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“The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble.”
–William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1
For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I
assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky. Now I
suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as
to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is
based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a
diagnosis of late stage pancreatic cancer. Is it definite that the
person is going to die soon? No, not definite. Is it highly probable?
Yes, one would be wise to face the likelihood and put one’s affairs in
order.
First, let’s look at climate data. Over the past decade I have been
studying climate chaos by reading scientific papers and listening to
climate lectures accessible to a layperson. There is no good news to be
found there. We have burned so much carbon into the atmosphere that the
CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the past three million
years. In the last decade our carbon emission levels are the highest in
history, and we have not yet experienced their full impact. If we were
to stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, we are still on track for much
higher heat for at least ten years. And we are certainly not stopping
our emissions by tomorrow.
This blanket of carbon in the atmosphere has triggered, and will
trigger, further runaway warming systems that are not under our control,
the most deadly of which is the release of methane gases that have been
trapped for eons under arctic ice and what is now euphemistically known
as permafrost (much of it is no longer permanent frost).
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon, and much
faster acting. In the first twenty years after its release into the
atmosphere, it is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Whereas the
full effect of heat from a carbon molecule takes ten years, peak warming
from a methane molecule occurs in a matter of months.
The Arctic and Antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than
even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these
regions, bubbling out of Arctic lakes (and hissing out of seas and soils
worldwide). Some scientists fear a methane “burp” of billions of tons
when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs, something that has not
happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large
release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate
within months. This alone could be the extinction event.
The Arctic summer ice is currently two thirds less than it was as
recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a full
summer melt is likely within the next five years. The continent of
Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of 280% in the
last forty years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such
as the breaking off the Larsen B ice shelf defied scientific
predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of
2017, was 2,200 square miles in size.
The Arctic ice has been the coolant for the northern part of the planet
and it impacts worldwide climate as well. Its white surface also
reflects back into space much of the heat from the sun, as does the
Antarctic ice. As the ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs the heat and the
warming ocean more quickly melts the remaining ice. Over the past three
decades, the oldest and thickest of the Arctic sea ice has declined by a
whopping 95%, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s 2018 annual Arctic report.
The U.S., Russia, and China are now vying for hegemony of the Arctic
region in order to get at the massive reserves of oil that exist there
and will be accessible as the ice melts. Aside from the real
possibility of military conflagrations over control of the region,
moving tankers through and drilling in this sensitive eco-system would
cause the dual destructions of rapidly deteriorating whatever ice is
left, thereby speeding up the release of methane; and then burning all
that stored carbon of newly found oil reserves into the atmosphere.
These and all the other warming feedback loops are now on an exponential
trajectory and becoming self-amplifying, potentially leading to a
“hothouse earth” independent of the carbon emissions that have triggered
them. Each day, the extra heat that is trapped near our planet is
equivalent to four hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. There are no known
technologies that can be deployed at world scale to reverse the warming,
and many climate scientists feel that the window for doing so is already
closed, that we have passed the tipping point and the heat is on
“runaway” no matter what we do.
We are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction with about 150
plant and animal species going extinct per day. Despite the phrase “the
sixth extinction” making its way into mainstream awareness via the
publication of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book of that
title, most people still don’t realize that we humans are also on the list.
full: http://www.catherineingram.com/facingextinction/
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