Thanks to Our Fossil Fuel Addiction, We May Be Setting Ourselves Up for a Catastrophic Natural Event

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted July 3, 2009.

All the pieces seem to be moving into place. Global warming is a runaway train, carbon dioxide levels are exponentially rising, and oceans are subsequently losing oxygen. There are even hydrogen sulfide blooms being found in Namibia and other places where industrial pollution is spilling waste into the water.

The good news? We know that in the Permian and other mass extinctions that it took levels of around 1,000 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide to rob the oceans of oxygen and kill off most life on Earth. The bad news? We're closer to that devastating concentration than we think.

With CO2 hovering around 385 ppm, but increasing at an annual rate of 2 to 3 ppm, it doesn't take a math teacher to realize that we could hit 900 ppm by the end of next century. Or earlier, given the exponential nature of climate change.

"It's not quite linear," Dickens explained. "As you make the system worse, less carbon gets taken up by the oceans, which are sinks on a global scale. When that has happened in the past, suddenly a whole bunch of carbon has come out of the ocean fast. The magnitude is extraordinary. And there's also a temperature component: As things get warmer, the process amplifies."

Currently, it's amplifying at a fearsome rate. For his part, Ward believes we're headed toward a penultimate moment in Earth's history, one we should be ashamed of.

"We're way beyond anything from the Pleistocene, and heading towards the Cretaceous," Ward told AlterNet. "If we hit 800-1,000 ppm, we're in trouble. The sun is also getting warmer, so 1,000 ppm is really going to be like 2,000 ppm. We're talking about the second-hottest period in the planet's history."

Right now, Ward and other scientists who have proposed parallels between the mass extinctions of the past and the one we could be experiencing now, known as the Holocene extinction event, are lost in the wilderness of geopolitical machination and rampant global consumption. But interest in their destabilizing theories are growing.

"NASA called me about three months ago, and the administrator at Ames Research Center said, 'You've got to be kidding about this stuff!' " Ward said. "So myself and several other scientists put together a white paper on hydrogen sulfide, because this is a matter of national security. Just because its longer-term than other problems doesn't mean it's any less deadly. Our species is going to be in trouble in a hundred to a thousand years from now. What happens if the oceans go anoxic, within this century or by the end of next century? You'll have conditions that might be irreversible for a very long time."

Ward says that the Obama administration has been cool to the possibility of anoxic oceans and the various hydrogen terrors that lie in wait on its floors or its chemical processes.

And for his part, even Dickens is not as worried about mass extinction at the hands of climate change as he is about terrors closer to home.

"I've got more important things to keep me up at night," the good-natured scientist wisecracked over the phone, "like finding the next grant so I can go study this stuff."

But time, and probably not a lot of it, will tell which terror is more worthy of our immediate attention, expense and innovation. But whatever may come and whatever we decide, Ward warned, we better get our lazy asses in gear.

The worst that could supposedly happen is that we could be wrong and lose trillions of dollars to saving the planet, and thereby ourselves, rather than throwing them down the black hole of credit-default swaps and hyper-real derivatives.

But the worst that could really happen is that anthropogenic global warming could throw the planet's pH balance into chaos, as the combination of CO2-choked skies and anoxic oceans release the mother of all mass-extinction farts into the atmosphere, a killing joke we could never recover from. And who wants to go out like that?

"There's bad stuff before you even get to hydrogen sulfide," Ward concluded. "And there's not much you can do about any of it, in terms of geoengineering. The simple solution is to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions, and do it now. Here's the scary thing that can happen: Human extinction. Let's get serious."

See more stories tagged with: global warming, climate change, hydrogen sulfide

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

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