sometimes the despair and anger gets to be overwhelming...

[ljgeoff]

lovecraftienne wrote: I've the idea that before I die, the earth may not be a very nice place to be anymore, for a thousand reasons. Maybe missing that isn't such a dreadful thing. I only wish I could have understood earlier, done more to fix it, but even so, I doubt it'd have been enough.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about ocean acidification, and she said something like "well, what can we do?" and I just shook my head.

At the end of the permian, it's estimated that volcanic activity pushed the CO2 levels to 1000-1500 ppm. 95% of ocean life and 85% of life on land died. Recovery took millions and millions of years.

World temperature during the P-Tr event is estimated at 10-30 degrees Celsius higher than today, but it wasn't just the heat that killed things off. It was the dying ocean; when the ocean warmed up, the currents slowed or even stopped. Most life in the ocean died, but the stagnant, dysoxygenated ocean was a good breading ground for anaerobic organisms, which in turn released hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere.

We're currently at about 385 ppm of CO2, which beats IPCC's 2006 worst case scenario projection, and which makes IPCC stabilization scenarios for 2100 of 450 ppm - 650 ppm doubtful. I can easily see us getting up to 1000 ppm.

There is some hope, though. Even though we are approaching levels of atmospheric CO2 that precipitated the Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event, we still have lower levels of sulfur dioxide, chlorine and florine.

My friend asked "what can we do?" And I swallowed and gave her the reduce-reuse-recycle thing. I didn't tell her that everyone on the planet needs to stop producing carbon emissions right now. I didn't tell her that I don't think we (our species) will get our act together in time. I didn't tell her that I expect billions of people will die in this century.

But we are a lovely species. So beautiful, hopeful, clever and loving -- and very tenacious. I can only expect that things don't go as bad as it did 250 million years ago. I can only set things up as well as I can for the next couple of generations, and expect that they will have the skills and the heart to continue on.

I said to my friend, "When I was a kid, I had such dreams; space ships and robots and the end of poverty..."

Comments

[lovecraftienne.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It's just...depressing. I feel ashamed.

[limnrix.livejournal.com]

The Permian die-off was slower than we'd be able to observe in a lifetime, but I have this sort of SF imagination that suggests it was thanks to a technological boom.

I'm thinking I should get into, say, green farming. I just feel so impotent.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

you would do well to be careful of your diet of ideas, in the same way you might watch what you eat, or watch your kid's choice of friends. There are a lot of ideas out there that don't really go anyplace interesting.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Really, this post was more about feelings of being overwhelmed and depressed. I agree that hashing and rehashing things that I have no control over is non-productive and even counter productive.

As usual, you have helped me kick my thinking over to see what might be hiding underneath, and what I found was a strong desire to become involved with a chess piece that's actually sitting on my board. I'm going to begin working for better mass transit in Marquette County. It frustrates me that I have no options other than to take my car up and down the US 41 corridor between Marquette and Negaunee.

I have absolutely no idea of how to start a grass roots effort. There doesn't seem to be anyone else working toward usable mass transit for Marquette County, though there are plenty of other groups in other cities. So I do have some resources there.

I think that feelings of impotence, anger and even despair and shame can be useful -- like feelings of physical pain, they can goad a person to action.

[limnrix.livejournal.com]

YES! You should all be taking buses and taxis up there. The financial drain of cars is only a faint indicator of their environmental debt.

say what?

[julia-reynolds.livejournal.com]

So LJ should only have happy thoughts? It takes courage and integrity to examine the aspects of our little universe that are daunting and depressing. But your advice is to just not think about things that "don't go anyplace interesting"? Really?