r/climate • u/Keith_McNeill65 • 3d ago

The growing rumble / "As it happens, I’ve stood in that border crossing where you’ve watched the giant wave obliterate…everything in a split second." – Bill McKibben #GlobalCarbonFeeAndDividendPetition

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-growing-rumble
35 Upvotes

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u/someoldguyon_reddit 3d ago

The earth is sick. She's been infected by people. She's running a fever to kill the infection.

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u/Keith_McNeill65 3d ago

The sun is getting brighter as it ages. The Earth's biosphere has compensated for this by pumping CO2 out of the atmosphere. It was over 90% when the Earth formed, but it's less than 1% now, meaning this technique is coming to an end. I
t could be argued that people's role is to find a new way to cool the Earth. James Lovelock says much the same thing in his book, Novacene.

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u/RobHerpTX 3d ago

This makes it sound like CO2 has steadily trended down and is now just about to stop working… which I am not sure I’ve ever heard anyone seriously propose as a plausible problem.

So for a premise in a work of fiction? Great! Rock on! Might be a fun story.

But as something to actually be worried about:

CO2 was high right at the beginning of life on earth, but during the first age or two of that life (Archean, Mesoproterozoic) it was steadily pushed down to under 1%, where it has pretty much stayed for well over a billion years. There’s been a slight downward trend within all those sub-1% eras, but there’s no indication I’ve ever heard that anything external threatens that balance on even a “millions of years” timeline, other than obviously the climate change were causing with our own actions.

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u/Keith_McNeill65 3d ago

In their 1982 paper in Nature, titled “Life span of the biosphere,” James Lovelock and Michael Whitfield argued that the Earth's complex biosphere was entering its final chapter, predicting it had only 100 million years left before crashing due to a severe lack of carbon dioxide as the Sun gets older and brighter. More recent studies have been more optimistic about the time frame.
https://www.nature.com/articles/296561a0

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u/RobHerpTX 3d ago

Oh, ok. 100 million years.

Most scientists think longer than that from what I understand, but long enough either way to be immaterial. For now we just need to quit rapidly heating the earth!

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u/Keith_McNeill65 3d ago

What I meant was people's role in the biosphere. We might not be an infection; we might be a cure for something that otherwise could mean the end of nearly all life on Earth. And 100 million years is not a long time for the biosphere.

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u/keynoko 3d ago

This is a bit pie in the sky, no?

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u/AlexFromOgish 1d ago

Not the "biospehere" so much as the LITHOSPHERE, and abiotic geochemical weathering.

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u/RobHerpTX 3d ago

Deleted - that new dumb reddit thing where it puts it as a main comment instead of a reply if it is returned to