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It has been some time since I have been able to keep abreast with still (relatively) slow-moving freight train of global heating and the sixth mass extinction.
The interview with Guy is between 54'30" and 1 hr 40'
Guy McPherson interviewed by Gary Null on Earth Day
The interview with Guy is between 54'30" and 1 hr 40'
Guy McPherson interviewed by Gary Null on Earth Day
This essay is updated periodically to accommodate recent evidence. It was last updated 29 March 2019.
My December 2018 essay, “Ocean Deoxygenation as an Indicator of Abrupt Climate Change,” provides an overview of the marine response to abrupt climate change. It is linked here.
~ George C. Williams
American evolutionary biologist George C. Williams died in September 2010 at the age of 83 years. I doubt he knew we were facing our own imminent extinction.
By the time Williams died, I’d been sounding the alarm in this space for three years. I was not alone. The warnings I’ll mention in this short essay were hardly the first ones about climate catastrophe likely to result from burning fossil fuels. A little time with your favorite online search engine will take you to George Perkins Marsh sounding the alarm in 1847, Svente Arrhenius’s relevant journal article in 1896, and young versions of Al Gore, Carl Sagan, and James Hansen testifying before the United States Congress in the 1980s. There is more, of course, all ignored for a few dollars in a few pockets.
The projected rate of climate change based on IPCC-style gradualism outstrips the adaptive response of vertebrates by a factor of 10,000 times. Closer to home Homo sapiens, mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape the current extinction crisis. Humans are vertebrate mammals. To believe that our species can avoid extinction, even as non-human vertebrates and non-human mammals disappear, is classic human hubris wrapped in a warm blanket of myth-based human supremacy. The evidence indicates humans will join the annihilation of “all life on earth,” as reported in the journal literature on 13 November 2018. After all, humans are alive (some more than others). We depend greatly upon invertebrates for our continued existence, yet an “insect apocalypse” is under way, as reported in a review paper in the April 2019 issue of Biological Conservation.
The catastrophic, uncontrolled meltdown of the world’s nuclear power facilities is sufficient but not necessary for the near-term loss of life on Earth. “Only” abrupt climate change is necessary to rid Earth of all life.
The response to these warnings, throughout history? Shift the baseline. Ignore the abundant science. Throw caution to the wind. And, for the IPCC, retain a remarkably conservative approach (according to the remarkably conservative peer-reviewed literature).
The corporate media, governments, and most climate scientists continue to adhere to the 2 C target proposed by economist William Nordhaus in 1977: “If there were global temperatures more than 2C or 3C above the current average temperature, this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.”
We know quite a bit more about climate science than we did in 1977. And real scientists knew, even way back then, that economists were not to be treated as scientists. It’s small wonder Nordhaus shared the politically motivated Nobel Prize in Economics earlier this year. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he been given the Nobel Peace Prize, thus joining fellow partners-in-crime specialists-in-genocide Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.
Earth is at least 1.73 C above the 1750 baseline marking the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This global-average temperature is the highest ever with Homo sapiens present, according to a 2017 paper in Earth System Dynamics by James Hansen and colleagues. In other words, our species has never experienced a hotter Earth than the one currently driving the ongoing refugee crisis as habitat for humans disappears. And we’re not quite at the 2 C limit (sic) established by Nordhaus.
According to an overview published by European Strategy and Policy Analysis System: “An increase of 1.5 degrees is the maximum the planet can tolerate; should temperatures increase further … we will face even more droughts, floods, extreme heat and poverty … and at worst, the extinction of humankind altogether.” In other words, according to this major synthesis, we’ve passed the point beyond which human extinction might occur.
In response to the ever-accelerating crisis known as abrupt climate change, the conventional approach is to shift the baseline. Instead of admitting the planet is nearly 2 C above the 1750 baseline, governments and many scientists have determined the baseline is actually 1981-2010, or later. Adherence to the Precautionary Principle is clearly unfashionable.
We’ve known for decades that the 2 C number set in stone by Nordhaus is dangerous. We were ”running out of time” to deal with greenhouse gases in 1965, according to the chief of the American Petroleum Institute. Fourteen years later, it was Edward Teller informing Big Oil they needed to change. Al Gore and Carl Sagan testified to Congress in 1985 that we must act now on climate change. In late June 1989 Noel Brown, the director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program indicated we had only until 2000 to avoid catastrophic climate change. About 16 months after Brown’s warning, the United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases set 1 C as the absolute upper limit in October 1990. Climate speaker and writer David Spratt said 0.5 C was the upper limit in October 2014.
It was probably too late to reverse abrupt, irreversible climate change in 1977 when Nordhaus shared his genocidal opinion. It certainly was too late to change course in 1989. And comforting words aside, we haven’t done anything to prevent our own extinction in the wake of warnings distant or near.
In October 2018, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated we have until 2030 to hold global-average temperature at 1.5 C above the ever-shifting baseline. Yes, that’s correct: The United Nations is recommending a global-average temperature well below the current temperature as a “target.”
It gets worse, of course: United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres says we have until 2020 to turn this ship around. In early October 2018, according to the Guardian, “the next three months are crucial for the future of the planet.” Of course, nothing of significance was done at the planetary level because nothing of significance could be done. The only known means by which humans can change the global-average temperature in any direction between now and 2020 is the reduction of industrial activity, which will alleviate the aerosol masking effect and therefore drive the global-average much higher very quickly. The impact of the aerosol masking effect has been greatly underestimated, as pointed out in a 17 January 2019 article in Science. As pointed out by the author of the paper in Science on 22 January 2019: “Global efforts to improve air quality by developing cleaner fuels and burning less coal could end up harming our planet by reducing the number of aerosols in the atmosphere, and by doing so, diminishing aerosols’ cooling ability to offset global warming.” This Catch-22 of abrupt climate change, termed the McPherson Paradox, takes us in the wrong direction regardless of the direction of industrial activity if we are interested in maintaining habitat for vertebrates and mammals on Earth. Loss of the aerosol masking effect means loss of habitat for human animals, with human extinction soon to follow.
It gets unimaginably worse by the day, of course. Recent information from the refereed journal literature finally caught up to me in concluding the Sixth Mass Extinction could annihilate all life on Earth. A paper in Scientific Reports draws this conclusion based upon the rate of environmental change, consistent with my own conclusions. Five-and-a-half years after I described the horrors of interacting factors, a paper in the 21 December 2018 issue of Science concludes such interactions are tremendously important. Following up on 10 January 2019, a paper in the same publication points to ocean temperatures increasing much faster than expected, thereby ensuring 2018 as the year with the warmest oceans ever recorded on Earth. As one result, Antarctica is losing ice mass at six times the rate of 40 years ago, according to a paper in the 14 January 2019 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Meanwhile, “roughly 430 million years ago, during the Earth’s Silurian Period, global oceans were experiencing changes that would seem eerily familiar today. Melting polar ice sheets meant sea levels were steadily rising, and ocean oxygen was falling fast around the world.” In other words, the Ireviken extinction event is stunningly similar to the Sixth Mass Extinction in which we are currently participating, according to a paper in the 1 May 2019 issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Finally, a paper in Geosciences dated 23 November 2018 indicates up to 8516 ppm by volume in the Yamal region of Siberia, indicating the great potential for terrestrial permafrost to warm the planet in the near future. In other words, it is not only the 50-Gt burst of methane described by Shakhova and colleagues as “highly possible for abrupt release at any time” in 2008 that poses an existential threat based on methane alone. As one who loves life, my gratification from these most conservative of sources is overwhelmed by my sadness at the loss.
To put it simply, our fate as a species is sealed. We’re headed for extinction in the very near term despite warnings dating more than 150 years. It’s a tragic tale. And, as foretold by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams, our species hardly made a squeak as the hammer dropped.
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