On May 9, 2019 I gave a talk as part of the EcuAction Forum Series in Christchurch. I discussed climate change from the perspective of atmospheric physicist involved more with ozone depletion and its interactions with climate change. I emphasised the huge impact that man has made during our fleeting appearance on the planet.
Our brain is not very good at comprehending the huge numbers involved, so I constructed the table below. By compressing the time scale so the time since Planet Earth was formed is reduced to one “year”, the times for other events since then become much more digestible. For example, by that measure, mankind has been around for only the last 30 “minutes”, and a human lifetime is half a “second” of that “year”.
The Tuatara is a scaly lizard-like creature that that grows to a length of about 0.5 m. It’s been endemic to New Zealand for the last two “weeks”, since the time of the dinosaurs. It’s one of the few large animals that survived the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 5 “days” ago.
Action on climate change is more difficult than that needed to protect ozone, especially with delays caused by the “Merchants of Doubt” (see book of that title by Naomi Ereskes and Eric Conway). But the huge success of Montreal Protocol on Protection of the Ozone Layer shows that we can do it.
A transcript of the talk for Plains FM can be heard here (unfortunately the sound quality is not very good, as we had difficulties with the microphone)