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Books and mass extinctions
Am in receipt of a few new books, some of which came in to work as review copies and some ordered by mine own hand and credit card. Notable in the latter category is Michael Bérubé‘s Rhetorical Occasions
Hat tip to PSOTD on that one. I have in mind a sorta hybrid Verdi-slash-HipHop kinda thing, which style I am calling “Mean Joe Green” for now.
My friend Richard Heinberg has been busy: his new book The Oil Depletion Protocol
You people outside the United States will just have to tell us how that “acting responsibly” thing goes.
Two gigantic coffee-table tomes have hit the desk at work in the last week. One of them brought back some serious pleasant memories. Back in the days before I knew of Carl’s work, I would likely have told you that Robert Bateman was my favorite painter of natural subjects. About twenty years ago the Smithsonian held an exhibit of his work, and I spent more than a few days studying each painting with odd and poignant longings in my heart when I should have been working. His style is an odd mix of photorealistic and Japanese-inspired simplicity: each subject, elk or heron or bobcat or fencepost lichen, is rendered in wonderful detail. The context in which the subject resides is rendered almost as exactly, but much of the detail is seamlessly omitted. It is a painterly equivalent of depth of field:
...but the slight lack of detail in the surroundings is far more subtle than blurring.
That twenty-years-gone frisson came back as I paged through the weighty The Art of Robert Bateman.
Also unread and anticipated and gigantic: George Wuerthner’s The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy.
But that goes onto the pile too, until I finish Douglas Erwin’s Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago
The end-Permian extinction (as it is properly called, because there were other mass extinctions that took place during the Permian) nearly wiped out life on Earth. Between 90 and 95 percent of marine species went extinct at the time, with about 70 percent of terrestrial species dying out as well. The event ended some evolutionary lines that had previously dominated the planet: trilobites, pelycosaurs like the sailback dimetrodon, the dinocephalian therapsids. (For a modern-day equivalent to the extinction of that last taxon, imagine all mammals dying out.) Some paleontologists, California’s Luann Becker among them, have proposed that a “bolide impact” — a big meteor or comet or asteroid hitting the planet — was responsible for the end-Permian extinction, and a few years back the mainstream press responded to a Becker press release by declaring that the cause of the event had been established. But rumors of the cause of death have been exaggerated. Peter Ward has studied the end-Permian for most of his adult life, and has consistently argued that the data support entirely earth-bound, ecological explanations for the extinction. For a time he speculated that sudden exposure of anoxic ocean sediments — the oceans receded, and the muck came out from under — depleted the oxygen in the atmosphere, and only those organisms that could tolerate suffocatingly low O2 levels survived. (The ancestors of today’s supremely respiratorily efficient birds, for instance.)
But Ward’s SciAm article advances an idea even more chilling than worldwide smothering. He’s updated his thinking based on new data, much of it coming from the study of “biomarkers” — trace organic substances in fossil strata left by organisms that do not themselves usually fossilize. One such biomarker is cell membrane lipids, which vary in chemical constitution from species to species. It is thus relatively straightforward to assign cell membrane lipids from, say, end-Permian strata to a particular kind of organism. And in fact, study of biomarkers in end-Permian, early Triassic ocean sediment rocks indicate that the oceans experienced a huge spike in the population of certain kinds of bacteria, huge population spikes of which are inconsistent with a comfortable planet for us oxygen-breathing types. Here’s the bullet-point version of the hypothesis, excerpted from a sidebar accompanying Ward’s article:
- Trouble begins with widespread volcanic activity that releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.
- The gases cause rapid global warming. A warmer ocean absorbs less oxygen from the atmosphere.
- Low oxygen (anoxia) destabilizes the chemocline, where oxygenated water meets water permeated with hydrogen sulfide (H2S) generated by bottom-dwelling anaerobic bacteria.
- As H2S concentrations build and oxygen falls, the chemocline rises abruptly to the ocean surface.
- Green and purple photosynthesizing sulfur bacteria, which consume H2S and normally live at chemocline depth, now inhabit the H2S-rich surface waters while ocean-breathing life suffocates.
- H2S also diffuses into the air, killing animals and plants on land and rising to the troposphere to attack the planet’s ozone layer.
- Without the ozone shield, the sun’s ultraviolet radiation kills remaining life.
Whee!
No one knows what the atmospheric CO2 and methane levels were in the end-Permian. We do have figures for other mass extinctions in which climate is thought to have played a role, such as the end-Paleocene and end-Triassic. During both of those extinctions, atmospheric CO2 levels were somewhere around 1,000 parts per million. The good news: this is three times the atmospheric CO2 we currently enjoy. The bad news: most climatologists predict we’ll get to those levels somewhere around 2100 if we follow Bush administration climate policy. And that’s not even taking into account things such as outgassing of the insane amounts of carbon now locked up in polar soils, which catastrophic event is almost likely inevitable. In fact, it’s happening now, or starting to at least, as the reports coming across my desk from Siberia indicate. Or the bright boys at ExxonMobil tapping into unstable methane hydrates reserves beneath the ocean floor, as is currently planned, and dislodging a couple billion tons of methane into the atmosphere — a possibility discussed soberly in the engineering documents.
So I’m reading that Erwin book first. And then I’ll need to look at the pretty paintings.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
=v= Heinberg’s earlier book provided a lot of hard facts (and I do mean hard) that are cited by those concerned about Peak Oil. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream press has simplemindedly portrayed these concerns as dismissable wacky end-of-worldism. Even worse has been the reaction of many so-called activists,whose reactions fall largely into two categories:
· Inaction, because it’s hopeless.
·Looking forward to petrocollapse, since that’ll mean fewer SUVs (and no fuel for Fleet Week).
I hope the new book serves as a corrective to this.
By: By Jym on 2006 10 06
Everything I’m about to say is meant in a completely madcap, zanily humorous way, and I don’t mean a word of it:
I’ve been saying for years that I couldn’t imagine anything to replace oil. We use it because it’s a lot cheaper, in a lot of ways, than anything else. I see it as something like the steroid of modern civilization. We got this big, in population, at least, thanks to petroleum. Take it away, even gradually, and I’ll bet there’s not enough resources to keep more than a quarter of us alive.
At the newspaper where I work, I see articles about twice a year about some enterprising optimist who converts his car to burn waste donut-frying oil, or something similar. Biodiesel and gasohol always come into the story, with the constant subtext of “We’re saved! Tra-la, Tra-la, we’re saved! Nothing has to change, technology is coming to our rescue yet again!â€?
When you peel apart any human-related environmental problem, at base it’s not an environmental problem, it’s one or both of a couple of human problems.
The Too Many People Problem: Conceptually divide the human population by ten and there’s enough petroleum to last hundreds of years. Leave it at 6 billion, and maybe we’re screwed in five.
The Not Enough Brains Problem: Humans generally are probably less than half as bright as they need to be to survive as a species, and to keep from wrecking the earth. But put people under intense pressure and they become LESS intelligent. More fearful, more desperate, more dangerous ... and LESS thoughtful and rational.
As to that second factor, I kinda think the very existence of George W. Bush, Moron President, (and the growing religious-fundamentalist movement in the U.S. and elsewhere) is a symptom of an already-intense situation.
As to the first, as we get deeper into the pit, I can picture the insane godders in our midst blocking any action to limit human breeding, and even working to eliminate the ones we already have (as they already do).
I’m an optimist myself most of the time, but there are moments when I think relaxed optimism is probably the exactly wrong tool to handle what’s happening on Planet Earth right now. There’s a much longer rant here, which I’ll leave out, but ... I can imagine billions of people dying. Within our lifetimes.
:coolsmile: Have a nice day. :ahhh:
By: By Hank Fox on 2006 10 07
But Dr. Who comes and rescues us, right?
No, wait, what I mean to say is, Where are those damn Daleks? “Must Exterminate! Must Exterminate!”
I shuttle between those two extremes.
By: By bdaggerlee on 2006 10 07
SOOOO…....Chris, Hank, what are your PERSONAL plans?
One must cultivate his own garden. Or her own.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 10 07
Well, speaking for myself, Kathy, I happen to know that good Mormon families keep a year’s worth of food in storage at all times. I figure if I know just one family of Mormons, and I have a gun, I’ll be okay.
Okay, just kidding. Actually, the phrase “... find a safe place to ride out the fall of civilization ...” percolates through my head every once in a while, and I consider various alternatives. But I haven’t made any real decisions yet.
It’s funny how very much of our literature is based on the idea of the Hero. And yet nobody seems to realize that the reason we value heroes so much is the same reason we value gold: rarity.
By: By Hank Fox on 2006 10 07
Kathy, I’d say yes.
Imagine the future as best you can (the dark aspects AND the bright ones). And then start living your life as if that future is really real.
By: By Hank Fox on 2006 10 07
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Books
Paleontology
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