by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Dancing at a Pakistani wedding is a safer celebration than gunfire. It's an analogy we can stand to learn in God's "what goes up, must come down" creation.

“What goes up, must come down,” is one of those multi-purpose aphorisms, functional on the natural level as well as the moral.   A physicist might use it to describe the Law of Gravity.  A preacher might recite it in a sermon on Galatians 6:7: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Last week, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab reported that global carbon-dioxide emissions saw their biggest one-year rise, a 6 percent jump in 2010.  (The report is linked here.)  Tom Boden, director of the lab, calls it a “big jump.”  His colleague, Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, was a bit more descriptive: it’s a “monster” increase, Marland said.  Part of the monstrosity no doubt is how the study indicates that emissions are now growing faster than what the IPCC projected as a worst-case scenario in its 2007 report.  A worsened pace of carbon emissions will result in higher projected temperature averages (up now to 5.2° C by 2100, according to MIT models.)

What goes up—including CO₂ molecules—must come down, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it may take 100 years or so.  It is true that our planet’s oceans and vegetation act as carbon sinks, that is, they absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, albeit at a rate slower than what industrial society and natural processes are emitting it.   A single molecule of CO₂ will float unmolested in the atmosphere for one hundred years.  Imagine that the atmosphere is a bathtub.  The tap of carbon emissions has just been bumped that much further open, a faster flow.  The tub is filling faster than the drain can regulate it.  Like our friend, climatologist Katherine Hayhoe has said, the thing about climate change (including the greenhouse effect) is that it is “just basic physics,” in this case, illustratable with your own bathtub and cupboard full of towels to mop up the results.

Once, during a summer spent in the Pakistani foothills, we got a report from family friends down on the plains that their young son Timmy had been struck in his shoulder by a stray bullet.  He had been playing outside.  It was wedding season in Pakistan.  Occasionally in exuberance, someone from the wedding party will take an automatic weapon and spray a number of rounds innocently and joyfully into the air.  But what goes up, most come down.  That’s a law of physics.  Timmy recovered well from surgery, but every year some bystanders, many miles from any wedding, are not so fortunate.   To what extent though is “what goes up, must come down” a moral aphorism for a trigger-happy wedding guest?  Whoever Timmy’s assailant was, he was just shooting into the sky, adding to the joy.  Forty one percent of 2010’s monster carbon dioxide increase is attributable to China’s greater output, and an additional 12 percent to the U.S. trying to happily put the financial crisis behind us.

When it comes to CO₂ we can tweak the proverb.  Employing our best street lingo about threatening prospects, we can say, “What goes up, means sumthing is gonna go down.”

Lowell Bliss is the publisher of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, which this month features the Tar Sands of Madgascar.  He and his wife Robynn were missionaries for 14 years in India and Pakistan.

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Other Links to this Post

1. MeasuremeRON — November 7, 2011 @ 10:38 pm

2. OccupatioWI — November 8, 2011 @ 1:59 am