Spinal Fire Scientia Est Potentia

The Concept of Extinction
By John Kedrowski

50 million years ago, in the Eocene, the average global temperature was 26 degrees C! The world was covered with a blanket of rainforest and even the poles were green. The oceans were high and epicratonic seas swept over the continental shelves and reached far into the interior.

Then, something changed. The oceans currents began to slow and stop and ice began to form at the poles for the first time in hundreds of millions of years. In matter of a million years, the global temperature fell 15 degrees and 30% of animal species on earth went extinct.

Think about this. 15-degree temperature change over a million years...and we get a mass extinction. What happens if we change the temperature 5 degrees in a hundred? That is exactly what many of the models predict. Life depends on a stable environment in order to prosper. Human, in order to support our current population, NEED a stable climate. We are changing the climate and we can measure the changes and even though we can't figure out how these changes might affect us yet, the climate is still changing.

I liken this process to the famous flowerpot islands around many south pacific islands. These islands are made of limestone and coral and there is an algae that feeds on the CaCO^3 in the rock. Feeding on the algae are small mollusks called Chitons. These creatures have iron teeth that they use to scrape the algae away. Unfortunately, it also scrapes a little bit of the rock away, too. Over the years this has led to a mushroom shaped island with the stems getting smaller and smaller every year.

If the chitons were capable of thought, they might look at the way they were living and ask the question, if we keep scraping the rock away on the stem of these islands, the whole thing is going to come crashing down to kill us all. But they are not, and they continue to scrape and the island falls on the entire community. Do you see my point?

Extinction is in our future whether we like it or not. It may be tomorrow, or it may be a million years from now. The forces of nature could extinct us easily and there would be nothing we could do about it. Just as quickly though, we could extinct ourselves with vast amounts of thermonuclear weaponry. Much more insidious, though, is this "chewing up the island" process. It does not happen quickly, so it doesn't send us into a panic that would unite people against it. Yet, the changes are going to lead to a different global climate in a short time.

Global warming has the potential to affect our lives and our children's lives negatively. Something needs to be done about it. We can sit there and stare at the island above us and hope that it doesn't fall, meanwhile ignoring the fact that the small things we all do will tip it over, as long as we want. Or at least, until it falls. Then what? Extinction? Maybe, maybe not. Yet, the concept alone is unthinkable. It is different then death because at least something of us would pass on. The immortality of our genetic lines end. It's too much to risk just driving an SUV.