WORLDFIRE - Chapter 14, Part I
Last Hours?
“Unthinkable and terrifying as it may seem, nearly all life on Earth could go extinct because of manmade climate change.” Leonardo DiCaprio (from the film, “Last Hours”)
You may recall my mentioning the 2006 TIME magazine cover that used to hang on my office wall screaming (in ALL CAPS): “BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED.” We are now going to take a deeper dive into why the climate crisis should have you worried–very worried–and why absent an emergency whole-of-government response, the collapse of our atmospheric life support system could spell the last hours for humanity. That is if we continue down the path we’re currently on, a path that leads to mutually assured misery. Alternatively, we could choose another path, a path that honors the Earth; a path that celebrates life.
In an earlier chapter we examined the methane threat from permafrost thaw, but there is an equally ominous methane threat lurking beneath the sea. Most people have never heard about this, because the corporate media rarely reports on such things, but in addition to all the methane stored in permafrost on land, massive amounts of the pernicious greenhouse gas are also entombed under the sea in a frozen slush called methane hydrates. Some of these hydrates are melting, releasing methane gas, which is bubbling to the surface and heating the atmosphere and oceans even more, which is melting more of the frozen methane, in a vicious cycle.
Since as far back as 2008, the International Siberian Shelf Study has been tracking the alarming phenomenon of methane bubbling up from the sea floor. In 2011, another research team with nearly two decades of experience surveying the Arctic seabed off Russia was stunned by their discovery of vast methane plumes rising from beneath the sea. Three years later, an international team of scientists captured alarming video footage of methane gas escaping from the depths of the Arctic Ocean. Closer to home, 168 underwater methane plumes have been observed by a team of researchers off the coasts of Washington and Oregon. Other researchers have detected similar methane hydrate destabilization events on the northern U.S. Atlantic seafloor. In 2014, glaciologist Jason Box, who has studied the Greenland ice sheet for decades, wrote this in response to news of methane plumes bubbling up from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean: “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.” Because scientists don’t usually communicate so directly, the young scientist’s post went viral.
The implications of this underwater methane threat were brought into sharp relief in a short film called “Last Hours.” Narrated by Academy award winner Leonardo DiCaprio and presented by bestselling author Thom Hartmann, the ten-minute film is a jolting wake-up call for humanity. When I first saw the film in 2013, it shook me to my core. When I watch it today, it chills me even more.
DiCaprio is no Johnny-come-lately to the climate cause. One of the rare Hollywood actors who leverages their celebrity to advance the greater good, he has long led in the climate arena. In 2016, after winning an Oscar for his lead role in the film, The Revenant, DiCaprio used his nationally televised acceptance speech to deliver this powerful message: “Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity… Let us not take this planet for granted.” That is what I call making the most of your 15 minutes of fame.
The film “Last Hours” describes a terrifying science-based scenario where runaway global meltdown is triggered by carbon dioxide emissions and the release of massive amounts of frozen methane. You already know the worst part: the melting of this frozen climate destabilizer is already underway. Profiling not only respected climatologists, but also geologists and other earth scientists, the film documents how our planet has experienced five major extinctions in geologic history and how our prolific production of greenhouse gases is now triggering a sixth mass extinction not dissimilar to one set off by volcanoes in Siberia that led to a 6°C temperature spike roughly 250 million years ago. Thom Hartmann sets the scene: “By the end of the Permian mass extinction, 95 percent of all life on the planet was dead. And why is this important today? Because today a sixth extinction is underway, one that will test the survival of not just human civilization, but possibly of the human species itself. And it bears a horrifying resemblance to several previous global warming-driven events like the Permian mass extinction.” If this is news to you, brace yourself for what the experts in the film had to say.
Dr. Paul Wignall, Professor of Paleoenvironments, University of Leeds: “The Permian mass extinction is, in essence, just the greatest crisis that life on earth has ever suffered… a lot of the main crises in the past were associated with global warming, with obvious implications for the present day… The numbers are very similar from some of these giant lava flows in Siberia. The amount of carbon dioxide that was released is very similar to the sort of fossil fuel burning, carbon dioxide release that we’re doing, sort of decade after decade today.”
Dr. Michael Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, University of Bristol: “[T]he atmosphere doesn’t care whether the carbon dioxide comes from human activity or from a volcano. It has the same end effects… The risk is so-called runaway greenhouse, which is that the self-correcting mechanisms cease to kick in and you heat by a little bit, then you release methane. That then causes excess heating, and you release more methane, and so it goes.”
Dr. Peter Wadhams, Polar Oceans Physics Group, University of Cambridge: “When the sea ice retreats, as it’s been doing, the shallow shelf seas warm up and this warm water extends down to the seabed. The seabed warms up, it releases the methane, and you get plumes of methane coming up.”
Benjamin Black of the MIT Siberia Expedition: “It’s a kind of a scary thought, but maybe one of the best geological analogues for the kind of rapid changes in climate and CO2 in the atmosphere that we’re going to witness now and for the next few centuries, potentially, is this end Permian time when, as you know, that culminated in one of the largest mass extinctions that we know of.”
Are we nearing a methane death spiral, where its release triggers more dangerous global overheating, which emits yet more menacing methane, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop at ever increasing speed? Many of the findings in “Last Hours” were reinforced by a 2016 scientific study on the end Permian extinction called, “Methane Hydrate: Killer cause of Earth's greatest mass extinction.” In it, researchers described how “carbon dioxide from volcanic emissions triggered the release of… methane from permafrost and shelf sediment methane hydrates” that “accelerated global warming.” The authors warned that “global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic, but the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic.”
For those who spend more time thinking about the state of the economy than the state of humanity, alarm bells should also be going off. In 2013, a group of economists and polar scientists warned that an “economic timebomb” is ticking in the Arctic. They even put a price tag on the catastrophic flooding, agricultural, health, and weather impacts of a rapid Arctic methane thaw: $60 trillion. That’s trillions with a t. 60 of them. And that’s just from the Arctic melting down.
In the beginning, we didn’t know what we were doing. Now we know. We have destroyed Earth’s delicate temperature balance through the burning of fossil fuels. By pumping such prodigious amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, we are taunting the climate beast. It doesn’t take a climate scientist to see that the beast is angry and lashing out. Yet the production of fossil fuels continues unabated. We are burning it like there’s no tomorrow, and if we don’t stop soon, we may find that there is no tomorrow, at least for our progeny. Every year that passes without a serious global response to this quickening crisis begs the haunting question that should be gnawing at each of us: are we living through the last hours of humanity? A small but growing body of scientists believe the answer to that question may be yes and that humanity is fast approaching the edge of a point-of-no-return climate cliff. Some, in fact, think we have already fallen off the deadly cliff and are hurtling at dizzying speed toward the sharp rocks below.
While I was busy banging my head against the wall trying to get the wind industry to step up and lead a green industrial revolution, Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell was interviewing scientist James Lovelock about this very topic: “In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad... Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions… By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes – Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.”
Lovelock is not alone in his apocalyptic predictions. Others go so far as to predict the extinction of our species. While I was busy planning my ride, Frank Fenner, the scientist who famously helped eradicate smallpox, was issuing a grave warning to humanity. As reported in the Daily Mail, Fenner predicted “homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years.” He said: “I think it's too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.”
In 2016, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, widely recognized as one of the world’s brightest minds, projected humans had only 1,000 years to find another planet to live on due to a host of threats including “runaway climate change.” The following year, the Albert Einstein Award winner moved the goalposts, predicting we have only 100 years to move. The urgency Hawking expressed was a welcome wake-up call for humanity, but his idea of escaping to another planet to me really missed the point. If we can’t figure out how to live on Earth, which is uniquely suited to life, what are the odds, really, that we’ll somehow miraculously do better on a planet that isn’t? Space barons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can hype their colonization dreams all they want, but I don’t find the thought of trying to survive the hostile elements of Mars particularly appealing. I’d rather find a way to keep living on the only planet in the universe known to support life. Of course, the ominous, unspoken message behind billionaires wanting to colonize other planets is that they see Earth soon becoming uninhabitable for the rest of us. But let’s say we were all somehow able to move, shouldn’t we figure out how to make things work here first before we go and trash another planet? We are already messing with the Moon. In 2009, NASA intentionally crashed a rocket and satellite into the Moon, creating an explosion that sent debris almost ten miles high, to confirm the presence of water molecules. We can’t even seem to resist the urge to bomb our own Moon.
In 2017, researchers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography added their voices to the climate catastrophe chorus by warning of a 1 in 20 chance of humanity being destroyed within the next 100 years if global temperatures exceed 5°C (9°F) beyond pre-industrial levels. One of the study’s authors, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, told reporters: “When we say 5 percent-probability high-impact event, people may dismiss it as small but it is equivalent to a one-in-20 chance the plane you are about to board will crash.” He said, “We would never get on that plane with a one-in-20 chance of it coming down but we are willing to send our children and grandchildren on that plane.”
In 2018, social scientist Mayer Hillman raised eyebrows when he declared, “We’re doomed.” As reported by The Guardian, Hillman, who has written extensively on how we might avert climate catastrophe, believes “the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too.” But he doubts it can be done. The newspaper reported that “Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. ‘I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.’”
They may be in the minority, but the aforementioned scientists and academics are far from alone in their thinking. While I believe we can avert annihilation by mobilizing a climate emergency response at wartime speed, I think we owe it to ourselves to listen to what the doomsday scientists are saying. For what if they are right? What if we are on the verge of extinction? How would I comport myself in the time I have left? How would you? Should we not be loving each other and our fellow planetary travelers as deeply as we possibly can? That would be good for our souls, no matter how things turn out. It is certainly possible that nothing we do at this point will prove to be enough. Because we have waited so long to act, much is now out of our control. Of this, however, there can be no doubt: if we persist in waging war against the planet, we will lose that war. For in the end, Mother Earth does not need us. It is we who need her. If we stubbornly persist in our self-destructive ways, Gaia will continue to evolve, just without her human children.
But what if, as I believe, the doomsayers are wrong? What if there is still time to avert the worst that climate chaos has to dish out? If we go all out to make peace with the planet, Mother Nature just might surprise us by meeting us part way. It just might prove to be enough. Nature can be quite forgiving when shown a modicum of respect. We know from experience that ecosystems can and do restore themselves, and sometimes very quickly. Earth’s systems are far too complex for anyone to definitively predict one way or the other, and since no one can know for sure what the future holds, it would be monstrously immoral not to give it everything we’ve got. If we successfully evolve ourselves to embrace an ecological worldview, Gaia may yet grace humanity with a reprieve. If she doesn’t, and it proves too late, we will at least have comported ourselves with a semblance of grace. We will have proven ourselves worthy of the love of our children for having risen to their defense. We will be able to look our other-than-human kin in the eye and say that we tried. I want to become what J. Allen Boone, author of Kinship With All Life, calls “a better citizen of the universe.” To those who might accuse me of peddling false hope, I say the real crime would be to throw up our hands and not even try. Intergenerational justice demands that we assume humanity still has a chance, and that we rally all the resources at our command to buy future generations time to turn around the Titanic.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.