I recently covered a CBS 60 Minutes segment featuring humanity-hating Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and other doom-casters who asserted we were poised to experience the dreaded “Sixth Mass Extinction event.”
To counter this narrative, I found an article about a scan of a section of the North Atlantic that revealed the remnants of a massive pulse of hot rock that initiated a rapid climate warming event 56 million years ago. [Emphasis mine.]
The climate event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), warmed the already-hot climate of the time by about 5.6° C due to a jump in atmospheric CO2. Levels of that greenhouse gas rose from about 1,120 parts per million to about 2,020 ppm—much higher than today’s 417 ppm.Although it didn’t trigger a major extinction, it still exterminated some deep-sea creatures and tropical plants. Scientists want to understand the PETM better, because it’s an example of how the Earth reacted to a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 a bit like we’re currently experiencing, albeit starting from a hot, ice-free climate.Although the cause of PETM has been debated since it was discovered in the 1990s, more and more evidence has accumulated that points to massive quantities of CO2 and methane emitted due to volcanic activity in the North Atlantic as the primary cause. This activity created what’s now known as the North Atlantic Igneous Province— the same kind of enormous volcanic phenomenon linked to climate disruption and extinctions at other times in Earth’s past, like the end-Triassic, the end-Permian, the early Jurassic, and others.
Let’s pull these paragraphs apart. So, during an era with 2.7 more carbon dioxide than today, the planet was lush, and lifeforms thrived.
Due to a pulse of hot magma, that carbon dioxide level jumped to almost five times what we have today…and there was no mass extinction. Yes, a few deep-sea creatures took a hit. But the geologic record is filled with Darwinian losers.
Finally, 56 million years ago, mankind evolved to the fuzzball stage, so it could not impact the gas levels.
The fossilized remains of a tree-dwelling fuzzball smaller than a mouse are giving scientists a “unique” glimpse of how one group of primates looked shortly after it diverged from the line that would later become monkeys, apes, and humans.The remains, unearthed in China and estimated at 55 million years old, are some 7 million years older than the next oldest primate fossils, according to a team of scientists describing the discovery in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
I bring this up because anti-fossil fuel activists such as Helena Gualinga are being featured at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
The 20-year-old Indigenous youth climate advocate is speaking on several panels at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, sharing the stage with the likes of John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and IKEA CEO Jesper Brodin….At Davos this year, Gualinga wants to see “a real commitment to climate action.””There’s big oil and big mining attending, and I think they really need to commit to phase out from fossil fuels,” she said.”It’s not like COP, where they can sign something,” Gualinga said. “But I think it’s an opportunity for the private sector to show their commitment without the pressure of the binding commitments that governments have.”Gualinga added that taking action on climate is not as easy as making a campaign about sustainability or supporting a handful of small projects.”I think, unfortunately, we’re just seeing more and more and more greenwashing. In one way or another, every company now has had a campaign that is green or sustainable, or, you know, something that makes them look like they care about the planet.”
And let’s not forget about long-time climate scammer, former Vice President Al Gore
If the participants at Davos were seriously interested in preventing extinctions, they would target the Chinese fishing fleet.
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