Saturday, July 28, 2012

A little perspective … will there be a global extinction event within the next 20 to 40 years?

Sounds like science fiction, fantasy, or a wing-nut conspiracy theory, right?

Well, perhaps … but read this paper and you tell me whether these guys are just wing-nuts. Doesn’t read like that to me.

Thanks go to Peter Croft, my friend from Perth Australia, for pointing out the article on his blog. Fascinating reading. I can’t find myself getting terribly worried about it because it will target everyone if it really happens, and no one gets to plan for that or duck out of it.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html

The warning about extinction is stark. It is remarkable that global scientists had not anticipated a giant buildup of  methane in the atmosphere when it had been so clearly predicted 10 to 20 years ago and has been shown to be critically linked to extinction events in the geological record (Kennett et al. 2003). Furthermore all the experiments should have already been done to determine which geoengineering methods were the most effective in oxidising/destroying the methane in the atmosphere in case it should ever build up to a concentration where it posed a threat to humanity. Those methods need to be applied immediately if there is any faint hope of  reducing the catastrophic heating effects of the fast building atmospheric methane concentration.

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