120 years of climate warnings paint a story of extinction

An excellent story on climate change in the Dec. 1 Register ("What makes 2.7 degrees F so crucial?") sent me to Wikipedia to find Greta Thunberg’s 2018 speech to the United Nations.

Thunberg, all 4 feet 11 inches of her, began fighting climate change by leaving school at age 15 and took her protest to the climate change summit.

“People are dying,” she said. “Entire eco systems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.”

I bought a book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert. I have not thought of our planet in the same way since. My wish is that people will pick up a book on climate change and educate themselves.

All but a small percent of the creatures on Earth died 250 million years ago in one of five major mass extinctions. The only question is whether or not marine life succumbed separate from the extinction of many land creatures.

Kolbert posits we are in a sixth major mass extinction.

A mass extinction doesn't necessarily mean the end of life on earth, but it does mean species vanish quickly.

Warnings have been around for at least 120 years.

Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927), who won the Nobel Prize in 1903, connected increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide to Earth’s increasing surface temperatures.

I remember hearing that Earth had already reached a tipping point 40 years ago. A random article in a newspaper or magazine said something like: The heat is already in the pipeline. I shrugged it off and didn’t hear much discussion about it.

Also years ago on the radio program "Car Talk" with Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a caller wanted to know what kind of car to buy to negotiate mountain roads in the Western United States. One of the brothers asked what she needed it for. She explained that she was monitoring the atmosphere and climate at high altitudes. Pressed about her findings, the young woman began to cry. On the radio. Really crying. She said something like, "If people only knew."

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006 seemed to be greeted mostly with a snore or ridicule worldwide.

As far as I could tell, reaction to Thunberg’s speech lasted a few news cycles and much of the world returned to its ostrich-like pose.

Venus was once considered Earth’s twin: about the same size, about the same distance from the sun, in the so-called Goldilocks zone. But that was mostly before we understood what a hellish place it is. There are other factors to consider: Earth has a very helpful moon, Venus has no moon; the Earth is tipped at a helpful 23 degrees and Venus a meager 3 degrees.

Still, Venus may once have been more hospitable. But something went terribly wrong. It became hot enough to melt lead.

Earth is a special place in the universe. Just how special is yet to be determined. It’s clear that we are treating it like a town dump.

Carl Sagan put it like this in “Pale Blue Dot” — a piece about the way Earth appeared in a photo by NASA's Voyager on Feb. 14, 1990 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun:

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

I first heard of Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” probably sometime in the 1990s. I never looked at rush hour and heavy vehicle traffic the same way again.

Stories about melting permafrost and the resulting methane and carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, are terrifying. Roughly half of Earth's oxygen comes from the oceans — from plankton and algae and bacteria. Kill that off with warming waters and the result is easy to imagine.

We learn meat production significantly contributes to the release of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

Special interests commonly challenge science and science challenges itself. But in a world of journalism that tries hard to balance information, quoting people on both sides of an issue, the facts blur and the warnings become muddled.

There is only one side to climate change. It is here, it is getting worse and without serious intervention or an unforeseen world-saving technology, Homo sapiens will go extinct.

I applaud Elizabeth Weise’s USA Today piece in the Register; I just wish it could have been splattered all over page one.

Thomas Alex, a former Register reporter, lives in West Des Moines.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: COP28: Climate warnings are nothing new, and the danger only grows