Are we on the
road to mass extinction? More
scientists, from different fields of study, say that is possible, as we pollute
the atmosphere and oceans.
We'll explore
that - the worst case scenario - in this edition of Radio Ecoshock.
I'm going to
dedicate this program to one such scientist, Dr. Andrew Glikson, an Earth and
Paleoclimate specialist, from Australian National University.
We featured
Andrew Glikson in our Radio Ecoshock show, May 1st, 2009. You can download that
free from our web site, ecoshock.org.
We'll also
interview a top scientist from Yale, Dr. Mark Pagani. His recently released study shows a hot greenhouse world, just 5
million years ago, with CO2 levels similar to those we have already put into
the atmosphere. We'll talk about what
the IPCC may have missed.
And we'll keep
coming back to the mother of all climate nightmares: the dying oceans, which
could wipe out most land species as well.
Including us. You'll hear clips
from an important speech, "Brave New Oceans" by Jeremy Jackson,
Scripps Professor of Oceanography. He
too warns we are heading toward a mass extinction event. And Jackson is far from alone.
But first,
we'll start with a drop of good news: Bill Gates, the world's richest man, has
finally discovered dangerous climate change.
Here is how Gates began his speech to TED, the Technology, Entertainment
and Design series, on February 12th, 2010.
Bill
Gates quote:
"I'm
going to talk today about energy and climate.
And that might seem a bit surprising because my full-time work at the
foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds - about the things we need to
invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives.
But
energy and climate are extremely important to these people. In fact, more important than to anyone else
on the planet. The climate getting
worse means that mean years, their crops won't grow. There'll be too much rain, not enough rain - things will change
in ways that their fragile environment simply can't support.
And that
leads to starvation. It leads to
uncertainty, it leads to unrest. So the
climate changes will be terrible for them."
He
follows:
"I asked the top scientists on this, several times: 'Do we really have to get down to near zero? Can't we just, you know, cut it in half, or a quarter?' And the answer is that until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise.
And so
that's a big challenge. It's very
different than saying we are a twelve foot high truck trying to get under a ten
foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under. This is something that has to get to zero."
You can find the whole video presentation
by Bill Gates at ted.com, and I've posted the audio on my web site, for those
who prefer an
mp3 to go. Gates describes a
formula for attacking greenhouse gas emissions. It's remarkable that Bill Gates endorses zero CO2 emissions by
2050. Not reductions. Zero.
After noting
the unsolved difficulties of capturing CO2, and trying to store it for hundreds
or thousands of years - Bill Gates recommended a new type of nuclear
reactor. Not surprising from the master
monopolist, he briefly describes a nuclear tech he owns, called TerraPower. I may go into that in a future show.
The point is,
one by one, even the billionaires are getting the scientific warnings about
Peak Oil, and about a dangerous climate shift.
Welcome aboard Bill.
ON TO EXTINCTION:
Now let's
get on to the scientists who warn us the very worst could happen.
Five times in the life history of our planet, mass extinctions have slashed through the species. In the worst, the Permian extinction of 250 million years ago, around 80 to 90 percent of all ocean species, and 75 percent of those on land, plants and animals, vanished. We need to know why. And we need to know if that is developing now, due to our actions.
One of the
most persistent voices is Andrew
Glikson. Andrew arrived in
Australia as a war orphan from Germany.
Perhaps that enabled him to separate himself a bit, to view the
long-term history of life, as recorded in the ancient stone of Australia. He began with the record of outer-space
impacts, like asteroids hitting the Earth.
But Glikson
early recognized that space forces did not cause all the dead zones in the rock
record. He began to specialize in climate changes,
as the grim reaper of species. And then
he saw clearly, we are recreating the conditions for our own demise.
I get Andrew's new papers as they come out. I read them, and resist them. The message is clear, and it's frightening. It's simple.
WE ARE CREATURES OF THE ICE
AGES
We humans developed in the rotation of ice ages, with air and ocean currents driven by the difference between frozen poles and the hot tropics.
If the poles
melt, weather systems change beyond our agricultural needs. And oceans stagnate. Without ocean mixing, oxygen drops in the
seas. Then, as Dr. Peter Ward has
described twice on Radio Ecoshock, other microbes take over. These life forms don't need oxygen, and they
emit hydrogen sulfide, a gas deadly to all oxygen breathers, including those on
the land. Mass extinctions follow.
Could it
happen again? In this lovely
world? We can't believe it. We are programmed to believe in the ways we
have always known. So, it takes many
trips into this looming void, before the pieces get personal. Before we know the truth in our hearts.
Once again,
dear friends, into the breech.
THE CLIMATE HAS ALREADY CHANGED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO COME.
For me, this
round began a month ago, when Dr. Glikson sent me a paper about Rising Seas and
Climate Skeptics. In it, he said that our
current CO2 levels of 388 parts per million already commits us to 3 or 4
degrees of heating in the tropics, and ten degrees in the polar regions. Never mind what emissions may come in 2100 or
2050 - the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will drive us beyond the
tipping point, beyond the possibility of human control.
How could he say this? On what authority? I looked for the foot-note, and found reference to a recent study by Dr. Mark Pagani of Yale. I hadn't heard of it. So I phoned Dr. Pagani, to find out more.
[Pagani
interview][check back on our climate pages in the next few weeks for a
transcription]
Here is a
link to an abstract of Pagani's paper in my blog. The title is: "High Earth-system climate sensitivity
determined from Pliocene carbon dioxide concentrations". In addition to Mark Pagani, the authors are
Zhonhui Lui, Jonathan LaRiviere and Ana Christina Ravelo. It was published in the journal Nature Geoscience, first
online on December 20th, 2009.
This is Radio
Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith. We are exploring the science and scientists
who warn us: we are on the road to mass extinction.
It isn't just
climate scientists who say so. I'm
going to take just one more example, from dozens and dozens.
Back in 2006,
Friday the 3rd of March to be exact, Dr. Jeremy Jackson delivered his
"Brave New Ocean" speech.
Jackson is a Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute.
I have only a
poor quality recording of this talk, taken from a video which you can still
watch online. Here
is the link for the video. You must see
it. Or download
the audio from the ecoshock oceans page.
Jackson
explicitly says we are heading into a mass extinction event, based on the dying
state of our oceans. That is important
for you to hear.
We begin
with growing Dead zones off our coasts.
"And
then the degradation of water quality in coastal seas. This is something we can actually study from
cores, and see a chemistry. So there is
very hard data to support this.
And so
what you see is that all the things we valued in estuaries, - estuaries were
the breadbasket of humanity, as it were.
In the coastal zones, it's where all great civilizations arose. We've pretty much removed everything of
value in them. And we've created all
the toxic stuff in them instead.
And the
result is the formation of more than a hundred and fifty major dead zones [in
2006] around the world in coastal seas.
Dead
zones aren't dead. They are Pre-Cambrian and late Pre-Cambrian
communities of microbes and jelly fish.
And the only commercial harvest that can be sustained in dead zones is
jelly fish. It's a major fishery, and
they ship them to Taiwan.
The
hyper-production in a dead zone is way beyond the ability of grazing animals to
consume the phytoplankton, so they just die and rot. The breakdown of these microbes sucks up all the oxygen in the
system. And so the water is anoxic all
the way down from the very shallow surface area. And that's something to keep in mind."
Dr. Jackson
laments that species are dying off faster than we can discover and catalog
them. Biology has descended into being an
obituary of Nature.
"In
summary, Nancy calls this refining the obituary of Nature. Which is what I sometimes think ninety five
percent of conservation biology is, unfortunately.
We are causing extreme habitat reductions in entire suites of organisms, to the point of ecological extinction. Who cares if they are extinct? They will be extinct. It's not worth trying to find out if they are extinct, because we'll never find most of them again.
This
elimination of all these things that we used to value is providing the
opportunity for all sorts of new creatures on the block, which are going to
increase in abundance whether we like them or not. The Cow Nosed Ray is an example.
All the seaweed on the reefs of the world is an example. All those microbes that we don't like very
much are examples.
And of
course, these newly established communities are really hard to get rid of. It's the Humpty-Dumpty effect. You know, it's really easy to break an egg,
and it's really hard to put it together again.
And there
are experiments that are being done now, which are probably the most important
and exciting ecology that's being done in conservation ecology, to see whether
or not you can overcome these thresholds.
To actually restore ecosystems to something vaguely like what they used to be. But I can tell you, it's not a particularly
happy literature.
OK. So, given all that, what are the projected
long-term consequences of these changes, for the environment and human well
being? You know the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment is a wonderful thing.
And I thought it was really cool that is had scenarios. But those scenarios are defined in terms of
what we can imagine. And in my mind,
that's what's wrong with those scenarios.
Scientists
are just really not good at sticking their necks out. It's takes people like this [points to Aldus Huxley], to write
books like 'Brave New World' and '1984'.
Right, and when you think about how 1984 was considered to be outrageous
and how it's all true today - look at the [George Bush] Whitehouse...there is
something to be gained from this.
Don't you
love that. A book to be read again and
again, and pondered before oblivion comes... [laughter]
Actually
the best... I don't know how many of you have read 'The Time Machine' but read
it, or re-read it. It's wonderful. Because our hero advances forward in time
and he goes to a time in the future where humans have evolved into two species.
The Eloi and the Morlocks, and the Eloi
are the effete former aristocrats who are basically farmed by the Morlocks, who
are the working class living underground - and they eat the Eloi. Because people have eliminated all animals
on Earth, except for people, and they have to breed people in order to eat
them.
And our
hero escapes from the Morlocks in a very difficult situation, and jumps in his
machine, and fast-forwards, and goes too far.
And he gets to a time on the future Earth when the Sun is bigger. And there is nothing on the Earth but slime,
and a giant crab that almost devours him.
And that's.... we are going there!
OK. So the global ocean, you know there used to
be a lot of big animals but we know what happened to them. And there used to be a lot of three
dimensional structure, and that hung on long enough for people like me and Paul
Bethea, and this is where we are going."
[The
reference to three dimensional structures points to the flattening of the ocean
bottoms due to trawl fishing, and the break-down of corals due to warming and
acidification.]
Then we get
to an explicit warning of mass extinctions.
"We
heard about mass extinctions. I used to
think... there was a wonderful meeting here six years ago [year 2000] on the
future of evolution, that was organized by Andy Knowell and Norman Myers,
actually. And there was a lot of
parallel in that meeting to the meeting we are having here.
And I
heard David, and Doug at that meeting talk about the wisdom we can derive from
the fossil record, and I thought 'you
know, this is really interesting, but I don't think it has anything to do with
what is going on now.'
I mean,
we are going through something really terrible, but I don't see ... but you
know, the Permian-Triassic extinction, we're going there.
I'm going
to show you three scenarios.
This is
the hopeful one. This is the best
humanity can hope for. Now you just
think about how likely it is that we will cap and reduce nutrient run-off, and
carbon emissions, and stop over-fishing, within the next two to three
decades. If we do that, the oceans will
stay well-mixed. There will still be
oxygen in the deep sea. Dead zones will
decrease. We probably won't have any
mega fauna. But that will be fine,
because Mahi-Mahi taste good. And there
will be more Mahi-Mahi if you don't have big things to eat the Mahi-Mahi, and
you know, we could have massive agriculture, and we could live happily ever
after. We wouldn't eat fish.
But, if
we fail to cap and significantly decrease carbon emissions - even if we stop
over-fishing, and even if we control run-off, the oceans are going to become
acidic as Hell. And they are going to
be vertically stratified, because you know warmer water at the surface is
harder to mix down into colder deeper water.
We are
already measuring in the Eastern Pacific a decline in over-turn. We're already a decline in up-welling
rates. We are already measuring a
decrease in nutrient flux to the surface.
So, you
know, the ocean could become not only acidic, but stratified like the Black
Sea. The Black Sea used to have,
before the Russian agricultural revolution - used to have a prospering
commercial fishery in surface waters.
But you know, it was stratified, and not a very good place for people in
deeper water.
So we
have dominance of opportunistic species in the surface, as in the first
scenario. We have the demise of
calcified organisms, including corals, mollusks, and major groups of
plankton-like Coccolithopores.
Think
about the fact that Coccolithopores made the chalk of the White Cliffs of
Dover. They are the most productive
primary producers, in Temperate, and sort of low Polar oceans. They will be replaced by something. Undoubtedly a cyanobacteria or
something. And that would be good, bad,
or indifferent, who knows? It's an
uncontrolled experiment.
There is
lots of experimental data that show that Coccolithopores just give up the ghost
when the Ph drops to levels it will arrive at ... the ocean will arrive at the
Ph in fifty to one hundred years.
And there
will be anoxia throughout the thermo cline, and it's starting to sound like the
Permian.
And then,
if we just don't do anything, which is highly likely, there will be extreme
nutrient enrichment on top of all the other things that I said. And so we'll have dead zones surrounding
the land masses of the world. Maybe the
dead zones will move into the open ocean.
The
coastal waters will be too toxic for agriculture. You don't really want eat something, an oyster, that was raised
in an environment that had Dynoflagelate blooms. It would be kind of a gastronomic Russian Roulette. Sometimes, it's OK. And sometimes it isn't."
That was Dr.
Jeremy Jackson, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
ANDREW GLIKSON’S NEW PAPER:
“CLIMATE CHANGE IS A GEOLOGICAL EVENT”
At the start of this Radio Ecoshock show, I promised you the latest from Andrew Glikson, of Australia National University.
"We
are living in an ice age. Mammals would
not... warm-blooded mammals would have hardly been able to exist if conditions
were as warm as in the Cretaceous.
Although there were some mammals in the Cretaceous, mostly burrowing
underground."
- Andrew Glikson, from our Radio
Ecoshock feature, May 1st, 2009.
To get this
message out, I'm prepared to commit relative radio suicide, by doing the
forbidden. I will read out Glikson's
most recent scientific paper.
It's four
pages. It's scientific but clear. I'll elaborate a bit afterwards. Good luck, here it is as sent by email.
[A very
similar version of the Glikson paper I read out is here on
countercurrents.org].
Glikson has
said:
"With
a K2, the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, which has eliminated the Dinosaurs, and
most of you will know about it - there has been a release of some 4600
Gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Which, once again was a major major cause for the extinction of fauna at
this time.
Now when
we compare that level of carbon release to what we, as a civilization have been
releasing, so far we have released 305 gigatonnes carbon. But we have reserves, carbon reserves, of at
least 4,000 gigatonnes carbon. And so,
if in theory, civilization decides to continue to burn fuel, and then use the
oil shales as well, we are going to reach the level of carbon - carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere is going to reach similar proportions to this mass
extinction."
- Andrew Glikson, from our Radio
Ecoshock feature, May 1st, 2009.
PETER WARD EXPLAINS THE MECHANICS OF MASS EXTINCTION
And then there
is Dr. Peter
Ward.
"So
we're looking at similarly aged Coral reefs of the Devonian Age. There was a big mass extinction among
them. And we're trying to figure out
why is it that, about 360 million years ago, over half the species on Earth
rather suddenly died out."
-
Peter Ward, from Radio Ecoshock interview
October 16th,
2009.
Here are our
two Peter Ward interviews:
Under
A Green Sky 2008 26 min 6 MB Lo-Fi
and
The
Medea Hypothesis 2009 25 minutes 5
MB Lo-Fi
The mechanics
of how a changing ocean could kill us off, are best described by Dr. Peter Ward
in two books: "Under A Green Sky" and more recently "The
Medea Hypothesis". If you only
read one book this year, make it "Under A Green Sky".
Here is Peter
Ward, from our Radio Ecoshock interview in 2009, reiterating the well known
thesis of ocean stagnation.
"Try
to understand: if we had microbes at the major mass extinctions which seem to
correlate to times of very high heat, and low oxygen in the ocean.
The
oceans themselves can lose their oxygen if have a globally warmed world. If you think about it, what makes wind? Well, wind is simply air masses that are
going from warm places to cold places, or cold to warm. Let's say we take a globe that has a nice
cold pole, as we do now at both ends, and warm in the middle - well, the warm
wants to go to the cold, and the cold to the warm, and hence we have beautiful
winds. And currents, ocean currents.
And the
whole circulation system is built on this world that is warm at one point, and
cool somewhere else. If we warm the
whole thing, relatively, there is no more driving force for currents. No more driving force for big air currents,
or ocean currents. Things stagnate, and
when they stagnate, oxygen goes away.
When
oxygen disappears, whole different regimes of microbes can take over the
oceans. And they seem to have done this
in the past."
And finally,
just a brief glimpse of how oceans can kill.
Alex
Smith: "And
then it seems like the ocean can somehow become poisonous, if I understand the
theory in your book [Under A Green Sky].
Is that right?"
Peter Ward: "That's absolutely correct. One of the microbial groups that does best when there's no oxygen is a form that produces hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen sulfide is a great poison. It's that rotten egg smell. And the reason we react so strongly to it, and hate it so much, is that it is, at very small concentrations - parts per million - can kill we humans.
Just the
tiniest whiff of this stuff, we are so sensitive to it, because we know
intuitively, or deep in ourselves, that this is poison. We cannot deal with this stuff. Stay away, stay away!
And yet,
when we have an ocean with no oxygen at it's bottom, and worse, there's no
oxygen at it's top, these microbes take over.
And they can start producing (if they get enough nutrients) they can
start producing enormous amounts of hydrogen sulfide.
Hydrogen
sulfide is a poison to all animals and plants. So, it's
not a good thing. And the microbes that
produced this hydrogen sulfide have left behind little biomarkers, little bits
and pieces of their cell walls, in these Australian rocks we looked at. We've got the same stuff coming from your
nice Canadian rocks of the same age.
And in
fact we now find these in about ten or thirteen time intervals in the past -
all coinciding with rapid global warming, and volcanic events."
Of course, all
this takes time. None of us will live
to see the end of ice on Earth. But all
of us may have helped pull the switch that began this vast process. The extinctions have already begun, as
Jackson told us.
So many
scientists have spoken out, warning of a coming mass extinction. I started covering this in 2005, after
reading a popular book by Richard Leakey “The Sixth Extinction”. Just a few weeks ago, in the Radio
Ecoshock Show for January 29th, 2010 - we heard similar worries
from the eminent biologist Thomas Lovejoy, addressing UNESCO in Paris.
In addition to
the long haul changes at the Poles, and in the ocean currents, there remain two
possibilities much closer to us. The
first, as Mark Pagani told us earlier, is that existing greenhouse gas emissions
may already determine a much hotter world.
Too hot to support the billions we are now.
But Andrew
Glikson hopes we may survive, perhaps even evolving through the climate
shift?
"And
I have a particular interest in the behavior and the fate of these early
humans, surviving during some of the sharpest ice ages, glaciations and
deglaciations that have existed. To the
extent of temperatures raising many many degrees over short time periods.
It's
possible that the intelligence, the high intelligence of humans, has greatly
benefited from the fact that they had to survive such fluctuations. And this gives us some hope.
It gives
us some hope that our species is possibly more capable, than perhaps some other
species, to adapt to extreme variations.
But of course, civilization is something else again."
Beyond
the long march to extinction, there is an even more drastic change.
One example
from Earth's past is expressed in an email from an Ecoshock listener, Erik
Phillips-Nania:
quote:
“Regarding your
next program, I became familiar with these previous mass extinction events
while writing my senior honors thesis in 2007 at the Univ. of Colorado at
Boulder on ‘A Cultural Climate Change.’
I believe you'll be talking about what some scientists call the Clathrate Gun
Hypothesis where, about 55 million years ago, the world experienced 5°C/
23°F warming in about 70 years due to about 1,200 gigatonnes of gas
hydrates. (Gas hydrates refer to both the methane hydrate (clathrate)
reservoirs in ocean sediments and the carbon in permafrost zones.) There are 10,000 gigatonnes of stored gas
hydrates compared with only 180 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide currently in the
atmosphere.
The methane hydrate reservoirs are
generally not considered for several reasons: it is remote and poorly studied,
little was known about them until recently, and modern reservoirs appeared
stable until recently. But now ocean temperatures are increasing and the ocean’s
ecosystems are the most immediately impacted by climate change. Scientists such
as Buffett and Archer (2004), Kennett et al. (2002), and Maslin (2004) all
believe that methane hydrates may be the ‘dark horse’ of climate change."
end quote.
Here are the
full references used above: Kennett, James P.; Cannariato, Kevin G.; Hendy,
Ingrid L. & Behl, Richard J. (October 2002). Methane Hydrates in Quaternary
Climate Change: The
Clathrate Gun Hypothesis. American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Maslin, Mark.
(2004). Global Warming. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press; New
York.
Erik also
cleared up something that has bothered me, hearing different impacts given
for methane.
quote
"One
thing that gets me is that methane is almost always described (even by Joe
Romm) as have 21 times the greenhouse warming potential of CO2. While this is
accurate over a 100 year period, on a shorter 20 year period, it's effect is
closer to 62-72 times that of CO2. It
may seem nit-picky but it means short term impacts of methane (meat, landfills,
etc) are grossly underestimated."
That explains
why we hear methane numbers ranging from 20 times to 70 times CO2. It depends on the time frame we talk
about. And if "the Clathrate
Gun" can go off in 70 years, without the insistent emissions of humanity,
the shorter and more powerful content of methane may come to pass. We don't know when. Some think that process has already
started. Scientists are scrambling to
measure methane releases from the sea-bed, and from the Permafrost on land.
For more on
that, see the February 22nd article in the Independent newspaper, titled "Methane
Levels May See 'Runaway' Rise".
That's by one of the last environment reporters, Michael McCarthy. The subtitle says "A rapid acceleration
may have begun in levels of a gas far more harmful than CO2."
Here is just
another example of extreme and abrupt climate changes from
the past:
"One example of abrupt climate change is an event that happened some 11,600 years ago at the termination of the Younger Dryads cold event, which was the last blast of cold climate at the end of the last Ice Age some.
Ice core
records from Greenland show in less than a decade there was a sudden warming
of around 15 degrees Celsius (27oF) of the annual mean temperature. At the
same time a doubling of annual precipitation occurred. Researcher Richard Alley
suggests that not only does the climate system have dials that slowly alter
climate patterns, there are also switches that can suddenly shift climate in
dramatic ways. (Source: Alley, et al. 1993. Graphic above from CLIVAR.) This
abrupt event can be found in paleo records from many parts of the world,
although not necessarily to such an extreme degree."
That quote comes from
the National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration web site.
Or how about
this one, as
described by Joe Romm:
“UK Met
Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in
the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but ‘we do have time to stop it if we
cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.’”
That news is from the UK government!
The present and developing extinction event is
an open secret.
In last week’s
Radio Ecoshock show, Gwynne Dyer told us governments, and the military,
know the developing danger. Scientist
Peter Ward got his theory into popular TV, on Animal Planet, a show called “Animal
Armageddon”. You can order that on
video. And like Bill Gates, Peter
Ward presented at TED. But I still like
his two appearances on Radio Ecoshock for clarity.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/peter_ward.html
There's a small
school of journalism on mass extinction, which treats it like an exotic
horror story, more
scare fiction, to feed our intense fascination with death.
That's all
though. The impending disaster, known
so well by biologists, physicists, paleoclimatologists, ocean specialists, even
cloud specialists - is not part of the general social mind. The message has not reached the public. Perhaps, the possibility of extinction
cannot be communicated, using the minds we have now. Without any memory of such an event, do may
lack the inner ability to comprehend it?
We need a way
to process this kind of super-information, beyond more data, or entertainment,
into personal awareness, into that deep biological core, where action to save
ourselves originates.
We are not
there yet.
I'm Alex
Smith, and this has been Radio Ecoshock.
Join us next week as we explore the first wave: economic and social
collapse.
Get all our
past programs, as free mp3 downloads, at ecoshock.org.
I'm sorry if I
damaged your day.