The Soapbox: The horrid possibility of a sixth extinction event

In the blizzard of messages storming through conventional and social media, a constant drumbeat is growing louder and faster. It’s about climate change.

Everyone is aware of the fires and floods and dire predictions for the future. In fact, the “news” has become a white noise for many as we try to distance ourselves from the human suffering occurring in everyday of today’s world.

Another fact, one which is barely understood or accepted, is that the immediacy of the pending crisis is threatening not only the grandchildren, but our children and ourselves, as well. The extinction of all living things is pretty well guaranteed unless our species starts acting now. And, in order to grasp that fully, one needs to understand the full range of factors that are now in play.

Climate change is not just about science and technology. It is more than that.

Over the last 50-plus years, scientists have reported alarming changes to the earth’s climates with mixed reviews. It took a while for a critical mass in the scientific community to accept the climate change phenomenon and it took longer for the political community to pay attention.

Eventually, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came into being and the UN helped produce the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Accord and currently, the COP 26 Key Outcome agreements from the November, 2021 Glasgow conference.

Throughout these developments, government actions failed to halt the increase of greenhouse gases and the UN Secretary General is now proclaiming the Earth is headed for a climate disaster.

There are more than 16 credible, national and international agencies that have been mapping climate change for decades. They have been producing substantive, scientific data, but it seems that scientific data is not enough to convince everyone.

“Climate change” is caused by “global warming”. Global warming is caused by an excess of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (Co2), methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapour.

These gases trap the warm air heated by the sun and generated by nature’s living things. Nature has always produced Co2 and methane, and it stored it through natural processes. This production and storage cycle was carefully balanced until we humans came along.

We added those other gases to Co2, and increased these gases beyond the Earth’s ability for storage as our global populations grew to 7.8 billon. The natural balance of production and storage no longer exists and nature can no longer help us control the volume of greenhouse gases.

Today, most people are aware that things are going badly. News reports of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, melting ice fields, deaths by hyperthermia and killer pollution have become the new normal.

The news is normal, but government intervention is not.

Hurricane Sandy attacked New York City in 2012 to flood subways, destroy homes, vehicles, electrical networks — all to cause approximately $19 billion in damages. Six and half years later, the city announced the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Plan to be completed in 2021. So far, New York City has yet to advance the $900 million needed to reinforce Lower Manhattan's coastal areas with construction to begin in 2022.

After the 2012 devastation, as recurrences were always threatening about 18.8 million people, the work remains to be completed 10 years later.

Sadly, this example of a delayed response to a critical climate threat is being repeated elsewhere. Government responses to climate change are either ineffective or too slow. And how much time is left to the world outside of New York City?

Enter the tipping point. This measure is based on a correlation of reports by climate scientists to predict when the effects of climate change will begin to unravel. The ‘climate change tipping point’ is that point in time when irreversible damage will have been inflicted upon the earth’s ecological systems.

Once past the tipping point, global warming will keep on increasing beyond control. The eventual destruction of the Earth’s ecological systems will then eliminate the Earth’s supply of breathable air and potable water, and critically reduce habitable lands.

These ecological systems include the ice caps, ocean temperatures, levels and currents, forests that generate oxygen while storing Co2, potable water systems, etc. These systems will not break down all at once, but some of them will irrevocably create a cascade of ecological disasters to progressively compound the destruction of the Earth’s living species – including ours.

When will the critical tipping point occur? Climate scientists are reluctant to set an absolute date. In 2020, the scientific journal Nature predicted the tipping point could be triggered in the next two decades.

In that same year, New York City erected its own climate clock to predict an approximate tipping point in seven years – a time frame considerably shorter than a few decades.

The August 2021 IPCC report stated, “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.”

This essentially reported that we already reached the beginnings of the tipping point.

The international climate agreements all point to net-zero emission targets for greenhouse gasses by certain dates that seem to fluctuate with the political will of the conference participants.

What they don’t mention is that net-zero emissions do not eliminate the presence of greenhouse gases immediately. Their elimination can take more than 100 years to clean our air and during this time, much of global warming will continue as nature continues to produce its own Co2 and as we slip more slowly, but inexorably toward extinction.

Can the human species become extinct? Why not? Although, horrible to contemplate, extinctions are a fact of life. Millions of plant and animal species have been extinguished since the birth of Earth, some 4.5 billion years ago. There have been five global extinctions during this time that left Earth almost devoid of all living things. Except for one huge meteorite that killed all the dinosaurs, the other four extinctions were caused by climate changes.

Today, a sixth extinction is being predicted to include human life. The difference with this sixth extinction is that the human species is knowingly bringing it upon itself.

André Clement lives in Greater Sudbury. He is the author of “Evolution to Extinction, a Primer on Global Warming”.

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