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

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..."