I thought this week I would talk a little about the Earth, its climate and atmosphere. I want to inject a little perspective on the way things really are.
So, let’s start by traveling up to the International Space Station. OK, we can’t all go at once, but we can imagine the trip. The space station is around 408 kilometres up, its in outer space and it orbits the Earth every hour and a half or to be more precise every 91.63 minutes.
I don’t know about you, but I get a little dizzy just thinking about that. Something else to think about is the distance between Yellowknife and Hay river is 194 kilometres which would be half way to the space station if you went straight up and the distance between Yellowknife to Edmonton is 1,021 kilometres which would put you way past the space station.
If you were to look out the window of the space station, one thing you would hopefully notice is just how incredibly thin the atmosphere really is and how everyone on the planet shares that one thin atmosphere. If someone or some country pollutes one part of it, that pollution eventually travels around the entire globe. For some reason this seems to be a really hard concept for a lot of people, including leaders, to understand or appreciate. The NIMBYs would say, electronic wastes, we don’t care where you send them to be dealt with just as long as its not in my back yard and it was impossible to convince them the entire world is their back yard.
That attitude has inflicted a lot of damage on the world and still is. But back to the atmosphere. As you descend from the space station you would cross an imaginary line at 100 kilometres above the planet and you just crossed from outer space to inner space.
Shooting stars occur at approximately 82 kilometres which also seems to be the area where the northern lights occur. The main area of our atmosphere is the troposphere from sea level up to 10 kilometres and that is where most of our weather occurs. I remember in high school I was writing an essay on our atmosphere and I had posed two of what I thought were relatively simple questions. What part of our atmosphere was livable or habitable to humans and, was there such a thing as ideal elevations for humans to live at?
Back in those days before the Internet you went to the library and pored through encyclopedias and reference books. The questions turned out to be a whole lot harder to answer then I thought and despite all this talk about climate and atmosphere, green houses gases and pollution are still darned hard to research and figure out.
At 2,100 metres you enter the high-altitude zone and the percentage of oxygen decreases rapidly. You can get altitude illness which can be fatal, so you had better train for it, have some oxygen with you in case you need it and slowly get yourself acclimatized to it. Think about that for a few minutes, at a mere 2,100 metres above sea level humans start to run out of oxygen. Our habitable zone of atmosphere is incredibly small.
La Rinconada in Peru is a settlement of 50,000 people who live at 4,800 meters and the people run unregulated gold mines. It shows you the lengths people will go to in order to get a little gold and the incredibly harsh conditions they will live under. People also live on the Tibetan plateau at over 3,500 meters. However, the general rule of thumb for humanity seems to be the closer you get to sea level, the more people choose to live there. One figure I came across is that 80 per cent of humanity live within 100 kilometres of the world’s oceans.
So, there is a little primer on our atmosphere. It is incredibly thin, and we are polluting it at an alarming rate. To me the so-called greenhouse gases are only a small part of the problem.