activities on the planet, leaving the Earth with the excess of order that drives the evolutionary processes, increasing the complexity of natural systems over time. Depleting plant biomass removes this ordering process and eliminates the ability of the Earth to maintain its ordered condition.
Nearly half of the planet’s plant biomass reserve has been eliminated by anthropogenic activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Is it any wonder that the ordered nature of the biosphere and the atmosphere are collapsing?
Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not the answer to the problem. Reordering it to functional biomass is the answer. Only by restoring the waste disposal function of the biosphere will we correct the imbalance of disorder we have imposed upon our planet.
