How can the planet’s energy be so dangerous?

A reader sent through this important question that I answered by email but wanted to repeat here. Kim F (thank you) asked, how can the planet’s energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More be so dangerous? This was in response to this article about Animal Impact. The evidence I presented, is that without animals, plants will continue to capture and distribute dangerous amounts of solar energy. Without anything to eat them, these chemicals create an imbalance that collapses ecosystem structures, eventually making them uninhabitable.

Question

If plants concentrate the Sun’s energy and that’s dangerous, how could coal and ocean sediment be formed by this? How do we believe the argument that energy is dangerous, when it remains on earth? Isn’t it just recycled by animals.

How can the planet’s energy be so dangerous?

Carbon storage in the upper portions of the Earth’s crust happens on time scales of tens of millions of years. But we only live on the skin. The ‘danger’ of free energyThe energy of a system that is emitted as waste and is not part of ecosystem processes. There is always some free surplus energy as this creates the basis for evolution where new species exploit gaps in the ecosystem where free energy becomes available. Surplus energy can occur as a result of disruption or disturbance. When free surplus energy reaches More is to the fragility of that system over our very short period of existence.

It’s only some of the carbon process that supports our life on Earth. People are made of carbon, we eat carbon and we build with carbon. What’s deep underground is largely irrelevant to our survival today. It’s very relevant to the existence of water in our oceans but that was locked safely away in processes that spanned millions – billions of years.

Humans have only existed for about two million years, or two-hundred thousand years, in the case of our species sapien. The biological processes we live among (along with other animals) only recycle a small component of shallow seabed or soil carbon from the ground and this happens in the short term over tens of thousands of years. 

We live on a different time scale

Assessing our impact on ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More is a case of choosing the right scale of time and place.

Imagining Earth’s physical processes, or even its largest biological processes, can be a distraction from what is most significant for our survival, which happens for shorter periods.

Sitting down to dinner, we enjoy a meal, even though the dinner service and chairs are there for years. We would never think the table leg is more important. The short-term service of food is the life-giving process. The surface we place it on is made from the same kinds of plant material and might exist for a lifetime but it isn’t a substitute for our daily meals.

We draw nutrients from a tiny proportion of the planet

Earth has a huge amount of carbon stored, that’s true. But we already know how dangerous that energy can be, because we are digging it up and burning it as fossil fuel. This surplus energy, that long-extinct animals processed, has been locked away for longer than any human being can ever possibly imagine … effectively since before the dawn of time.

The bit we live on is the thinnest fabric of Earth’s crust. It is only thin and fragile, yet it is subject to the largest continuous inpouring of new energy in the solar system. Everything we are and have ever been, is created by solar energy and it’s plants that capture this and turn it into something useful to us. But it took billions of years for animals to evolve, before this system could sustain human life.

As a final point, we should remember, that humans are part of those stabilisation processes that animals collectively create. We don’t just depend on them, they are our very reason for existence.