"But the words on these pages are meant only for those who are ready for them."
Facing Extinction
by Catherine Ingram
2019
DARK KNOWLEDGE
“The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble.”
–William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part 1
"For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky. Now I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a diagnosis of late stage pancreatic cancer. Is it definite that the person is going to die soon? No, not definite. Is it highly probable? Yes, one would be wise to face the likelihood and put one’s affairs in order.
"First, let’s look at climate data. Over the past couple decades I have been studying climate disruption by reading scientific papers and listening to climate lectures accessible to a layperson. There is no good news to be found there. We have burned so much carbon into the atmosphere that the CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the
past twenty three million years. In the last decade our carbon emission levels are the highest in history, and we have not yet experienced their full impact. If we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, we are still on track for much higher heat for at least
ten years. And we are certainly not stopping our emissions by tomorrow. Although global carbon emissions were down in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, there has been
negligible effect on global temperatures, which are continuing to rise, with 2020 tied with 2016 as
the hottest years on record, despite the cooling effects of the climate cycle known as La Niña in 2020.
"The blanket of carbon in the atmosphere has triggered, and will trigger, further runaway warming systems that are not under our control, one of the most deadly of which is the release of methane gases that have been trapped for eons under arctic ice and what is now euphemistically known as permafrost (much of it is no longer permanent frost).
"Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon, and much faster acting. In the first twenty years after its release into the atmosphere, it is
86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Whereas the full effect of heat from a carbon dioxide molecule takes ten years, peak warming from a methane molecule occurs in a matter of months.
"Nitrous oxide is another greenhouse gas whose dangers have only recently been reported. Excess nitrogen from fertilizer becomes nitrous oxide when it escapes into soils and groundwater. It is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, molecule for molecule, and now accounts for about 20% of global warming. Due to food shortages, some countries are using more fertilizer than ever to increase crop production.
New studies show a clear correlation between increased fertilizer use and increasing levels of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.
"As if these emissions were not daunting enough, a heretofore little-known gas, sulphur hexafluoride or SF6, used in many green and renewable technologies, is
23,500 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon. It leaks from electrical production sites and is estimated to stay in the atmosphere for a thousand years.
"The Amazon rainforest, which had historically been considered “the lungs of the planet,” is now emitting
more carbon than it can absorb. Much of this has been caused by fires for deliberate crop clearing and animal grazing, but higher temperatures and drought have contributed to the Amazon now throwing off an estimated billion tons of carbon per year, turning it from a carbon capture to a carbon generator.
"The arctic and antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these regions, bubbling out of arctic lakes, and hissing out of seas and soils worldwide. Some scientists fear a methane “burp” of billions of tons when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs; a full melt has not happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate within months. This alone could be the extinction event.
"The arctic summer ice is currently
two thirds less than it was as recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a
full summer melt is likely within the next few years. During the month of June 2020, the Arctic Circle had the
highest temperatures ever recorded in the region, with one Siberian town hitting 38C (100 F). The wildfires that raged for months in the Arctic have now set a pollution record by emitting 244 megatons of carbon dioxide during the summer season of 2020, thirty-five percent more than in 2019, which also set a record. This is more than the annual carbon output of numerous countries. The Arctic ice is not only threatened by a warming atmosphere but, according to a study published in the
Journal of Climate, “deep heat in the Arctic Ocean has risen and is now melting the ice from below”. The continent of Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of
280% in the last forty years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such as the breaking off the
Larsen B ice shelf defied scientific predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of 2017, was
2,200 square miles in size.
The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, a mass of ice the size of Florida, is becoming increasingly unstable, now losing more than 100 billion tons of ice each year. Scientists fear that its collapse would cause much of the West Antarctic ice sheet to fall into the sea, since Thwaites currently acts “like a cork in a wine bottle.”
"The arctic ice has been the coolant for the northern part of the planet and it impacts worldwide climate as well. Its white surface also reflects back into space much of the heat from the sun, as does the antarctic ice. As the ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs the heat and the warming ocean more quickly melts the remaining ice. Over the past four decades, the proportion of the oldest and thickest ice in the
Arctic’s winter ice pack has dropped from more than 33 percent to barely 1 percent today, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
2019 annual Arctic report.
"The U.S., Russia, and China are now vying for hegemony of the arctic region in order to get at the massive reserves of oil that exist there and will be accessible as the ice melts. For instance, in 2019, Russia launched a floating barge on which
two nuclear reactors were wired into its infrastructure to power gas and oil platforms in remote regions of the Arctic. In early 2021,
satellite images show a build-up of Russian military forces in the Arctic, which, according to a spokesperson for Vladamir Putin, they have deployed in order to implement economic development in the Arctic region, an area they consider part of the Russian Federation. Apart from the real possibility of military conflagrations over control of the Arctic, moving “icebreaker” tankers through and drilling in this sensitive eco-system would cause the dual destructions of rapidly deteriorating whatever ice is left, thereby speeding up the release of methane, and then burning all that stored carbon of newly found oil reserves into the atmosphere.
"These and all the other warming feedback loops are now on an exponential trajectory and becoming self-amplifying, potentially leading to a “hothouse earth” independent of the carbon emissions that have triggered them. Each day, the extra heat that is trapped near our planet is equivalent to
four hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. There are no known technologies that can be deployed at world scale to reverse the warming, and many climate scientists feel that the window for doing so is already closed, that we have passed the
tipping point and the heat is on “runaway” no matter what we do.
"We are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction with about
150 plant and animal species going extinct per day. Despite the phrase “the sixth extinction” making its way into mainstream awareness via the publication of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book of that title, most people still don’t realize that we humans are also on the list.
"Some of the consequences we face are mass die-offs due to widespread drought, flooding, fires, forest mortality, runaway diseases, and dying ocean life—all of which we now see in preview. A few of these consequences could even result in the annihilation of all complex life on earth in a quick hurry: the use of nuclear weapons, for instance, as societies and governments become more desperate for resources; or the meltdown of the
450 nuclear reactors, which will likely become impossible to maintain as industrial civilization breaks down. Since 2011, when a tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan and caused a near meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, it has taken more than
42,000 gallons of fresh water per day to keep the reactors cooled. Keeping the radioactive elements contained requires dangerous jobs for the workers and building a new steel water tank every four days to store the spent radioactive water. As this process has become increasingly untenable, Japan approved plans in April, 2021 to begin dumping 1.2 million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean.
"If we were to make it through this gauntlet of threats, we would still be facing starvation. Grains, the basis of the world’s food supply, are reduced on average by
6% for every one degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial norms. We are now about
1.6 degrees Celsius above and climbing fast; the oceans are warming twice as fast and have absorbed a staggering
93% of the warming for us so far. If that were not the case, the average land temperatures would be a toasty
36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit)
above what they are now. Of course, there is a huge cost for ocean warming in the form of dying coral reefs, plankton loss, ocean acidification, unprecedented storms, and increased water vapor, which is yet another greenhouse blanket holding heat in the atmosphere.
"As I became aware of these facts and many hundreds like them, I also marveled at how oblivious most people are to the coming catastrophes. There has never been a greater news story than that of humans facing full extinction, and yet extinction is rarely mentioned on the evening news, cable channels, or on the front pages of blogs and newspapers. It is as though the world’s astronomers were telling us that an asteroid is heading our way and will make a direct hit destined to wipe out all of life to which the public responds by remaining fascinated with sporting events, social media, the latest political machinations, and celebrity gossip.
"However, beginning around 2010, a few books and other sources of information began to address the chances of full extinction of all complex life, and these became my refuge, even though the information was the most horrific I had ever imagined.
"For decades, I had sensed that things were dramatically worsening, the rate of destruction increasing. As a journalist from 1982 to 1994, I specialized in social and environmental issues. I had written about global warming (the phrase we most used in those days) numerous times in the 1980s, but because it seemed a far-off threat, we could intellectually discuss it without fear that it would affect our own lives in terribly significant ways. As time marched on, I began to awaken to how fast the climate was changing and how negative would be its impacts. It became a strange relief to read and listen to the truth of the situation from people who were studying the hard data as it affirmed my instincts and threw a light on what had been shadowy forebodings, dancing like ghosts in my awareness. It is an ongoing study that has taken me through a powerful internal process–emotional and cathartic–one that I felt might be helpful to share with those who have woken to this dark knowledge or are in the process of waking to it, just as I, over time, found comfort in the reflections of the small yet increasing number of comrades with whom I share this journey.
"Because the subject is so tragic and because it can scare or anger people, this is not an essay I ever wanted to write; it is one I would have wanted to
read along the way. But the words on these pages are meant only for those who are ready for them. I offer no hope or solutions for our continuation, only companionship and empathy to you, the reader, who either knows or suspects that there is no hope or solution to be found. What we now need to find is courage.
"The Coronavirus Pandemic: I wrote the original version of this essay in February 2019. At this writing, we find ourselves twenty months into a worldwide focus on the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent global restrictions on human movement and business. The imminence of this threat has taken center stage in our minds, but of course the other crises are rolling along in the background, undeterred by a virus, as evidenced in the 2021 report from the IPCC with data showing that the earth is hotter than it has been
for 125,000 years. We can also expect more viruses to erupt not only from gain-of-function research and mishaps and overcrowding of human populations, but also from melting ices caps. In January 2020, a team of scientists published their discovery of 28 new virus groups contained within 15,000-year-old ice. All of these viruses would likely be “novel.” The outbreak of Covid has also shown us how quickly life in the world entire can be radically changed and how confused, inept, and corrupt are most of our governments in response to a crisis with a less than one percent death toll."
