“In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.” ~ Aristotle
It is a fact that the biggest threat to our species is not climate change, though it will likely end much of what we experience today, but rather our war on bio-diversity.
Bio-diversity is under attack from a swelling human population that consumes more than what Earth can replace, Very little of the natural world remains, falling victim to agriculture, our cacophony of noise, plastics, fossil fuel waste, insecticides, and other pollutants, radioactivity, outside electric lighting. human greed, invasive species, and of course, climate change.
Amanda Gorman, who received international acclaim with her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, works her magic on why we need to act now in her clarion call to prevent climate calamity that can be seen in the video at the bottom of the story.
Peter Brannen writes an incredible piece in The Atlantic on how climate change is not only godawful right now, but he describes a past in vivid detail about what the history of rocks tells us about how vulnerable we truly are to even the slightest change to the atmosphere. I recommend you read the article in its entirety; the research and links are remarkable.
Below are some excerpts:
We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half-mile of ice atop Boston. That negligible wisp of the air is carbon dioxide.
Since about the time of the American Civil War, CO2’s crucial role in warming the planet has been well understood. And not just based on mathematical models: The planet has run many experiments with different levels of atmospheric CO2. At some points in the Earth’s history, lots of CO2 has vented from the crust and leaped from the seas, and the planet has gotten warm. At others, lots of CO2 has been hidden away in the rocks and in the ocean’s depths, and the planet has gotten cold. The sea level, meanwhile, has tried to keep up—rising and falling over the ages, with coastlines racing out across the continental shelf, only to be drawn back in again. During the entire half-billion-year Phanerozoic eon of animal life, CO2 has been the primary driver of the Earth’s climate. And sometimes, when the planet has issued a truly titanic slug of CO2 into the atmosphere, things have gone horribly wrong.
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