Saturday’s tsunami that struck Indonesia without warning along the rim of the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra islands, was caused by a large chunk of the volcanic Anak Krakatau island sliding into the ocean.
The state of the planet in the late Permian—increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that create warmer temperatures on Earth—is similar to today says oceanographer Justin Penn, at the University of Washington: “Under a business-as-usual emissions scenarios, by 2100 warming in the upper ocean will have approached 20 percent of warming in the late Permian, and by the year 2300 it will reach between 35 and 50 percent. This study highlights the potential for a mass extinction arising from a similar mechanism under anthropogenic climate change.”
“Beneath the ocean floor huge reservoirs of hydrocarbon gases–including methane, propane, butane and others–exist now, and these microbes prevent greenhouse gases from being released into the atmosphere,” said assistant professor of marine science Brett Baker, at the University of Texas at Austin.
The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment released today warns of dire changes by 2050, many irreversible, according to the first comprehensive climate study prepared entirely under the Trump administration, with costs threatening to reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually by the middle of this century. It’s the pace of carbon dioxide emissions, not the absolute volume, it turns out, that’s makes our human-dominated, Anthropocene Era so extraordinarily fragile.
In contradiction to common sense and the observation that humanity’s gain has been biodiversity’s loss, new research disputes the long-held view that our earliest tool-bearing ancestors contributed to the demise of large mammals in Africa over the last several million years. Instead, the researchers argue that long-term shifts in climate drove these near-time extinctions, mainly in the form of grassland expansion likely caused by falling atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.
“There was forest-destroying acid rain and a landscape so barren that rivers had stopped winding. There were carbon dioxide levels so high, and global warming so intense, that much of the earth had become too hot even for insects.”
