The Mouse & The Elephant In The Room

The metaphor symbolizes that of the large and the small though they provide little or no contrasting color at all for they are both gray. Let's cut through that quickly. It is like a mouse trying to get the elephant to move as it is mankind's  effort to try to get the climate to change.  As always I obligate myself to explain.

The butterfly effect is a fanciful way of defining that one little thing can literally lead into something huge. Of course, many arguments have been put forward  to prove or disprove such a phenomenon, if it were one. Here is a different take on the butterfly effect.

The fable that I remember, for those not familiar with or had forgotten it, goes like this: Out in the plains of the Serengeti, a lone butterfly was going about its business from flower to flower. Not too far away is a pride of lions patiently waiting for a herd of wildebeest to come closer. The butterfly, as it flutters its wings, hovering and landing on several flowers, causes some of the disturbed pollen to be carried away by the wafting air. A few of the pollen went into the nostril of the lead lioness, thus causing it to sneeze uncontrollably and loudly - loud enough to spook the ever alert and nervous wildebeest. They turned, saw the lions, and they panicked. The resulting stampede of a few thousand wildebeests soon after, caused a cloud of swirling dust upwards with the rising warm air. The dust clouds joined the Jetstream up above. That somehow changed the air density and speed. In a matter of three days, the global weather pattern had changed considerably and by the seventh day, a typhoon had developed on the Bay of Bengal.  In a few more days, Bangladesh was devastated by strong winds and flooding that followed.  All that was caused by one butterfly.

Like I said, it's a fable I remember but the embellished version is all my own.

Now, talk about two global butterfly wings. China and India.  Over one billion people from each. Each a place where industrial manufacturing are their largest economic engines and fossil fuel is the main source of energy.

Climate protests are widespread in the U.S. and Europe but little anywhere else. India and China are the two butterfly wings that, unlike the ones on the plains of the Serengeti, are gigantically real and who is to say those wings are not directly affecting the global climate, despite the efforts in the West. Is it not that the efforts in the U.S. and Europe seem like the mouse trying to get the elephant to move?

Expanding the metaphor further, the planet is to the sun as the mouse is to the elephant.  It is actually much too generous a comparison.  A million earths will fit inside the sun; it will not take but  a mere third of a million mice to weigh as much as an elephant.  I actually did the math, using the heaviest African elephant tipping the scales at 6,350 kilograms and a healthy, fully satiated, mouse at 20 grams. 317,500 mice will tip the balance scale with the elephant at equilibrium.

Anyway, the sun bosses the entire solar system around, literally in fact. Not the least of its power is controlling earth's climate.  Yes, not only that all the eight (or nine) planets, all their moons, all the comets and the asteroid belt go where the sun goes, each of all the hitchhikers are subject to the whims and tantrums of the sun. The sun, on the other hand, while huge and gravitationally overpowering to all that revolve around it, is an average star and merely one of perhaps an estimated 100 to 400 billion other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The earth would then seem like a single grain of sand on ten acres of the Sahara.  Perhaps, a little too generous a comparison, once again.

But the sun, like every other star, is one giant thermonuclear device. The only thing that stops it from obliterating the entire solar system is that its own gravity keeps it from exploding to smithereens.  What an amazing natural wonder that its own  gravity holds in check all the thermonuclear explosions that occur every second within the sun.  The gravity is so strong that photons of light from its center take several thousand years to reach its surface, but only eight minutes to reach us, across stellar space. Of course, the photon's trek inside the sun is naturally hindered by so many factors, including bumping against and bouncing with other subatomic particles within the sun.

We need to go through the weeds, as I presented above, just to show the reader the futility of going all out towards green energy as an all or nothing alternative against the one proven source of energy that had sustained global industrialization and progress for over two centuries already.  And ignoring the biggest elephant in the room.  The sun.

Think about this for a minute.  Man-made CO2, we are warned, will raise the temperature of the earth two degrees over the next 100 years. Are we forgetting the elephant in the room? The provider of light and warmth and the shepherding grip on all that revolve around it in the solar system has nothing to say at all, in a manner of speaking? The earth's orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle, the sun's voyage around the galaxy, gravitational perturbations of the galaxy, and so many other factors that are much too large to take for granted will have to be factored into before we, humans, impose on one another a singular climate agenda.

The mouse is well served to be mindful of the elephant in the room. The mouse must forever be mindful not to impose or act on its assumption that it can get the elephant to move to one side of the room because there are others  in the same room that can get hurt.  The reader is urged to think about who those others are - real people in various industries, developing countries, thriving economies put asunder because of some singular agenda superseding all others.  Think about it hard.