The modern hypothesis is based on life destroying itself by its own actions. Over two billion years ago the second great extinction of life occurred. Before that time life was bacteria eating and giving off gases that would be poisonous to most life today. Along came bacteria that changed its exhaust gases from the toxins to oxygen. As oxygen levels increased 99 per cent of life died. That oxygen allowed for multi-celled life to evolve. Several extinctions afterward nearly wiped out life but the Great Oxidation Event was the first where life nearly made the Earth barren of life again.

            If one species was able to wipe out 99 percent of life two billion years ago is our heating up the Earth going to do the same thing? We know Venus didn’t always have the lead melting high temperature cloud blanket it has today. We are about to have a runaway climate change here that humans are causing. Could it be that we will continue to cause hundreds of species to go extinct each year until almost all are gone?

            Is each of us participating in making that extinction event possible? That possibility should be lots of food for thought.

            There’s a saying about being between a rock and a hard place and the world is in that spot. We have a huge disaster looming and the alternative is also a disaster. The rock is climate change and the hammer is the need for petroleum and natural gas.

            Scientists and environmentalists tell us we must get away from fossil fuels and hope we can keep the Earth from getting too hot destroying not only our way of life but life itself. We know the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers are melting which will raise the oceans over 200 feet flooding most of the world’s major cities.

            The only way to prevent this disaster is to quickly reduce our dependence on carbon dioxide and methane. It will take thousands of years for what is already dumped by humans into the air to fall back to the surface. Science is working to find a way to reduce that amount faster.

            However our problem is we want to replace the power plants, vehicles, and other uses with renewable energy and nuclear power. Currently the power source for vehicles and storage batteries is lithium which will be depleted by the end of the century if we don’t recycle. The current cost to replace batteries on any electric vehicle is several thousand dollars and should be done within ten years. In addition the capacity of the battery could have declined 30% of its original capacity. Relying on wind and solar during windless cloudy days will overtax community storage facilities. The current and anticipated use of nuclear plants won’t make up for the loss.

            If we don’t cut back on the pollution and embrace the change, we will die and if we do economies may be destroyed now. Ouch!

            A couple of decades ago the world made stringent targets on cutting carbon emissions. The World’s energy production and usage was basically calm and predictable. In the United States a new nuclear plant was being built while a few were in the planning stage of being retired. Coal plants were being scrapped and replaced by natural gas fired ones. The automotive industry was starting to design electric vehicles and reducing emissions on their gasoline engines. Fossil fuel companies were still saying they were not the problem because climate change didn’t exist but had started planning a new future for the companies.

            Now conditions have changed greatly. Now the Russian-Ukrainian War and the pandemic rebound has caused fossil fuel prices to skyrocket because of shortages. Coal prices have quadrupled because some plants here are not closing while others are being restarted. Instead of planning to reduce natural gas production, we are increasing the number of wells and production not for here but to turn into liquefied natural gas (LPG) to be shipped to other continents. Europe depended on Russia for natural gas and oil but now must find other sources for heat and power. That source appears to be the United States causing the rising prices for Americans. Germany was planning on closing all their nuclear plants but now should reconsider and postpone any retirements.

            In spite of the growing demands to cut emissions to save the world from runaway climate change, geo-political considerations and demands have made reduction of carbon emissions in the United States more difficult. Whether this is short term or decades long are unknown.

            As I write this, pictures of the massive F4 tornado that hit Winterset, Iowa are on the television screen. My first thought is of the destruction of Mayfield, Kentucky. This one is basically a winter tornado and rare or at least, it used to be rare. Climate change has upset historical weather data used for projections.

            People don’t realize all that a minor change in the levels of carbon dioxide and methane are doing to day-to-day weather, world climate, and sea levels. Young people today have a base reality different than people of my age. I remember the ground freezing five feet down. I remember temperatures of 20-25 degrees below zero and trying not to freeze my lungs. During the last couple decades seldom have I felt a few degrees below freezing and the ground froze only a few inches.

            I remember ice breakers trying to cut through the arctic ice cap in the summer. Now ice breakers can get between the northern land masses and the thick ice of the cap in winter. I remember seeing glaciers in glaciers in Glacier National Park in the early 1950s. Now they are almost all gone. Melting of the world’s glaciers is raising the ocean levels around the world. By the end of this century many o the world’ cities will be flooded or diked as a temporary stop-gap measure.

            Fifty-one years ago I was studying the projection for life on Earth. We knew the two most important factors were global warming and population growth. We knew CO₂ was going to raise the planets temperature causing the climate bands to shift toward the Poles. It would cause the glaciers to melt and raise the ocean levels. This would cause massive permanent flooding of coastal cities and portions of many states. A 300 foot increase impacted food production. Increasing need to energy would increase the CO₂ levels and increase temperatures causing further disruption.

            At that time the population was a sustainable 3.5 billion. The actual numbers have matched projections. Those projections haven’t changed. We are still looking at doubling again within a century. Some optimists said the seas could feed us, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. We have managed to feed the higher income people but those billions at the bottom are going to suffer even more with wider areas becoming unproductive.

            We didn’t consider wars in our discussions on migration. We saw the people in Central America and Mexico crossing our border, and Africans into Europe.

            All of those projections have rung true. What we didn’t consider was anti-science lunacy, mountains of garbage, chemical and plastics damage to the environment, and political denial of facts. We also didn’t consider a loss of life on the magnitude of World War II.

            The future is still very bleak.

            Sometimes knowledge is comforting but this is scary in the extreme. We know the climate is changing and changing rapidly due to increased levels of carbon in the air. The CO₂ we are spewing in the air has been the major cause of the temperature increase by our burning fossil fuels. Some of our damage is from burning natural gas, methane, which reduces the damage to CO₂ levels. Methane is thirty times more damaging than carbon dioxide. We bring up methane from deep underground and animals create some, but the growing release is from gas well leakage and the thawing of the tundra. We are working to stop the well leakage but with each passing day thousands of megatons from the melting tundra are released blocking the radiant heat from escaping.

            The damage we have caused is melting the Greenland glacier and some of the Antarctic glaciers. This plus heat expansion of the oceans is going to raise the oceans over thirty feet flooding the world’s coastal cities and hinterlands displacing over two billion people. The loss of all the world’s glaciers could raise the level to cover all of Florida, Louisiana, and several eastern states. The droughts and floods will increase in number and severity. Many areas that are now cool in winter will require air conditioning in a few decades.

            We have unintentionally raised the temperature but we have pushed the boulder over the top of the hill and it is starting to take up speed. We are trying to slow it down and probably too late. What we don’t know is how deep is the valley it is rolling into and how wide before the boulder can start rolling up the next hill. Will we still be around?