The next "great dying". World Ocean Shows Signs of Coming Extinction.

[Binkie The Clown]

[font size=5]Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole Toward a Second Great Dying? World Ocean Shows Signs of Coming Extinction.[/font]

The last time Earth experienced a Great Dying was during a dangerous transition from glaciation and to hothouse. We’re doing the same thing by burning fossil fuels today. And if we are sensitive to the lessons of our geological past, we’ll put a stop to it soon. Or else doesn’t even begin to characterize this necessary, moral choice.

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The Great Dying of 252 million years ago began, as it does today, with a great burning and release of ancient carbon. The Siberian flood basalts erupted. Spilling lava over ancient coal beds, they dumped carbon into the air at a rate of around 1-2 billion tons per year. Greenhouse gasses built in the atmosphere and the world warmed. Glacier melt and episodes of increasingly violent rainfall over the single land mass — Pangaea — generated an ocean in which large volumes of fresh water pooled at the top. Because fresh water is less dense than salt water, it floats at the surface — creating a layer that is resistant to mixing with water at other levels.

---SNIP---

The Great Dying of the Permian Extinction 200 million years ago should be a warning to anyone still enamored with the notion that today’s terrifying fossil fuel burning results in any future that is not horrible, wretched, bleak. Today, we dump 11 billion tons of carbon into the air each year — at least six times faster than during the Great Dying. Today, the great melting glaciers are beginning the painful process of ocean death by spreading out their films of stratifying, iron-loaded fresh water. Today fossil fuel industry, industrial farming and warming all together are fertilizing the ocean surface with nitrous oxides, particulates, phosphates flushed down rivers, and an overall increased runoff due to a multiplication of extreme rainfall events.

READ MORE HERE (Robert Scribbler)

[daleanime]

1. kick, kick, kick.....

And bookmarked.

[Unknown Beatle]

2. Fuck the Kochsucker brothers.

They're one of the leading causes of climate change. They deny that climate change and global warming are real and hire propaganda experts (GOP and other conservatives) and pay scientists to say it's a hoax so the kochsuckers can make even more money.

The human race is at a crossroads. We're fucked.

[GliderGuider]

3. "We" are the leading cause of climate change.

Attempting to shuck off that responsibility onto the shoulders of the the Kochs and Big Oil/Coal/Gas requires one to ignore hundreds and even thousands of years of human cultural history - all of it driven by energy consumption and resulting in environmental impact.

Even if we can't do much about the unfolding clusterfuck because we're trapped by the social requirements of our high-energy culture, recognizing our personal role is psychologically helpful.

I've found this new book to be enormously useful for putting the cultural consequences of human energy use into perspective:
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve

The author Ian Morris is a an Englishman who teaches archaeology, classics and history at Stanford. He’s an engaging writer and a deep/broad thinker. The book carries a very strong aroma of truth, but be warned that it presents a variety of challenges to our usual understanding of morality and value systems.

Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need–from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. In tiny forager bands, people who value equality but are ready to settle problems violently do better than those who aren’t; in large farming societies, people who value hierarchy and are less willing to use violence do best; and in huge fossil-fuel societies, the pendulum has swung back toward equality but even further away from violence.

Morris describes his approach to knowledge as reductionist (as is all scholarship in his view), materialist, essentialist, universalist, functionalist and evolutionist. I resonate with them all. Others will not. Such is life.

Reading this book has convinced me of the wrong-headedness of blaming individuals for the mess we're in.

[Binkie The Clown]

4. I once heard it claimed...

...that to tribal hunter-gatherer bands xenophobia is a virtue with positive survival value. That might explain why we have such a hard time weeding it out of the human race: It served us well for so long.

[GliderGuider]

5. Intra-group cooperation, inter-group competition.

The competition leads local groups to try and exclude outside groups from their resource base. Exclusion requires the locals to be able to tell who the outsiders are by some means. Any and all mechanisms are used for this - dress, language, customs etc. Outsiders, once recognized, are driven off, often violently. Bingo - xenophobia.

Wash, rise and repeat for 30,000 generations, and you've got xenophobia in your genes.

[Unknown Beatle]

6. I will rephrase what I meant.

What I mean is that 'we', as in people that want to do and are doing something about climate change, vs 'them', the koch brothers of the world that deny that climate change is real and fight tooth and nail to have the right to continue burning fossil fuel, among other things, even going so far as to hire professional deniers that use propaganda as a tool.

They, the kochsucker brothers, as a result are rapidly exacerbating climate change, which makes them, today, a leading cause of climate change by not doing anything about the effects of global warming.

I do what I can by planting as many trees as I can on my property and I drive only when necessary. Plus I try to conserve water.