Wild Free and Happy Sample 56

 

[Note: This is the fifty-sixth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

[Continued from Climate Crisis 01 Sample 55]

Super Seeps

Valeria Sukhova and Olga Gertcyk wrote an update on sea floor methane seeps.  Scientists have been doing research in the Laptev and East Siberian seas, where there are large deposits of offshore permafrost and methane hydrates.  Numerous seeps are releasing methane into the atmosphere.  In the air above the water’s surface, methane levels are 16 to 32 ppm (parts per million).  This is 15 times higher than the average methane content for the world atmosphere. 

Over a thousand large seep fields (super seeps) have been found so far.  “They probably are not having a large impact on atmospheric CO₂ or methane yet.”  Meanwhile, the Arctic climate is rapidly warming, the ice continues melting, the water continues warming, and there are large deposits of seabed hydrates that have not yet thawed. 

Methane Craters

Methane craters are massive holes in the tundra that are caused by methane explosions.  As the climate warms, thawing permafrost leads to methane releases that can accumulate in underground pockets.  The holes are also called gas emission craters, blowout craters, funnels, and hydrolaccoliths.  Methane craters not the same as thaw slumps caused by subsidence, when the land surface softens and sinks due to thawing permafrost.  Slumps sometimes fill with water, creating lakes or ponds.

Anna Liesowska reported that methane craters are a recent surprise, appearing on the Yamal and Taymyr (Gyden) peninsulas of northern Siberia.  The first one was discovered in 2014, by a plane passing over tundra in the middle of nowhere on the Yamal peninsula.  Until this sighting, these craters were unknown.  She mentioned this 2014 discovery in a July 2020 article that announced the discovery of the seventeenth methane crater.  It was about 164 feet (50 m) deep. 

Her article included a number of stunning photographs.  They included two photos of pingos, large mounds created by rising pressure.  The Pingo article in Wikipedia will further illuminate your understanding.  Pingos are only found in permafrost regions.  There may be 11,000 of them on Earth.  One region in Canada has permafrost that’s more than 50,000 years old.

Richard Gray created an excellent article for the BBC.  It is recent (November 2020), provides a deeper discussion of methane craters, and includes a number of dramatic photographs.  Satellite images, taken over multiple years, indicate that the site of the seventeenth crater (2020) had previously been a pingo that first appeared in the autumn of 2013.  In northwest Siberia, the exploding pingos are apparently created by concentrated pockets of methane, and they develop in a few years.  They are located in regions located above deep deposits of gas and oil. 

The explosions can be very exciting.  “Local reindeer herders reported seeing flames and smoke after one crater explosion in June 2017 along the banks of the Myudriyakha River. Villagers in nearby Seyakha — a settlement about 20.5 miles (33 km) south of the crater — claimed the gas kept burning for about 90 minutes and the flames reached 13 to16 feet (4 to 5 m) high.”

In this region of northern Siberia, satellite images taken from 1984 to 2007 indicate a five percent change in the landscape, as the climate warms, and more permafrost thaws.  The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average, so permafrost will continue thawing in summer months, and more methane will be released.  How many more craters will explode in the coming years?  How much more methane will be released into the atmosphere?  Also worrisome is that craters are exploding in a region of gas and oil extraction.  There are many pipelines running across the land, and some are close to pingos.  There is potential here for eco-catastrophes. 

Portia Kentish reported on impacts caused by the 2020 heat wave in Siberia, “where melting permafrost means the ground is no longer able to support structures built on it.  For many, this raises particular concerns over the oil and gas industry, which is the primary economic sector in the Arctic Circle.  Pipelines, processing plants and storage tanks on unstable and thawing ground become a serious threat to the natural environment.”

In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report.  It found that “45 per cent of oil and natural gas production fields in the Russian Arctic are located in the most hazardous and at-risk region.  Moreover, areas of discontinuous permafrost could see a 50-75 per cent drop in load bearing capacity over the period from 2015-25 in comparison to 1975-85.”  Stuff like roads, bridges, power grids, and towns are vulnerable. 

Undersea Craters

Nancy Bazilchuk reported on research in the Barents Sea, which is a region of the Arctic Ocean located between Norwegian and Russian territorial waters.  In the 1990s, scientists discovered craters that blew out of the seafloor 12,000 to 15,000 years ago.  Recent research has discovered hundreds more ancient craters.  Some are 300 to 1,000 meters (328 to 1093 yards) in diameter, and blasted out of solid bedrock.

Karin Andreassen and team have been doing this undersea research, and they published a very detailed paper.  Over the eons, there have been numerous glaciations (ice ages).  When regions freeze, methane is trapped beneath ice sheets, and solidifies into methane hydrates.  When warm periods return, some of the frozen methane can thaw and be released.  Releases can be gradual, in streams of bubbles, or they can be abrupt, with crater-making explosions. 

The incredible genius of humankind now allows us to cleverly disrupt the climate in a remarkable number of ways.  Andreassen assures us that there are still enormous amounts of methane stored in sea beds and terrestrial permafrost.  “It is apparent that extensive sub-glacial hydrate accumulations exist beneath the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets today.”  She expects more methane craters will explode. 

Life as we know it is moving into the rear view mirror.  The Hot Age just got out of bed, yawning, making coffee.  Nobody knows how hot it will get, how long it will last, and what it will remain when it’s over.

Ocean Heating

Cheryl Katz discussed how oceans have been softening climate impacts by soaking up excess heat that has been trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.  By keeping the atmosphere a bit cooler for a while, this has delayed our inevitable head-on collision with reality.  Currently, up to half of our CO₂ emissions are absorbed into seawater.  Also, heating up the oceans has accelerated acidification and deoxygenation (more on these below). 

Experts are learning that the surface waters are now warming faster and deeper than ever.  The situation was worse than they thought.  Heat gain had been underestimated by as much as half — too little attention had been devoted to the Southern Hemisphere, where 60 percent of ocean water resides.  Most of the heat gain was happening well south of the equator.  At the same time, the Arctic Ocean is heating especially fast, as its ice cover melts and shrinks. 

When water gets warmer, it expands.  So, warmer oceans contribute to higher sea levels, as does the huge volume of water flowing out of melting glaciers and icepacks.  The art of accurately predicting upcoming sea level changes has yet to be perfected.  The world is far more complex and capricious than the programmers of computer models can imagine.  There are limits to how much heat oceans can store.  As their ability to absorb heat maxes out, they may stop absorbing heat, and begin releasing stored heat into the atmosphere.

Paul Ehrlich and John Harte noted that in a warming climate, higher ocean temperatures can power more intense storm events, and the warmer atmosphere has the capacity to store more water, so rainstorms are more intense.

Tierney Smith notes that oceans absorb between 35 and 42 percent of CO₂ emissions.  They also absorb around 90 percent of the excess heat energy that results from the warming climate.  This elevates surface temperatures, and a warmer surface will absorb less of our CO₂ emissions.  So, more carbon will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, further warming the planet.

Timothy Lenton wrote, “Ocean heatwaves have led to mass coral bleaching and to the loss of half of the shallow-water corals on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  A staggering 99% of tropical corals are projected to be lost if global average temperature rises by 2°C, owing to interactions between warming, ocean acidification, and pollution.  This would represent a profound loss of marine biodiversity and human livelihoods.”

Todd Woody reported on the findings of the IPCC’s 2019 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.  It noted that the rate of ocean warming has doubled since 1993.  Extreme flooding of coastal areas will likely occur at least yearly by 2050.  Fish populations face collapse thanks to a combination of ocean acidification, loss of oxygen, and warming of the ocean’s surface, which blocks the flow of nutrients to and from the deep sea.

Ocean Deoxygenation

Karin Limburg reported that oxygen levels in the oceans have been declining for about 70 years.  This is gradually suffocating saltwater ecosystems (“oceans are losing their breath”).  Low oxygen conditions exist in a number of coastal sites, semi-enclosed seas, and the open ocean.  At the extreme, the Baltic Sea has regions of water with too little oxygen to measure (anoxic).

More than 700 coastal sites are experiencing low oxygen conditions (hypoxic).  They are overloaded with nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, runoff from fertilizer and sewage.  We call them dead zones, but they aren’t completely dead.  They are home to large mobs of wee microbes that thrive in nutrient rich water.  Algae (phytoplankton) are wee aquatic plants that feast on the nutrients, explode in number, and create algal blooms.  In the process, they emit lots of oxygen.  When the nutrients run low, the algae die and decompose.  Then, blooms are often followed by a surge of wee aquatic animals (zooplankton) that feast on the rich stew of dead algae and absorb the abundant oxygen.  Depleted oxygen = dead zone.

Polluted water is not caused by climate change, it’s the result large swarms of untidy primates that dump staggering amounts of crud into waterways.  Skanky water is one cause of deoxygenation.  Another cause is climate change, which is affecting open waters that are not nutrient rich. 

Rising temperatures make water close to the surface warmer and lighter, which intensifies thermal stratification.  This reduces the mixing of warmer surface water with deeper water that is denser and colder.  Colder water is able to absorb more oxygen, but the warmer water above inhibits its exposure to airborne oxygen.  Also, climate change is melting more and more ice, sending lots of freshwater into the salty sea.  Freshwater is less dense than salt water, so it stratifies above colder, deeper water — another obstacle.

So, compared to earlier times, less oxygen is now available in deeper waters.  Some sea animals are able to survive in zones of minimal oxygen, others are forced to move.  Animals having a high metabolism, like tuna or sharks, move to shallower depths, where they are more likely to be caught.  Migration introduces some chaos into traditional food webs, as more species become crowded together.

Ocean Acidification

Cody Sullivan and Rebecca Lindsey of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) wrote about how oceans are being affected by human-produced CO₂.  Oceans are the only long-term sink for manmade CO₂ emissions.  Colder waters tend to absorb CO₂, while warmer waters tend to release it back into the atmosphere.  Since 2000, the overall net increase in CO₂ absorption has been trending upward at a robust rate.  Unfortunately, the higher uptake of carbon also encourages ocean acidification.

Cheryl Katz studies ocean acidification (“global warming’s evil twin”).  In the Arctic, and in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, lots of ice is busy melting away, exposing the water below.  In cold polar waters, CO₂ is more soluble, so more of it can be absorbed.   Some of it reacts with the water to form carbonic acid.  Consequently, the frigid waters near both poles are becoming highly acidified.  Conditions in the polar regions are getting close to a tipping point into extreme acidification.

The area of increasingly corrosive water is expected to expand into the North Atlantic and North Pacific, impact the ocean food web, and threaten important fisheries.  Already, oysters are dying off in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.  Shell-building organisms need carbonate minerals.  In the past, carbonate ions in the water provided a buffer against the acids.  As these ions are depleted, acidity is able to rise.  Creatures with shells are having a harder time building and maintaining shells, because they corrode.

Increasing ocean acidification is a severe threat to the planet.  It is expected to have a big impact on fisheries in Alaska and throughout the Arctic.  As waters warm, species like Atlantic cod are migrating toward the cooler Arctic, where acidification is high.  Fish populations are likely to decline, impacting the global food supply for humans.

Stephanie Dutkiewicz and team studied the impact of acidification on phytoplankton (algae), the tiny plants that are the foundation of the marine food web.  They absorb CO₂ and emit the life-giving oxygen that’s necessary for the existence of animal life.  Oceans absorb about 30 percent of manmade carbon emissions, and this intensifies acidification.  Their analysis concluded, “At the level of ecological function of the phytoplankton community, acidification had a greater impact than warming or reduced nutrient supply.”

Dahr Jamail noted that “phytoplankton photosynthesis produces half the total oxygen supply for the planet.”  Growing acidification will eliminate some species, and disturb vital ecological balances.

Thermohaline Circulation

Ocean current circulation is a very big deal.  It has a major impact on regional climates, because it moves heat.  In plain English, it’s called the global conveyor belt.  In science speak, it’s called the thermohaline circulation (THC).  The THC moves heat around the world via a long and winding pathway.  Wikipedia provides a nice plain English description of the THC [HERE].

The flow of the current is driven by seawater density, which is determined by variations of surface temperature and salt content (salinity).  Warm water is less dense than cold, so it rises to the top.  Freshwater is lighter, less dense, so it stays close to the surface.  Salt water is denser and heavier. 

Today, melting ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice are pouring huge amounts of cold freshwater into the ocean, which throws a monkey wrench into the traditional operation of the current.  Global warming will increasingly have an impact on ocean circulation.  These changes are expected to eventually alter the traditional patterns of the THC as we know it.  Some experts are contemplating the possibility of a slowdown or shutdown of the THC.  Wikipedia discusses the possibilities [HERE]. 

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)

One segment of the global thermohaline circulation is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).  As the name implies, this involves the currents moving north and then south in the Atlantic Ocean.  The AMOC is fed by warm and salty water flowing past the cape of Africa, heading northwest to the Caribbean, then up the coast of North America, then northeast to Iceland and Scandinavia.  In the far north, the current loses much heat, and sends cool water back down toward the South Pole.

The segment of the AMOC that moves warm water from the Gulf of Mexico toward the Arctic is called the Gulf Stream.  It keeps the climate of the eastern U.S. and northern Europe warmer than is typical at such a high latitude.  This allows modern agriculture in these regions.  Some worry that the melting arctic will increase the frigid freshwater flowing into the AMOC, and this could lead to a slowdown or shutdown of the current, and possibly a chillier future for the eastern U.S. and western Europe. 

Some have presented evidence that the AMOC is slowing down.  Others don’t find this evidence to be compelling, and they don’t expect a slowdown in the near term future.  Much is not known about ocean currents, and controversies abound.  Scientists are far from full agreement on what is happening, and what might happen in the future.

Nicola Jones wrote an easy to understand description of current AMOC research and debates.  Undersea instruments that measure the current’s flow are indicating a significant slowdown.  Experts aren’t sure if this is worrisome evidence of climate change, or simply reflects normal variations. 

“Should the AMOC shut down, models show that changes in rainfall patterns would dry up Europe’s rivers, and North America’s entire Eastern Seaboard could see an additional 30 inches (76 cm) of sea level rise as the backed-up currents pile water up on East Coast shores.”  This hasn’t happened yet.  For now, data collection continues, and the debates rumble on.

Overheating

David Wallace-Wells wrote that the five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002.  Rising heat will have the most dramatic impacts in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, where record temperatures have soared to frightening heights.  In 2015, temps as high as 163°F (73°C) were recorded.

Matthew Lewis described how rising numbers of people are dying because extreme heat events are becoming more common.  “Deadly heat is cooking us alive.”  When our bodies get too warm, we sweat, which helps us shed excess heat as it evaporates.  If you’re lucky, this keeps your body temperature in the normal range. 

We evolved our ability to sweat on African savannahs, where the humidity is typically low (“dry heat”).  So, we can survive for a few hours of 120°F (49°C) in Death Valley, California.  It’s a different story in super-humid Florida, where “a single day of 120-degree temperatures in Palm Beach would be a mass casualty event.  Dead bodies would pile up in the morgues, victims of hyperthermia, or heatstroke — cooked, alive, in their own bodies.”  Alas, the cooling powers of sweating have limits.

Tara Santora explored the maximum amount of heat that the human body can endure.  Air temperature is the scale of heat that a thermometer displays.  Wet bulb temperature is produced by a thermometer covered in a water-soaked cloth.  It takes into account both air temperature and the humidity level.  She reported that the limit we humans can endure is a wet bulb temperature of 95°F (35°C).  You probably wouldn’t last three hours.

When the air temperature is 115°F (46.1°C) and humidity is 30%, the wet bulb temperature is 87°F (30.5°C).  When the air temperature is 102°F (38.9°C) and humidity is 77%, the wet bulb temperature is 95°F (35°C).  When the wet bulb temperature is close to your normal body temperature, you still sweat, but this doesn’t cool you.  You can also overheat at lower temperatures if you are exercising and/or exposed to direct sunlight.  As the climate warms, the risks of overheating increase. 

Janet Larsen noted that a warming climate is expected to increase the number and intensity of heat waves in the coming years.  In 2003, a blast furnace heat wave caused the deaths of more than 52,000 people across Europe.  It was the hottest weather in at least 500 years.  Temperatures were over 104°F (40°C) for up to two weeks.  Fatalities rose to 2,000 per day in France.  The higher the humidity, the higher the death rate.  City folks were most at risk, because urban areas are heat islands.  Jean-Marie Robine and team did additional research and estimated that the actual mortality in 2003 was more than 70,000.

John Gowdy added, “During the record heat in Europe in Summer 2003, maize production fell by 30% in France and 36% in Italy.  A 2008 study found that southern Africa could lose 30% of its maize crop by 2030 due to the negative effects of climate change.  Losses of maize and rice crops in South Asia could also be significant.”

Extreme heat dries out the land, making it more flammable.  Wikipedia noted that the 2003 European heat wave corresponded with a series of fires in Portugal that destroyed 1,160 square miles (3010 km²) of forest, and 170 square miles (440 km²) of agricultural land.  In southern Portugal, the temperatures reached as high as 117°F (47°C). 

Deepa Shivaram reported on a heat wave that hit British Columbia in July 2021.  Along the coastline of Vancouver, on one beach alone, the rocky shore was covered with hundreds of thousands of dead mussels.  It also killed barnacles, clams, crabs, sea stars, and intertidal anemones.  Overall, an estimated one billion sea creatures died from the heat.  Other animals that depend on sea life for food were also affected.  During the same heat wave, 180 wildfires ignited.

[Continued in Climate Crisis 03, Sample 57]

The End of Ice

 

The Climate Crisis is alive and thriving, a persistent embarrassing bummer that refuses to be wished away.  It is, by far, the biggest threat we’ve faced in the entire human saga.  We are, by far, the most unusual animals in the world, and we’ve bumbled and stumbled into a “deer in the headlights” situation of complete vulnerability.  The Climate Crisis shrugs with indifference, and faithfully serves us what we’ve ordered… rough justice.

In human society, there is a modest level of agreement that the crisis is real and intensifying.  There is vigorous disagreement over how severe the crisis may become, how quickly it may proceed, and whether there is anything non-idiotic we can do to soften impacts on the ecosystem.

Projections of long-term climate trends are based on computer models designed to predict how massively-complex natural processes are likely to interact over time, and how the consequences will affect life as we know it.  “Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO₂ content in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality,” wrote climate journalist Dahr Jamail.

Following this rapidly moving field of knowledge is not easy, because it’s a whirlwind of arguing experts, misinformation, hard truths, and shameless marketing gibberish.  The hard truths rarely appear in the daily headlines because they do not boost ratings, delight advertisers, or nurture consumer confidence.  Consumers are constantly fed steaming balderdash about progress and miracles.  Students might hear mild truths, if any (don’t scare the children!).  Many of the hard truth discussions are written for an audience of scientists, not general readers.  

Dahr Jamail is a journalist who is good at translating perplexing techno-jabber into ordinary English.  He is a Texas-born, fourth generation Lebanese-American.  In 1996, he moved to Alaska, where he got into mountain climbing.  As the years passed, he could see that the glaciers were melting and retreating.  The world was changing, and not in a good way.  In 2003, the fates called him to become a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2010, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico seized his full attention, and he began covering the world war on our home, Earth.

Since then, he’s travelled extensively, visited highly impacted regions, chatted with locals, and received a full immersion baptism in bullshit-free reality.  He’s written more than a hundred climate stories.  In 2019, he published The End of Ice, a combo of fascinating travel journal, terrifying horror story, and voyage of personal growth.  The book allows readers to see and feel the painful changes that are taking place, from the perspective of direct, feet on the ground, experience.  Jamail is passionately interested in helping people understand the Climate Crisis.  Ignorance is curable.

In Brazil, he was amazed by the Amazon rainforest.  About one percent of the incoming sunlight makes it through the dense green canopy.  It’s always warm, and close to 100 percent humidity.  There isn’t much difference between day and night, or winter and summer.  The birdsong symphony is amazing.  Scientists have barely begun discovering the fantastic biodiversity of this rainforest.  A 25 day expedition discovered 80 new species.  Because of the rapid rate of destruction, countless species will go extinct before we learn of their existence.

This forest used to sequester carbon.  Now, because of drought, fires, clear-cuts, and development, it’s releasing more carbon than all of the traffic in the U.S.  Biologists who are overwhelmed by the stunning magnificence of the Amazon are deeply pained by the massive mindless destruction, and by the cold indifference of the world.  People have no connection to the planet, no connection with anything.

A week after leaving the Amazon, Jamail arrived in the Inupiat village of Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly Barrow), on the Arctic Ocean.  The modern town is located east of the original village, which is decomposing, and collapsing into the sea.  The waves will eventually wash away modern Utqiagvik too.  Residents say that winters have been getting much shorter and warmer.  The sea ice is thinning, breaking up, and retreating.  Polar bears are gone. 

A gravedigger said that in the past, solid permafrost was just 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 cm) below the surface.  Digging a grave took three days of strenuous chopping.  Now, it only takes five hours or less.  There are enormous deposits of permafrost scattered across the northern hemisphere.  As permafrost thaws, it softens and the land sinks.  In the thawing process, methane is released.  In 2017, enormous methane craters began blowing open on Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, and in Canada’s Northwest Territories.  Big trouble is just getting warmed up.

NOTE: With warming, glaciers and ice “melt,” and permafrost deposits “thaw.”  To avoid looking like a dolt, never forget this!

Jamail visited Glacier National Park, home to a formerly thriving boreal forest.  A warming climate has delighted millions of hungry beetles, some of whom can now have two life cycles per year.  In the last 20 years, beetles have killed 40 million acres (16 million ha) of trees.  They kill fewer trees now, because fewer trees remain alive.  The latest serial killer is white pine blister rust, which has infected almost 85 percent of the trees in the park.

Another stop was Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which is busy dying.  Because of warming and ocean acidification, most of the world’s coral will be gone by 2050.  Oceans are absorbing more than 30 percent of the CO₂ that humans emit.  Carbon in the water promotes the formation of carbonic acid, which is harmful to coral, mollusks, and some types of plankton.  Phytoplankton are tiny water plants that generate half of the planet’s oxygen supply.  All of my best friends are chronic oxygen addicts.

Florida is a state that should learn how to swim.  In the southern region, there are four national parks that “will be underwater in my lifetime.”  Sea level is rising because ice is rapidly melting, and because warming seawater expands in volume.  Salt water will eventually infiltrate the Florida freshwater aquifer.  Miami’s drainage system was designed to operate by gravity.  Rising sea levels and tides now prohibit the system from fully draining.  Many homes in South Miami are on septic systems.  These only work when they are above the water table.  When this is not the case, bathtubs fill with raw sewage — a delightful surprise!

Anyway, zooming out to the bigger picture, current trends do not suggest that we are hippity-hopping down the golden path to a brighter future.  “The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three million years ago, when temperatures were as high as they are expected to be in 2050, and sea levels were 70 feet (21 m) higher than they are today.”  Back in those days there were trees growing on the South Pole.

“Even if we immediately stopped all greenhouse emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for the CO₂ now in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans.”  So, the ice will continue melting, the seas will continue absorbing heat, the climate will continue warming, and the planet’s ecosystems will continue taking a merciless catastrophic beating.  Ignorance pandemics don’t <bleep> around.

As readers move into the book’s homestretch, Jamail stops storytelling and looks them directly in the eye.  It’s time for some heart-to-heart communication.  Writing this book has been very painful.  The folks he wrote about were not extremists, lunatics, or liars.  In addition to his travels and interviews, he’s spent lots of time gathering additional information online.  Paying close attention to eco-reality, year after year, is a miserable path.

Writers are often inspired by the hope that the work they do can inspire beneficial change.  They hope that readers will see the light if blasted with a firehose of truth.  Well, the world often enjoys taking long hard pisses on hope-filled dreams.  It laughs at their grandiose hope in promoting real transformation.  And so, the spurned dreamer hopes even harder.  Eventually, Jamail wondered if there was any point in writing.

Hope is a turd in the swimming pool.  Hope can’t undo the damage, or send the carbon back home, or resurrect the extinct, or make people care.  The worst is yet to come.  It’s time for grieving not hoping.  Jamail took a nose dive into a deep depression, and eventually emerged hope-free, a great healing.  He is now able to be present in reality, in the fullness of the darkness.  He learned that it is possible for acceptance and inner peace to reside in the same heart with grief and suffering.  “I have never felt more alive.”

 Jamail, Dahr, The End of Ice, The New Press, New York, 2019.  

Wild Free and Happy Sample 19

[Note: This is the nineteenth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 201 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Climate Shifts?

So, what caused megafauna extinctions?  The two primary suspects in this mystery are hominin hunters and climate change.  After numerous rowdy fistfights at scholarly conferences, the overhunting theory has become the most widely accepted.  Quite a few still believe climate change was a secondary factor, because the swings between hot eras and frosty ones could cause substantial shifts in a habitat’s vegetation.  When tundra became forest, mammoths no longer lived in paradise.  Their numbers likely declined, and their groups could have become more isolated.

When the climate warmed, hippos and monkeys migrated into Europe, joining the woodland rhinos, elephants, boars, and deer.  Tundra became boreal forest, and the cold adapted critters no longer enjoyed optimal conditions.  This could have weakened them, and made them more vulnerable to hungry hominin hunters. 

Then, when temperatures dropped, ice sheets advanced again, and the good old days ended for the warmth loving critters.  Woodlands were displaced by tundra and taiga — good habitat for lemmings, arctic foxes, reindeer, woolly mammoths, and woolly rhinos. 

Peter Ungar discussed research in Greenland, where scientists bored deep into the thick 150,000 year old ice sheet.  In the ice core samples, the annual layers of ice buildup contained details about climate trends.  Patterns could remain stable for thousands of years, and then suddenly change.  The emergence of agriculture and civilization only became possible with the arrival of the current, unusually long warming trend, which began about 11,600 years ago.  It followed a 1,200 year stretch of intense cold.  The transition from intense cold to the modern warm trend occurred during one lifetime.  A lass who was born in an arid tundra would see the land transform into a young forest by the time her hair was gray.

Now, gaze at the globe on your desk.  As Earth makes its annual joyride around the sun, its axis tips.  When the northern hemisphere tips closer to the sun, it’s summer time.  Six months later, summer begins in the southern hemisphere, and winter arrives up north.  The regions close to the equator consistently receive the most solar energy throughout the year, so they are Earth’s warmest — the tropics.  Both the North Pole and the South Pole get the least solar energy, so they are icy year-round. 

On your globe, note that most dry land regions on the planet are north of the equator.  Also, at the top of the world, the northern edges of North America, Europe, and Asia extend into the Arctic Circle.  Consequently, the northern hemisphere has experienced a number of intense glaciation cycles.

The southern hemisphere has far less dry land, and far more ocean area.  The surrounding oceans retain heat, and encourage a more moderate climate.  In the southern hemisphere, the bottom edges of South America, Africa, and Australasia do not come close to the Antarctic Circle.  For these reasons, glaciation events have been less extensive.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the frigid peak of the most recent glacial cycle.  Ice sheets began growing about 33,000 years ago.  Glaciation peaked between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago.  Large regions of northern Europe, Asia, and North America were buried under ice sheets up to one mile (1.6 km) thick.  During the LGM, climate conditions were similar across these northern regions.  Glaciers retained so much frozen water that sea levels were 410 feet (125 m) lower than today.  A lass could walk from Ireland to Scandinavia or France without getting her feet wet. 

Bernardo Araujo’s team studied up-to-date climate models for the last 122,500 years.  For 19 regions, they compared the dates when humans arrived, with the dates when megafauna species went extinct.  They found that humans were entering Europe and Central Russia about 45,000 years ago.  In the colonized regions of Eurasia, extinction dates began about 40,000 years ago, and continued until about 10,000 years ago — the longest of the megafauna extinction cycles outside of Africa.

Araujo emphasized that our colonization of Eurasia was a significant turning point in the human colonization of the planet.  It was the first time that our fully tropical species was moving into regions that were colder than the conditions for which evolution had fine-tuned us.  It was far more challenging for humans to survive in snow country.

Fernando Fernandez also found no connection between climate patterns and extinctions.  He wrote that there were essentially two pulses of extinctions in Eurasia.  The first pulse was from 45,000 to 20,000 years ago, across the southern latitudes.  The second pulse was from 14,000 to 9,000 years ago, in the northern latitudes.

In North America, Fernandez reported a much quicker extinction spasm.  It mostly occurred between 13,500 and 11,000 years ago.  Experts still disagree when humans arrived on the continent, suggesting dates ranging from 20,000 to 13,000 years ago.  By the time humans entered North America, they had developed effective tools and strategies for succeeding in snow country, making a faster dispersal possible.  South American extinctions were mostly between 13,000 and 7,800 years ago.

Fernandez presented a list of arguments why climate change was not the primary cause of megafauna extinctions.  Climate swings affected the whole planet, but the extinction spasms occurred at widely different times, in different places — not everywhere at the same time.  The timing of extinctions does not closely correspond to the timing of glacial cycles.  Preceding the megafauna extinction spasms were 31 earlier glacial cycles which wiped out few if any species. 

Extinctions occurred first on continental mainlands, while species on isolated islands in the same region, with the same climate, survived much longer.  When extinctions took place in a region, there is no evidence that plant species were zapped by temperature swings at the same time.  It was the large animals that blinked out (the preferred game of hunters).  Small animals did not vanish in the same era (like they might have during a climate shift).  He did say that glacial cycles could have stressed ecosystems, making some species less resilient.

Baz Edmeades noted that most of Africa lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the equatorial belt.  When there were extinction spasms in the equatorial belt, there was no rise of extinctions in regions where hominins had not yet arrived.  The extinctions were limited to Africa and southern Asia — tropical regions where hominins resided.

OK!  So, based on what I know today, I am convinced that climate change was not the primary cause of megafauna extinctions.  I am also thoroughly convinced that the pattern of extinction spasms was closely related to the early emergence of advanced hominins in Africa, and to the later pattern of world colonization by humans.

I remain befuddled by one mystery.  During the North America extinction spasm, most of the megafauna species that survived were not indigenous. They were immigrants from the Old World, like moose, bison, caribou, elk, deer, grizzly bears, black bears.  Indigenous megafauna got hammered.  Super-speedy pronghorn antelope were among the few to escape extinction.  The implication here is that the Old World megafauna immigrants had arrived at about the same time as the Siberian hunters, and these foreigners were fully aware that humans were dangerous murderers — run!  I was not able to find information confirming that “about the same time” is true.

William Stolzenberg presented a different twist.  He shared a fascinating story about Joel Berger.  Early in the twenty-first century, when Berger was working near the Teton Range of Wyoming, wolves from Yellowstone began wandering back into the region.  They had been absent for 50 years, victims of a predator eradication project.  For 50 years, moose and elk had not been bothered by serious predators.  Berger freaked out.  He tried scaring the moose with wolf calls and scents.  No response.  They had completely forgotten their natural fear of wolves.  So, the wolves casually walked past the clueless moose mothers, and hauled away their calves.  Eventually moose learned that wolves were dangerous.

Global Serengeti

Baz Edmeades grew up in South Africa, where he enjoyed observing the remnants of African megafauna at Kruger National Park.  His deep interest in archaeology and evolution led him to read Björn Kurtén’s book on Pleistocene Europe.  He was shocked to discover that 15,000 years ago, hyenas, leopards, and lions roamed Europe, and they closely resembled the animals he watched in Africa.  Woolly rhinos and mammoths had cousins at Kruger.  Not that long ago, large animals were incredibly abundant.  Grassland regions of Europe were once a wildlife wonderland, like Africa’s Serengeti.

North and South America also had Serengeti-like grassland regions.  Dan Flores wrote that the Great Plains used to be home to many species of large mammals, none of which had evolved adaptations for living near packs of aggressive bloodthirsty tropical primates with spears, dogs, and fire.  Many blinked out.  Five hundred years ago, when European colonists began arriving in great numbers, with highly advanced technology, life on the American Serengeti got blindsided with astonishing speed and efficiency.

Today, many documentaries and nature programs present images of the African megafauna that still survive in protected areas, like the Serengeti.  These images of lions, zebras, giraffes, and baboons inspire astonishment among the wretched mobs trapped in sprawling, grungy, concrete landfills like New York City or London.  But, compared to the Serengeti of 2 million years ago, the twenty-first century Serengeti is much diminished.

Two million years ago, all the other continents were also astonishing Serengetis.  Earth was one big wonderful celebration of abundant life.  The critters of every ecosystem had coevolved with each other, resulting in functional relationships between the eaters and the eaten.  Loose cannon critters were not yet molesting the sacred dance.  Today, of course, a hurricane of swarming tropical primates has reduced Planet Serengeti to Planet Train Wreck.

It’s heartbreaking to comprehend that this staggering tragedy was driven by the innocent unintended consequences of thousands of years of gradually accumulating more and more clever innovations.  Today, the rate of extinctions is in the stratosphere.  Innovation and technology have given us the ability to thoroughly obliterate healthy ecosystems faster than ever before.  We call this “progress,” one of our god words.  Another one is “growth.”

In North America, when humans arrived, there were at least nine species of big cats, and seven species of elephants.  The biodiversity was incredible — beavers as big as bears, two-ton buffaloes, armadillos the size of VW Beetles

Mammoths emerged in South Africa about five million years ago.  By 2.6 million years ago, they had spread across Eurasia and North America.  Around 190,000 years ago, all mammoths in Europe had evolved the woolly look.  Until 14,000 years ago, mammoth country ranged from Western Europe to Siberia to New England to Mexico.  The last mammoths survived until about 3,700 years ago, on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia.

Aurochs once ranged from England to Korea, and south to India and North Africa.  Rhinos once ranged from Africa to Europe to Sumatra.  Leopard country spanned from southern Africa to England, to Java.  Short-faced hyenas were as big as lions, and their addresses included India, China, Transvaal, and Europe.  And on and on….

Tim Flannery mentioned Neanderthals, who had significantly larger brains than humans.  They were long-time residents of Eurasia that had coevolved with the other large animals.  For hundreds of thousands of years, they coexisted with mammoths, straight-tusked woodland elephants, and two species of woodland rhinoceros.  Scholars tend to regard Neanderthals as dullards.  Ecological stability is not a sign of pathological intelligence.

Mother Africa

Around 5 million years ago, the climate in Africa was getting cooler and dryer, forest area was being displaced by expanding savannah.  The ancestors of hominins learned ways to survive in the changing conditions.  Our hominin ancestors were bipedal at least 3.6 million years ago.  Somewhere around 2.5 million years ago, the climate in Africa once again entered a cooler and dryer pattern. 

By this time, our hominin ancestors were getting better adapted to savannah living.  They were bigger and smarter, using stone tools.  They may have been cooking with domesticated fire, but we’ll never know when the first fire was kindled.  As previously mentioned, hominin evolution was influenced by having the ability to regularly dine on cooked food, which significantly tweaked the design of our teeth and digestive tracts.  This implies that domesticated fire appeared early in the game.

The series of megafauna extinctions that occurred during the hominin era began in Mother Africa.  Lars Werdelin, an expert on ancient carnivores, wrote that beginning around 2 million years ago, large carnivore species began to gradually decline.  Hominins were becoming regular hunters, and they were eating more meat.  Carnivore extinctions accelerated around 1.5 million years ago.  Coincidentally, Homo erectus emerged around 1.5 million years ago.   Erectus was the first advanced hominin, having a brain larger than average for its body size.  This era corresponds to the oldest known evidence of domesticated fire.  Today, only two percent of the original African large carnivore species still survive.

Werdelin assumed that hominins were not deliberately hunting large carnivores, which would have been insanely dangerous.  The extinctions were likely due to a decline in herbivores — the prey that carnivores depended on.  Was climate change reducing the forage that herbivores required for survival?  Small carnivores were not in decline, which would have been the case if ecosystems were being walloped by a climate shift.  Werdelin believes that hominins had become successful competitors for the traditional carnivores, both of whom were eager to dine on the same prey. 

Baz Edmeades noted that the African continent was loaded with megafauna 1.8 million years ago, but many were gone by 1.4 million years ago.  In the good old days, Africa had nine species of big cats (three today), up to nine species of elephants (one today), and at least four types of hippos (one today).  There were giant antelopes, giant hyenas, giant pigs, giant monkeys, giant baboons, and many others — all gone.  Over the course of many thousands of years, the consequences of hunting just a bit too hard accumulated. 

Some species that disappeared in Africa continued to survive on other continents.  Edmeades emphasized that during the African wave of extinctions, there were no corresponding extinction blips in Siberia, Europe, Australia, or the Americas.  In these other regions, most megafauna species thrived for another million years.  A jury would not convict climate change for the extinctions in Africa.

Windfall

McKenzie Funk’s book, Windfall, explores the question, “What are we doing about climate change?”  Readers are introduced to ambitious speculators who are eager to make enormous profits on new opportunities resulting from a warming planet.  They are not investing in research for sharply reducing carbon emissions.  They are obsessed with keeping the economic growth monster on life support.  Climate change investment funds will soon become gold mines, creating a flood of new billionaires.  The future is rosy as hell.

Mining corporations are slobbering with anticipation as Greenland’s ice melts, providing access to billions of dollars worth of zinc, gold, diamonds, and uranium.  A defunct zinc mine, which operated from 1973 to 1990, provides a sneak preview of the nightmares to come.  The Black Angel mine dumped its tailings into a nearby fjord.  The zinc and lead in the runoff was absorbed by the blue mussels, which were eaten by fish, which were eaten by seals.  Investors won, the ecosystem lost.

Other entrepreneurs are anxious to turn the torrents of melt water into hydropower, providing cheap energy for new server farms and aluminum smelters.  Meanwhile, the tourism industry is raking in big money serving the growing swarms of disaster tourists.

As the Arctic ice melts, sea levels could rise as much as 20 feet (6 m).  A number of low-lying islands are already on death row — the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Seychelles, Bahamas, and the Carteret Islands.  Islanders are pissed that faraway rich folks are destroying their home.  Bath time is also predicted for large portions of Manila, Alexandria, Lagos, Karachi, Kolkata, Jakarta, Dakar, Rio, Miami, Ho Chi Minh City, and a fifth of Bangladesh.  There may be a billion climate refugees by 2050.

Five nations have shorelines on the icy Arctic Ocean: Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), and the United States (Alaska).  Beneath the rapidly melting ice are billions of dollars worth of oil, gas, and coal.  We would be wise to leave this energy in the ground but, of course, we won’t.  There will be abundant testosterone-powered discussion over borderlines in the region, and this might include blizzards of bombs and bullets.  Both Canada and Denmark claim ownership of Hans Island.  Russia has planted a flag on the North Pole.

A melted Arctic will also provide a new shipping lane, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, providing a much shorter and much cheaper alternative to the Panama Canal.  Both sides of the Northwest Passage are owned by Canada, but other nations, like the U.S. and China, disagree that Canada owns the waterway.  They prefer it to be an international route of innocent passage, like Gibraltar.  Funk took a cruise on the Montreal, a frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy.  They were engaged in Arctic war games, which included an exercise that seized a naughty American ship.

The core driver of climate change is simple: “add carbon, get heat.”  As carbon emissions skyrocket, so does the temperature of the atmosphere.  We can’t undo what has already been done, damage that will persist for centuries, but it would be rather intelligent to quit throwing gasoline on the fire.  Unfortunately, the titans of capitalism have a different plan.  Renewable energy cannot power our nightmare, and environmental activism has failed.  Governments are careful to ignore the prickly issue, because voters delight in living as wastefully as possible.  Technology is our only hope.

Cutting emissions would blindside our way of life (and so will not cutting emissions).  But cleverly adapting to climate change will greatly enrich the titans, temporarily.  There’s growing interest in seawalls, storm surge barriers, and floating cities.  Israelis are making big money selling snowmaking and desalinization equipment.  Biotech firms are working like crazy to produce expensive drought resistant seeds.  India is building a 2,100 mile (3,380 km) fence along its border with Bangladesh, to block the flood of refugees that are expected when rising seas submerge low-lying regions.

Others dream of making big money creating monopolies on the supply of freshwater, which is diminishing as the torrents of melting ice rush into the salty oceans.  There are two things that people will spend their remaining cash on, water and food.  Crop yields are sure to drop in a warming climate.  This will lead to rising prices, and create exciting opportunities for profiteering.  A number of wealthy nations are ruthlessly acquiring cropland in third world regions.

Funk visited Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft billionaire, who now runs Intellectual Ventures.  His plan is to keep economic growth on life support by creating a virtual volcano called StratoShield.  Volcanoes spew ash into the atmosphere, which reduces incoming solar heat, and cools off the climate.  StratoShield would spray 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere every year.  This would make the sunlight one percent dimmer, and enable life as we know it to continue, with reduced guilt, for a bit longer (maybe) — hooray!

Funk also visited Alan Robock, who opposes the plan.  Volcanic ash is not harmless.  The goal of StratoShield is to block heat.  The catastrophic side effect is that it’s like to severely alter rain patterns in the southern hemisphere, spurring horrendous droughts, deluges, and storm systems.  On the bright side, life in Microsoft country, the Pacific Northwest, would remain fairly normal, and the sulfur dioxide sunsets would be wonderfully colorful.

Funk didn’t mention that the geoengineering, if it actually worked, would have to be done permanently.  Beneath the shield, ongoing emissions would continue to increase the atmosphere’s carbon load.  If the shield was discontinued, and full sunlight resumed, the consequences would not be pleasant.

Myhrvold’s former boss, Bill Gates, is running a foundation that’s spending billions of dollars to eradicate disease.  The mosquitoes of the world are nervous, fearing near term extinction.  The foundation is dedicated to promoting the wellbeing of humankind.  Oddly, it has spent nothing on research to cut carbon emissions.  Folks will be spared from disease so they can enjoy drought and deluge.  There is no brilliant win/win solution.  The path to balance will be long and painful.

Funk finished his book in 2012, a very hot year for climate juju all around the world.  He had spent six years hanging out with tycoons, “the smartest guys in the room.”  All were obsessed with conjuring highly complex ways of making even more money by keeping our insane civilization on life support, for as long as possible, by any means necessary.

Climate change is a manmade disaster, and those most responsible are the wealthy consumers of the north.  Funk imagines that the poor folks of the south will be hammered, while the primary perpetrators remain fairly comfortable.  It’s a wicked problem because “we are not our own victims.”  We feel no obligation to reduce our emissions or consumption.  We care little about misery in far away places. 

I am not convinced that the north will get off easy.  Anyone who spends time studying the Earth Crisis will eventually conclude that humans are remarkably clever, but pathologically irrational.  We’ve created a reality far too complex for our tropical primate brains.  We’ve created a culture that burns every bridge it crosses.  Funk reminds us that, “We should remember that there is also genius in simplicity.”  I agree.

Funk, McKenzie, Windfall — The Booming Business of Global Warming, Penguin Press, New York, 2014.

Apocalyptic Planet

Craig Childs is a nature writer and globetrotting adventure hog.  He’s been thinking a lot about apocalypse lately.  It’s hard not to.  The jungle drums are pounding out a growing stream of warnings — attention! — big trouble ahead.

The Christian currents in our culture encourage us to perceive time as being something like a drag strip.  At one end is the starting line (creation), and at the other end is the finish line (judgment day).  We’re speeding closer and closer to the end, which some perceive to be the final Game Over for everything everywhere.  Childs disagrees.  “We are not on a one-way trip to a brown and sandblasted planet.”

He was lucky to survive into adulthood still possessing an unfettered imagination, and he can zoom right over packs of snarling dogmas that disembowel most folks who attempt to think outside the box.  In his book Apocalyptic Planet, he gives readers a helpful primer on eco-catastrophe.  The bottom line is that Earth is constantly changing, and it’s not uncommon for change events to be sudden and catastrophic.

He purports that the big storm on the horizon today is not “The Apocalypse.”  It’s just one more turbulent era in a four billion year story.  Out of the pile of planetary disasters, he selects nine examples, travels to locations that illustrate each one, and then spins stories.  Each tale cuts back and forth between his adventures at the site, and background information from assorted sources.  It’s an apocalypse buffet.

Deserts are a quarter of all land, and many are growing now.  History tells us that they can expand and contract rapidly, taking out societies in the process.  Four out of ten people live in regions prone to drying up.  New Mexico once experienced a drought that lasted 1,000 years.  Beneath the driest regions of the Sahara, pollen samples indicate that the land was once tropical savannah and woodlands.  A few years ago, Atlanta, Georgia (not an arid region) came close to draining its water supply during a long drought.

Glaciers are melting at rate that alarms people who think.  Childs visited the Northern Patagonia Ice Field, where hunks the size of buildings were crashing down off the edge of the dying glacier.  Enormous volumes of melt water are raising the global sea level.  He also visited the Bering Sea, where the old land bridge is now 340 feet (103 m) underwater.  Beringia was once a broad treeless steppe, home to an amazing community of megafauna.  If climate change eliminates all ice, the seas could rise another 120 feet (36 m) or so, and major rivers will run dry from lack of melt water.  About 40 percent of humankind resides near coasts.  Nobody knows how fast the seas will rise, or how much.

The planet has been smacked countless times by asteroids.  Many believe that the dinosaur era was terminated by the Chicxubal impact on the Yucatan Peninsula.  There are many, many objects zooming around in space that could hit us, but Childs recommends that our time would be better spent worrying about catastrophic volcanic eruptions.  There are daily eruptions from 200 active volcanoes.  Extreme eruptions have loaded the atmosphere with dust, blocking out sunlight, leading to winters that lasted for years.  Humankind once had a close call with extinction when Mount Toba erupted 73,000 years ago.

Climate change is likely to affect the movement of the planet’s tectonic plates.  As glaciers melt and dam reservoirs evaporate, there will be less weight on the land below, allowing it to rise.  Tectonic shifts can lead to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and altered ocean currents and weather patterns.

All civilizations are temporary outbursts of overbreeding and harmful lifestyles.  On a visit to Mayan ruins in Guatemala, Childs discussed their collapse, the result of a combination of factors.  “The issue, ultimately, was carrying capacity.”  Over the years, I’ve often seen people sharing their opinions of the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans.  Estimates usually range between 100 million and 15 billion, as if there is one correct answer.

Actually, the long-term carrying capacity is constantly changing, and these days it’s getting smaller and smaller.  Ocean acidification, chronic overfishing, and other harms have sharply reduced the vitality of marine ecosystems.  Chronic forest mining, soil mining, and industrialization have sharply reduced the vitality of terrestrial ecosystems. 

The fossil energy bubble enabled a huge temporary spike in carrying capacity, but as we move beyond peak, we’ll discover that the long-term carrying capacity is far less than it was 10,000 years ago, when the ecosystem enjoyed excellent health.  Climate change is likely to reduce it further still, as large numbers of plant and animal species go extinct.

There have been five mass extinction events in ages past, and we are now in the sixth.  Childs takes us on an amusing visit to the site of a catastrophic mass extinction, the state of Iowa, where 90 percent of the ecosystem has been reduced to agriculture.  He and a buddy spent two days hiking through fields, dwarfed by tall stalks of corn (maize), during a week of blast furnace heat. 

They were looking for signs of life besides corn, and they found almost none.  The ecosystem was once home to 300 species of plants, 60 mammals, 300 birds, and over 1,000 insects.  “This had historically been tallgrass prairie, one of the largest and most diverse biomasses in North America where a person on horseback could not be seen for the height of the grass.”  The sixth mass extinction is unlike the previous five, in that it is the result of human activities, an embarrassing accomplishment.

Yeast devours sugar and converts it into alcohol and carbon dioxide.  When yeast are added to a vat of freshly pressed grape juice, they plunge into a sweet paradise, and promptly produce a bubbly population explosion.  The alcohol in the vat will keep increasing until it reaches toxic levels, at which point the yeast experience a mass extinction event, the tragic consequence of living in an artificial environment constructed by thirsty alcoholics.

Childs believes that civilization and human domination of the planet waited until recently because we thrive in warm weather.  Humans evolved in a tropical climate.  Eventually, we migrated into non-tropical climates, and developed the skills and technology necessary for surviving in chilly weather, but the ice ages were a time of struggle, not a sweet paradise.  Then, a freak thing happened.  The weather got warm, and stayed warm, for 10,000 years.  Suddenly, we were like yeast in grape juice.  Yippee!

The 800-pound gorilla in this book is climate change, and concern about the decades that lie before us.  Childs cites the views of a number of scientists, and they are all over the place.  A loose cannon at the EPA says that global warming is a hoax, but the others agree that the climate is warming, and humans are the primary culprits.  Some think that we’ve passed the tipping point, and all ice will soon be gone.  Others think that if emissions are reduced, disaster might be avoided.  One is sure that technology will fix everything — geoengineering will allow us to control the planet’s climate like a thermostat.  Another says that humankind will be gone in 100 years.

Climate history tells us that global temperatures commonly swing up and down, sometimes as much as 10° to 12°C.  Huge temperature swings lead to extinctions, but life on Earth has persisted.  The current jump in temperature is unlike the previous ones in that it is the outcome of human activities.  It is the result of a unique combination of factors, with no historical precedent.  Humans are unique in being able to adapt to a wide variety of ecosystems, but ecosystems are far less adaptable to sudden climate shifts.  Agriculture is on thin ice, as are seven billion people.

In a hut on the Greenland ice sheet, Childs had a long chat with José Rial, a chaos researcher and climate change scholar.  Rial understands that nature is highly unstable, and quite capable of rapid and unpredictable changes.  “What we study doesn’t always help us predict very much, but it helps us to understand what is possible.”  Childs added, “He knows that the actual future is the one we never expect.”

Childs, Craig, Apocalyptic Planet — Field Guide to the Everending Earth, Pantheon Books, New York, 2012.