I have a
review of
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert in The Guardian. Here are a few notes and comments on points which I didn't manage to fit in the review or, if I did, got cut:
The hypothesis that the Chicxulub asteroid struck in
June or July was mentioned by
Jay Melosh on Radiolab's
Apocalyptical, December 2013
Total content of the world’s nuclear arsenals According to nucleardarkness.org in 2009 there were 23,335 weapons with total yield 6,400MT (
pdf).
Permian... a few decades see analysis by
Paul Wignall (
video) -- initial pulses of CO2 over tens and hundreds to thousands of years, perhaps triggering a rapid release of methane over a few decades
30 to 50% of species
functionally extinct by 2050 Sourced
here
Additional input of heat...equivalent to...four atomic bomb detonations per second See
here. As I noted in
Minotaur, the additional accumulation of heat in the oceans since the 1870s due to human activity is estimated as
equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs.
exact and beautiful adaptations Jacob Bronowski's lovely phrase occurs in the first few pages of
The Ascent of Man (1973), about which Simon Critchley recently wrote a
rather good piece.
artists an
interview with
Maya Lin at
Yale360. Tove Jannson had other disasters on her mind in 1946 but
this still resonates.
extinctions... see
these posts on extinction in The Blog of Barely Imagined Beings
... and new discoveries not just of species, many of which are verging on extinction even as they are discovered (or
rediscovered) but also processes in the Earth system itself of which we previously had little or no idea. So, for example, scientists did not anticipate the ozone hole (as is nicely summarised in
this piece by Alice Bell). In the event, the international community was able to largely solve this problem. The discovery of ocean acidification -- or at least the likely rapidity of its occurrence and the potential dangers it poses -- came as a surprise to many if not all. Unlike ozone depletion, ocean acidification does not appear to have easy answer. A significant future surprise -- an unknown unknown -- may be relatively easy to solve, as ozone depletion appears to have been, or be wickedly hard, as ocean acidification appears to be.
Amphibians a spark for Kolbert's book was her
article about disappearing frogs in
The New Yorker in 2009.
It's all pretty grim... The Guardian cut the rest of the sentence:
...but reading The Sixth Extinction is like riding in a well-engineered German car. With apologies to Edward Behr, it could be titled Anything Here Nearly Extinct and Have a Scientist with First Class Communication Skills as a Spokesperson?
spend... hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the majority in the dark See, e.g.,
Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change and
In the Carbon Wars, Big Oil Is Winning
it almost repels thought in a
review, Kathryn Schulz writes:
It could be that dwelling in geologic time, as you must do to write
about extinction, is good for perspective but bad for action; the arc of
the actual universe is so long it bends toward fatalism. Human time, by
contrast, is good for acting but bad for seeing. It is into the chasm
between these two timescales that species are dropping like flies.
hyperobject - an
accessible introduction
imaginative thinking Lee Billings (whose recent book I reviewed
here)
writes:
The great difficulty in all of this is
that no one yet knows how the Anthropocene will unfold. Our dominion
over the planet may prove brief in the scope of deep time. Or, the
Anthropocene could transform the entire planet into some new state
that persists for the remainder of the Earth’s existence. Most
wildly, the Anthropocene might surpass the boundaries of Earth
itself, becoming interplanetary if our descendants extend our
geological footprints to other worlds. Knowing that we have our own
age to shape may alter what we do with it, with possible outcomes
lying somewhere between our immortal reign and imminent demise.
But a distinct possibility is a “gone-away world [rather] than birth of
anything new...Radioactive fallout as fingerprint”
We need new big stories I had a sentence before this:
We have long since left behind the “places of many generations” known to our palaeolithic ancestors. We need new big stories.
J L Schellenberg asks
Why are our imagined futures so shallow?
what comes next Chris Thomas is
optimistic:
We worry about extinction of species in the era of humans. But at the
same time we are seeing an evolutionary surge. The seeds of recovery are
already visible.
See also Henry Nichols on
rats as big as sheep and Robert Krulwich on
pregnant brains
a world utterly transformed by synthetic biology one place to start thinking about that is
here
Is it too much to ask... I made an assertion here not a question: “It is not absurd
to ask...”
...whether we can express our humanity...with compassion... These words are from the palaeoanthropologist Rick Potts as quoted
by Lee Billings (see link above).
George Szirtes recently
tweeted
It is salutary to remember that we are walking on egg shells from first
day to last and that we're not weightless. We walk between storms.
Images: Priceless or Worthless? (pdf); Manāfi˓-i al-ḥayavā, or The Benefits of Animals (1297-1300) by Ibn Bakhtīshū (via Persian Painting); and Goya's El Gigante o El Coloso (1814-1818)