It is not an asteroid, a super volcano, or climate change that will bring an end to the most destructive super predator to walk the earth;

NOT THIS ONE

THIS ONE

 it is the thousands of nuclear weapons in the hands of individual despots, religious fanatics, and outright idiots

   We dodged the warheads with four years of Donald Trump having access to the launch codes

But not to worry, the government has a plan to preserve the human race.

the Ol'Buzzard

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

 

There have been five extinction events in the history of the earth. Three of them took place over hundreds of thousands of years and were the result of changing climate, one resulted from a volcanic eruption, and one from an asteroid strike.

   

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction documents the loss of birds, animals, and sea life taking place at an extreme rate.  

 

Kolbert argues that we are in the midst of an extinction event caused by climate change.   She only deals peripherally with the human causation resulting in climate change, instead documenting the extinction of life taking place across the globe.

 

Undoubtedly we are past the point of arresting climate change.  There was a time we could have prevented this, but we did not have the resolve.   We are now seeing only the earliest extreme weather events that are a roadmap of things to come.  

 

We are at a point where the climates change is self-sustaining.   As the Greenland ice cap and the arctic ice melt, tundra buried for millions of years is emerging and emitting carbon diode which adds to the greenhouse effect increasing global temperature, increasing the melting rate.  It is not beyond credulity that within the next one hundred years the human race could be a nocturnal species.

  

I am not worried about climate change, because creative scientists on the upper end of the IQ scale will drag the rest of us into a sustainable environment.   Though we may have a massive extinction event of plants and animals in our familiar environment, the human race will be ok.    

 

The elephant in the room is not climate.   Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads; the US 5,428; France 290; China 350; UK 225; Israel 90; Pakistan 165; India 160; North Kores 20.  

A total of 12,705 nuclear warheads, each one capable of mass destruction, exist in the hands, and at the whim of a few men. 

 

Think Donald Trump!

The sixth extinction 

 

The human race is not responsible enough to control this kind of apocalyptic power.  The term Mutually Assured Destruction is a prediction, not a deterrent.

FIRE AND FURY

LIKE THE WORLD HAS NEVER KNOWN!

There have been five major extinctions charted through the geological record.   That the sixth extinction awaits somewhere in the future is not a question but fact.   Whether that event results from an asteroid impacting the earth or the moon; or the sun boiling away our atmosphere leaving the earth like its sister planet Mars; or a cataclysmic volcanic event…    The question is not if, but when and how. 

There is a new scenario to add to the mix.    3.2 million years ago, a creature came down from the trees and found it could grasp a stick in its tactile hands and beat the brains out of other animals and creatures like itself. 

The 1.6% genetic difference between human and its closest relative in the great ape family allowed development of a creature that has been able to bring most animal groups to the verge of extinction, destroy the rain forest, pollute the rivers and lakes and oceans of the world and contaminate the very air that sustains life on earth.

The earth was able to adjust to man’s destruction for 3 million years.   Then in the early 1900’s, only 100 years ago, the population of man exceeded one billion: thirty years later two billion, thirty years later four billion… five billion, six billion, seven billion; and by 2050 the world human population is charted to reach nine billion.    The ability of the earth to support the consumption of food, water and natural resources required by this human virus is finite.

Only seventy years ago, in the 1940’s man traded the stick in his hand for a nuclear bomb.  Now instantaneous mass destruction brought on by human error or madness is possible.  

For sixty years the sanest among the race have held the reigns on nuclear destruction while building a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the entire earth seven times over.   

The fear has always been that at some point in the future this power would fall into the hands of a person or persons unstable enough to pull the trigger: fire and fury like the world has never seen.

Seventy-two years later, on the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have two psychotic narcissists being goaded by their minions to unleash Shiva the destroyer of worlds – not understanding that the world they will destroy is their own.

PISS ON ‘EM

Many years ago my wife and I moved into an abandon farm house buried deep in the Maine woods.   We had no electricity, sewerage or running water.  We carried our water from the stream behind the house, read and studied by oil lamps; with a porta-potty for my wife and an outhouse I built for me.

Each morning I would wake up and walk out into the front yard for a morning piss.  There were numerous small ant hills around the yard and it became a routine to select one to relieve myself on.  Within a month the ants were gone. 

We all, unknowingly, walk over millions of ants every day.

After the sixth extinction, and as we approach the final nuclear extinction, I believe the ants, not the cockroaches or rats, will be left as the dominant life form on this earth.  

Therefore, we should start our battle now.

Piss on ‘em

the Ol’Buzzard

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

We modern day humans are the human equivalent of an asteroid strike.  We have fouled the atmosphere, acidified the oceans, deforested the rain forest and introduced invasive species around the world to the result that humankind will, at some point in the not so distant future, pay the price.

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times article: 
Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic

By Marla Cone

The arctic Inuit are being contaminated by pollution borne north by winds and concentrated as it travels up the food chain

About 200 hazardous compounds, which migrate from industrialized regions and accumulate in ocean-dwelling animals, have been detected in the inhabitants of the far north.

The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth -- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.

1987, Dr. Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Quebec, was surveying contaminants in breast milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily polluted Gulf of St. Lawrence when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the Arctic portion of Quebec province. She asked whether he wanted to gather milk samples from women there.

Dewailly reluctantly agreed, thinking it might be useful as "blanks," samples with nondetectable pollution levels.

A few months later, the first batch of samples from Nunavik -- glass vials holding a half-cup of milk from each of 24 women -- arrived by air mail at the lab in Quebec.   Dewailly soon got a phone call from the lab director. Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the lab's equipment, running off the page. The technician thought the samples must have been tainted in transit.   Upon checking more breast milk, the scientists soon realized that the peaks were, in fact, accurate: The Arctic mothers had seven times more PCBs in their milk than mothers in Canada's biggest cities.

It is one thing to be ignorant; it is another to be Georgia Republican Paul Broun and head the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in Congress.    

What hope is there to avoid the Sixth Extenction?
the Ol'Buzzard

A BOOK REVIEW

The sky is falling!   The sky is falling!

Chicken Little

If you only read one book on science this year it should be Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Man, Nature and Climate Change; written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published in 2006.    This book addresses the issue of climate change with startling examples that verify legitimate science predictions.  

For the decades after the industrial revolution the idea that mankind could be instrumental in changing the environment was never considered.

Because of concerns of some scientist a study was undertaken in 1979 by members of the National Academy of Science and NASA on the effect of increase carbon dioxide emissions in our atmosphere.   The findings were so startling that President Carter commissioned a special panel led by a distinguished meteorologist from MIT for further study.    In the three decades since the predictions of this panel have come to fruition, but at an accelerated rate.  

There have been hundreds of more peer reviewed studies since, all verifying the results: until at last we can make a definitive statement that the CO-2 in our atmosphere is increasing beyond the predictions of normal climate variation and that the results is an increase in global temperature – and the results are verifiable by visible and measurable observations. 

Starting in 1991 the earth temperatures have exceeded all temperatures recorded since instrumental temperature recording began.   The results are most startling in the Arctic where glaciers are melting at an alarming rate.

As CO-2 increases more of the suns energy is trapped in our atmosphere.   As glacier ice recedes solar energy is absorbed by the ocean causing water temperatures to rise, which results in more glacial recession…   As permafrost melts CO-2 trapped in the ice for millions of years is released into the atmosphere…  Add this to population increase and industrialization of third word countries and the outcome is bleak.  

“Computer models of the earth’s climate suggest that a critical threshold is approaching.   Crossing over it will be easy, crossing back quite likely impossible.”

Elizabeth Kolbert has just released a second book The Sixth Extinction; and I have my name on the reserve list at the local library for when it becomes available. 

Good science – good reading – a good book

the Ol’Buzzard