Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction
Everyone knows what happened to the dinosaurs, an 110 mile meteorite crashing throught the atmosphere are 36,000 miles an hour, leaving a 12 mile deep indent in the ocean off Yucatán Pennisula, Mexico, vaporizing plants, animals, and ocean water, acid rain poured down on a lightless and fridgid neverending winter.
But this is not the worst mass extinction, not by any means, it is just the most interesting, the most palatable. No, the worst mass extinction was actually at the end of the Paleozoic, at the Permian-Triassic boundary. This eradicated ninety-five percent of all species, singlehandedly stopping the rise of mammals in its tracks. But this wasn’t caused by a planetary body, nothing foreign, no nuclear explosion, no act of tantilizing violence, but rather by something we come in contact with every single day. Something we emmit into the atmosphere with a seeming reckless abandon through our cars, our powerplants, something we wage wars over access too, something that powers our economies, politics, and societies, Carbon Dioxide. Just another example of a runaway greenhouse effect taking down a group of mammals.
The main difference is that the carbon dioxide that caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction was emitted by a series of severe and explosive volcanic eruptions from the Siberian Traps in central Sibera, Russia. Those emissions reached 7,000 PPM of air pollution due to carbon dixoide, but it didn’t start that high. First there was a pre-crisis, at about 400 PPM as opposed to the pre-industrial average of 280 PPM. We are in a pre-crisis climate atmosphere, we are at an average of 400 PPM. We could get to there in two hundred years with only our current actions, removing any potential natural disasters, and that should concern you, I know it concerns me.
It’s ironic and a bit tragic that all we talk about is the abstract, the mystial. We talk of colonizing other planets while ignoring all that could be done at home. Sometimes there is no metaphor, sometimes wildfires are just fires not cosmic tests of will, something famine and drought are just famine and drought not lessons in generosity, and sometimes climate change is just the truth not a liberal buzz word designed to trigger a religious or philisophical brawl to the death.
We ignore the truth for the interesting, the concrete for the abstract, guilt for plausible deniability, but this is our fault and now our responsibility. We humans did this; we triggered the sixth mass extinction in our planet's history. We have changed geology so much with our plastics and our chemicals that we pump out into the geosphere that a new epoch has been suggested, the Anthropocene, the human epoch, because at this rate, nothing will be the same as we found it three hundred thousand years ago.
The difference between then and now is that we are here. The problem is our fault, but that means that we can forge a solution. Humans are inventors by nature; we invent stories, weapons, polymers, data collecting tools. We can fix this problem; the problem we made is a problem only we can fix.
Well, that's not exactly true. Mother Nature will solve this problem herself if given enough time. She has done it before, she’ll do it again, probably millions of times more until this universe fades or implodes, or whatever happens to universes when they die, but we can be part of this solution; we can help her fix this. We need a new industrial revolution, a time of ingenuity and creativity where we build new technology and strengthen new sources of power.
We are sentient, fully, for better or for worse, and that means that we have a responsibility as citizens of Earth and as animals ourselves to help those who are in danger, are innocent of the destruction of our forefathers, not complicit as we are.
We must act because it is right, or because we have no other viable choice; pick whichever helps you sleep at night. I really don't care, but you can't sit back and do nothing, then complain about record heatwaves keeping your children inside or your dog not being able to walk on the pavement without burning his poor little feet, or your family fishing spot running barren because all the fish have died or migrated away from that hellhole or your crops drying out and dying in a drought the likes of which have never been seen before but will become all too common and cripple your livelyhood.
We have to act; we owe it to ourselves and the future generations to do so. We have lived in the shit left out to rot by our parents and grandparents' generations our entire lives, and as terrible as it is, we are going to have to be the generation of change because no one wants to do it, but if we want water to drink, food to eat, cities to live in, lives worth living we can't keep going on like this.
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