“Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. He does whatever he does to the web to himself.”― Ted Perry
A punch to the gut today from NOAA as the Mauna Loa laboratory on the big island of Hawaii showed that humanity passed a milestone of over 425.01 of CO2 measured in the atmosphere for the first time in recorded history.
We know human activity did this because:
In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide molecules absorb infrared radiation, so with more of them in the atmosphere, they trap more of the heat radiating off the planet’s surface below.
It never had to end up this way; the world was warned decades ago to act and act quickly. Humanity chose not to for most of that timeframe.
So here we are; all we can do is fight as hard as possible to save something that can survive this mess sapiens has made.
The paleological record is brilliantly compared to the Permian Triassic period, one of ten natural climate fluctuations discussed along with our contributions that affected climate history by Howard Lee in Quanta magazine. (You may want to bookmark this one.)
How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)
Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change.
Magnitude: Around 3 to 9 degrees Celsius of warming
Time frame: Hundreds of thousands of years
Continent-scale floods of lava and underground magma called large igneous provinces have ushered in many of Earth’s mass extinctions. These igneous events unleashed an arsenal of killers (including acid rain, acid fog, mercury poisoning and destruction of the ozone layer), while also warming the planet by dumping huge quantities of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more quickly than the weathering thermostat could handle.
In the end-Permian event 252 million years ago, which wiped out 81% of marine species, underground magma ignited Siberian coal, drove up atmospheric carbon dioxide to 8,000 parts per million and raised the temperature by between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius. The more minor Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 56 million years ago cooked methane in North Atlantic oil deposits and funneled it into the sky, warming the planet by 5 degrees Celsius and acidifying the ocean; alligators and palms subsequently thrived on Arctic shores. Similar releases of fossil carbon deposits happened in the end-Triassic and the early Jurassic; global warming, ocean dead zones and ocean acidification resulted.
If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because human activity is causing the same effects today.
As a team of researchers studying the end-Triassic event wrote in April in Nature Communications, “Our estimates suggest that the amount of CO2 that each … magmatic pulse injected into the end-Triassic atmosphere is comparable to the amount of anthropogenic emissions projected for the 21st century.”
And El Nino is coming.
It is worse than what you are being told.
Please keep it in the ground.