AboutThe Atlantic has an excellent piece on a drastic climate change event about 230 million years ago, when vast quantities of carbon dioxide gas erupted from undersea volcanoes. We’ve all heard the story of how the dinosaurs disappeared; well, this one is a different story.
But perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Carnian Pluvial Episode was not the crisis itself, but the world that came after. Until then, dinosaurs had been a puny and obscure lineage confined to the furthest southern reaches of Pangaea. But by the time the crisis was over, they had spread all over the world—perhaps using the oddly humid pulse to hopscotch across the previously arid wastelands of Pangaea—and rapidly diversified, using the extinction of their competitors to experiment with new lifestyles. The planet would never be the same.
Speaking of climate change, living in the US makes it pretty clear that some of us haven’t yet gotten our head around the whys, the hows, and really, the necessity, of caring about climate change. This is the part that we must keep reminding ourselves: it’s not that climate change destroys the Earth; far from it. The Earth was, is and will be fine. It’s just that the species that inhabit the Earth has and will change with drastic climate change.
If we, humankind, as a species are destined to have the same fate as the dinosaurs, well, so be it. But hey, if there’s one thing us humans have done better than any other species, that’s to change our environment to suit ourselves. Let’s use that to keep Earth’s climate as we like it! A huge chunk of our civilization is based on proximity to water, including oceans; a huge chunk of us are used to certain weather patterns. We won’t like it if either of those factors change. We won’t; the Earth won’t care.
(Hopefully we won’t end up like the dinosaurs. Hopefully, we will (a) keep Earth’s climate under control, and (b) inhabit other planets, at least, by the time the Sun makes Earth uninhabitable.)
Anyway, go read this great article. This kind of story about the paths of life and evolution on Earth is always fascinating to read.