Restoring Climate Stability By Managing Ecological Disorder

A Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamic Approach To Climate Change

Daniel Arthur Young | 4.50 | 3 ratings and reviews

There is nothing more fundamental to thermodynamic science than the fact that order emerges out of chaos when energy flows through a constrained environment. The order produced is quantitatively related to the energy flow and to the characteristics of the constraints on the environment. Complex systems, like the ecosystems in the earth's biosphere, are the result of extensive ordering of system contents due to prolonged, continuous energy flow across system constraints. The earth constitutes a closed thermodynamic system that allows energy from the sun to flow across its surface, but contains enough mass so that matter cannot easily escape its gravity. Energy from the sun impacting the earth carries a modest amount of entropy (disorder), but energy radiating into outer space from the surface of the earth carries a huge amount. The difference between the disorder brought in by sunlight and the disorder rejected as heat results in a huge deficit of disorder on the earth's surface. This is the driving force that implements the growth of ordered systems on the planet. Living systems are exquisitely ordered. For such systems to emerge and grow requires a huge withdrawal of extracted entropy from the system. The heat balance of solar energy, that maintains the temperature of the earth, produces a huge imbalance of entropy which drives the earth in the direction of more and more complex ordered systems. Greater entropy deficits direct the earth system toward more and more complex ecosystem development. Carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere constrains the extraction of entropy, reducing the entropy deficit, and forcing the earth to retain disorder, preventing the evolution of exquisitely ordered systems. Consumptive destruction of exquisitely ordered living systems eliminates order and turns it directly into disorder with the result that not only is entropy increased, but order is eliminated on the surface of the earth. Biomass is the accumulated product of long term energy flow across the surface of our planet. Its loss is more damaging to the dynamics of energy transfer than to energy retention and entropy production. Biomass controls the dynamics of energy transfer processes in earth systems maintaining the order of things in a far-from-equilibrium state that stabilizes energy flows and climates on the earth surface. Maintaining a sufficient reservoir of biomass in the mix of resilient materials on the earth's surface is critical to maintaining a livable environment and climate. Advances in methods of ecological engineering are pointing the way to stable, livable, sustainable ecosystems. less

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