Webster defines existential as, "grounded in existence or the experience of existence"; "relating to or affirming existence".
Another overused adjective, often paired with the noun, "threat", that is also almost always misused and abused. As a result we no longer pay attention, especially after hearing so many things we're told that this or that is an existential threat.
The threat to existence is no trivial matter based on that definition.
"I have no idea where we parked the car, or why we exist."
Let's begin with our sun - the source of heat and light and the gravitational hold that keeps our little world in its place. If we were to scale it down to the size of a golf ball, our puny earth is smaller than a grain of sand about eight meters away. Yet, season after season, that sun, so far away, 93 million miles in real scale, rules what climate prevailed on earth for millions of years. Our ancestors and those of other organisms had to adapt to the tantrums of a fusion thermonuclear device (yes, believe it) by which the sun produces its energy.
Now, there are other suns all throughout the universe. So farther apart from each other that the nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri double star system, is indiscernible to our bare eyes. Using the same golf ball analogy, with our sun as a golf ball on top of the Washington Monument, the nearest star would be just another golf ball farther north beyond Quebec, Canada, and you'd have to go another two hundred miles past that city to find it.
These vast distances have a way of emphasizing that our earth is puny, all its inhabitants even punier, yet it has a way of making it possible for life to develop and flourish in the only place we know it exists. In fact, scientists fondly put our place at the Goldilocks Zone. Not too hot, not too cold. Farther away we get a cold, lifeless planet that is Mars; too close and we'd have a hot summer day at 880 deg F (471 C), surface temperature, in our sister planet, Venus.
For life to exist in the only place we know and, more significantly, where we happen to be, along with a gazillion other organisms, the threat to our existence is not to be taken lightly. Yet, it appears that the phrase, "existential threat" gets thrown about with careless abandon.
In fact, it is the same phrase directed at real and imagined threats over centuries of human conflict. We will not flip back to so many pages of our past but, perhaps, look back to just the last half century after the Great War.
We - every nation with the capacity to do it - built up an awesome cache of arsenal against one another over decades of unrelenting arms race. The reason: the opposing side poses an "existential threat" to the other's way of life.
"This stuff is virtually useless against nukes."
For example, the hot wars of the Korean and Vietnam Wars were caused by threats, fueled by nothing more than the ideological differences between the perceived notions that capitalism was an existential threat to communism and vice-versa. It turned out that such wars were not only avoidable, they were both unnecessary, if fervent ideological zeal and unreasonable fears were kept at bay.
From all the capitalist nations' perspectives, we now know communism doesn't work. The only place where it is still practiced in its pure form is Cuba - a fine example of the way not to run an economy. Just ninety miles away, while also being surrounded by other more relatively successful Caribbean nations, is a capitalist nation that is the haven for countless Cuban immigrants who have called it home for decades, also a beacon of hope for individualism, as opposed to blind reliance and dependence on the power of the commune.
On the other hand, the Vietnam War could also have been avoided if not for the perversely imagined threat of the ideological "domino effect" that communism was going to engulf the entire Asian continent. It turned out that had the west let the vines of communism spread on its own, it would have wilted or withered without establishing deep roots. We now know that even China of over a billion people is a successful economic power by running its economy as capitalists would, albeit running its executive government as a sort of hybrid communism. A united Vietnam today, where the North won, abandoned pure communist idealism and is embracing capitalism to dictate its economy.
I will say this quickly as in removing a band aid. Climate change is not an existential threat. We are throwing money at it like drunken sailors - no offense to sailors who when they wake up the next morning will sober up and re-take their senses far better than the unelected government bureaucrats who will spend taxpayers' money like there is no tomorrow.
Today, we know that people - the governed - will discern quickly what works and what doesn't. The mistake was that governments were guided too much by ideology and had always maintained that throwing money and resources are what would assuage the fear, however unreasonably overblown and imagined, against perceived threats, existential or otherwise.
Climate change has been a phenomenon since the creation of our solar system. It was our ability, as it was true for every surviving organism today, to adapt to the changes in climate. Supported by geological evidence, there had been five ice ages before the last one. Keep in mind that every ice age was always followed by a warming of the climate.
Earth today is undergoing a warming up cycle from the last one. A few things to consider here: (a) climate changes occurred in the past and will continue to occur into the far future without our actions; (b) climate changes made us who we are today. If not for the warming of climate, we would still be covered in fur; diversity of skin and eye color are all a result of climate changes; if not for climate change, there will be no Sports Illustrated, Swimsuit edition; (c) Climate change created the Great Lakes and all kinds of bodies of water worldwide; island nations and nation-archipelagos were created as ice melted at the poles to raise sea level as the earth warmed up.
Plate tectonics, driven by the molten nature of the earth's mantle, have more power to reshape the global landscape than all the nuclear bombs combine. Look no further than its handiwork in the Grand Canyon, the African Rift valley, the shapes of continents and the separation of the Americas from Africa, etc. What used to be one great landmass, called Pangea, are now the various continents.
All of the above, including the constant volcanic activities and earthquakes that caused all kinds of changes in the landscape - were catastrophic events at the time that they occurred. We and all current living organisms survived because of adaptation - a distinct ability every survivor is equipped with.
"All I'm saying is now is the time to develop the technology to deflect an asteroid."
And don't forget, extraterrestrial threats like a wayward comet, asteroids, massive radiation from the sun's hiccup or tantrum, a supernova explosion nearby (in galactic proximity, of course). One asteroid that hit earth 67 million years ago killed off the dinosaurs but it ushered the age of mammals (including us) and for the diversity of birds soaring through our skies or running through desert sands, that were the successful species to adapt from dinosaurian lineage.
So, why is climate change being forced on us as an existential threat more than a nuclear war, famine and diseases?
Permit me one analogy. A dropped pebble on a still pond will create a ripple. Try as we may, we cannot stop the ripple, wave after wave projecting from the center of the impact. There is just no way. The dropped stone is the changing climate, composed of many elements but the least of which is the use of fossil fuel. The foolish one who is trying to stop it is the promoter of the ideology to control the narrative, overturn the people's way of life over a flimsy argument, and the messaging of a political agenda.
What are we to do but ride over each wave, float over the ripple. Yes, indeed we can cut emissions through efficiency in combustion, lighter vehicle bodyweight, use electric cars where warranted, more efficient housing materials, create more carbon sinks with a massive tree-planting program, etc. As had been in the past, climate change occurred over millennia of very complex processes that allowed time for adaptation to help species survive. Warmer climate allowed for longer growing seasons and better yielding food crops.
We know there is something wrong when political personas predict rising waters, end of civilization with dates like 2012, at one time, then re-adjusted to 2030, and on and on. Predicting dates like that, just to make it relevant for people living today and create a dire scenario of a pressing nature, is pure folly. Don't forget too that these narratives almost always follow the same political magnetic lines against another. It is no longer about, "what can we do together to make this a cohesive and reasonably well thought out plan agreed upon by both sides", instead of instinctively demagoguing the messages to conform with a single political persuasion.
Ending the fossil fuels, extinguish the coal industry, doing away with internal combustion engines, outlawing gas stoves, refrain from eating meat, plus many more inanities, are only ideas that are dictated by a single voice, but clearly not through wide public acclamation.
Here's a not-so-farfetched thought experiment. Can we conceive of an all electric powered fire trucks, emergency rescue vehicles, earth moving equipment, cargo ships, 18 wheeled transport trucks, air transport, even cruise ships? Now, if we make an exception to refine hydrocarbons just for these example vehicles, does anyone realize how expensive fuel production would be just for these vehicles and equipment? Can we defend this or any other country with electric tanks, warships and stealth aircraft? Can we launch into space even just one lightweight weather satellite?
As in the TV game show, "Jeopardy", all of the above in the last two paragraphs, and many other examples, will fall under the category of, "Stupid Answers".
One final thought. One popular mantra of saving the environment is recycling. Well, well, nature has been recycling everything over eons. Carbon and hydrogen based vegetation, decayed and piling up layer over each layer for millions of years, compacted under immense pressure and heat, became what is known as hydrocarbon. This was the gift from the earth that propelled civilization into the industrial age, modern travel and productive agriculture from better hydrocarbon-based fertilizer.
Just imagine this. Hydrocarbon splits up into carbon and hydrogen after releasing the stored energy within their bonds during and after combustion. Vegetation will recapture the carbon, hydrogen will combine with oxygen to make water or water vapor. Should we not be dedicating resources to make that recycling process one of the permanent solutions instead of demagoguing carbon as a pernicious villain? After all, we are all carbon-based organisms by definition. We consume carbohydrates for energy, and amino acids that are the main components of protein are bonds of hydrogen, a little bit of nitrogen and, yes, carbon!
Let's think about this very carefully before we condemn hydrocarbons, also known as fossil fuel, into the Most Unwanted List.
We will soon begin another cycle around the sun, let us not forget that what we see around us are, almost without exception, recycled material, not the least of which are hydrogen and carbon in the form of hydrocarbons, which by the way includes the base component for asphalt - which literally paved and continues to pave the world's highways around the world, connecting places and people who would have been so remotely far removed from better healthcare facilities, otherwise.
The last oxygen atoms you inhaled within the last seconds just now had been around since a few billion years ago; the carbon dioxide you just exhaled was the same molecule that came from simple life forms and dinosaurs, Neanderthals, Nile crocodiles, etc. over eons of breathing in and breathing out many million, trillion times over and over. This makes the nice sounding catchphrase, "Net Zero Carbon Emissions Initiative" sound like a pipe dream with too many holes to hold anything.
Let's re-think every existential threat we hear or read about. Better still, let's expunge that phrase with a permanent restraining order.
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