Gassing Ourselves Into Oblivion?

[peristaltor]

A few weeks ago, kmo had a great interview on his C-Realm Podcast with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist of the NASA Langley Research Center. Mr. Bushnell is, to say the least, an immensely qualified individual. Just listen to the introduction kmo gives him. (If you don't have time for that, someone was good enough to transcribe the interview here

Comments

[beachofdreams]

I'll have to give the book a good read. I remember posting on something on the ecological power of bacteria in exobio (I should really post something there).

This reminds me of Dawkins' chiling nod to the bacteria (specifically, the Eubacterium Thermus aquaticus, with characteristic fictional prose:

" Look at life from our perspective, and you eukaryotes will soon cease giving yourselves such airs. You bipedal apes, you stump-tailed tree-shrews, you desiccated lobe-fins, you vertebrated worms, you Hoxed-up sponges, you newcomers on the block, you eukaryotes, you barely distinguishable congregations of a monotonously narrow parish, you are little more than fancy froth on the surface of bacterial life. Why, the very cells that build you are themselves colonies of bacteria, replaying the same old tricks we bacteria discovered a billion years ago. We were here before you arrived, and we shall be here after you are gone" (from The Ancestor's Tale

[peristaltor]

You should start with Out of Thin Air. I think you'll like it. Lots of meat and potatoes science there, with lots of cutting-edge atmospheric studies that have yet to be formally published. Green Sky is more of a recap of that science with some sobering updates into new research.

I, meanwhile, am definitely going to have to splurge on Dawkins.

[beachofdreams]

You should start with Out of Thin Air

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll be splurging on Ward as soon as I can. As for Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale is one of his better books, and not only because it recounts many of the ideas he's explored in others. One of my favourite reads, and a long one too.

[ironphoenix]

Great article... too bad I won't be sleeping tonight! Linking...

[l33tminion]

I've been noticing the news about "dead zones" and "red tides", but I feel I was missing the larger picture until now. Good article. Scary, though.

[shiva_kun]

I only have one issue with this: even if we're producing CO2 100 times faster than the Siberian Traps, the eruption events that caused this lasted for quite awhile; a quick search on Wikipedia (yes, I know, horrible place to use as a source, but it's quick and dirty) gives me 200,000 years, or about a million years, so for us to put out that much CO2 would still take us 2,000 or 10,000 years. I'm sure an argument can be made that the extinction event started happening before the event ended, but I can't seem to find any information regarding that (I'm not criticizing the lack of evidence, merely stating I can't find any).

Our output of CO2 is definitely alarming, but using that quote just seems like a scare-tactic to me.

[beachofdreams]

I thought about this too. It seems that total output is the integer we should be interested in here. That, or what kind of temperature changes induced this event, if they did. Though, what is alarming about our situation is that already signs of a similar process are occurring, and it isn't as if we have to see a tremendous calamity happen before things get bad; even a further 20% loss of biodiversity is a bad thing.

[peristaltor]

Especially if you as an individual and member of a species happen to be at the top of the food chain.

[peristaltor]

That's absolutely true. I thought about including that point in the original entry, but decided not to simply because it isn't really relevant.

Yes, the Permian carbon release lasted hundreds of thousands of years. That's not true, however, of all greenhouse extinctions. The Permian is only the largest extinction. Ward notes twelve extinctions in all in Out of Thin Air, five of them major. This graph might help:

Dennis M. Bushnell returning to the C-Realm Podcast

[kmo]

I think Dennis M. Bushnell will be returning to the C-Realm Podcast in the near future. Do you have any questions that you'd like for me to put to him?

The link to the transcript of his first interview no longer works. Did you happen to save that transcript locally? If so, I'd love to get a copy.

Re: Dennis M. Bushnell returning to the C-Realm Podcast

[peristaltor]

Cool news, KMO. I'll spleunk my hard drives in the next few days and see if the transcript dwells in some dark crevice.

If I don't find it, I may transcribe it myself (putting those years of legal secretarial transcription work to good use). I'll probably at least have to listen to #108 again anyway to get a good idea of what to ask Dr. Bushnell.

Either way, expect the transcript and maybe a question by at least Thursday, maybe earlier.