Imagine a world with no ice, plagued with extremes dust storms, falling crops production, deadly heat waves acidic oceans, sea level at its maximum and the depletion of atmospheric oxygen and saturation of CO2 on a global scale resulting in the extinction of animals and humans. No, I´m not trying to describe a 2014 Hollywood science fiction film “Interstellar” starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathawaym, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine, set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive extinction and a group of astronauts have to travel through a wormhole in search of a new home; But in reality these extreme dangerous environments truly existed 55 million years ago and now are about to exist again.

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In deed a report of 594 paleontological records published on the August 2018 Jinan University Journal Science suggested that without a fast reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are at risk to transform back to these dangerous environments again. Connor Nolan, the University of Arizona graduate student who led the analysis warned that humanity’s ignorance, idleness and “business as usual” negligent attitude will unleash the same conditions of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 55.5 million years ago in the Cenozoic Era when massive carbon injection into the atmosphere caused global temperatures to rise between 5°C and 8°C. In deed the amount of carbon released during this period, was 0.2 gigatonnes per year (at peaks 0.58 gigatonnes) however today humans add about 10 gigatonnes (10 Billion tons) per year producing the same kind of carbon isotope spike researchers has found in 55 million year old rocks. Also model simulations of peak carbon addition to the ocean-atmosphere system indicated a probable release range of 0.3 to 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon per year (Pg C/yr) which is much slower than today’s observed rate of carbon emissions. But most concerning is that one of the possible individual causes of the PETM, 55 million years ago may be already unfolding again today in the Arctic Ocean where huge quantities of methane may be erupting from the seafloor of the East Siberian Sea and entering the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean. In 2010, Natalia Shakhova a team member of the Swedish/Russian/US Arctic Ocean Investigation of Climate-Cryosphere-Carbon Interactions program (SWERUS-C3) estimated an accumulated methane potential for the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf alone to be about 500Gt (500 Billion tons) of organic carbon in the permafrost warning that the release of up to 50 Gt of hydrate store was highly possible for abrupt release at any time.

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According to findings published this year in the scientific journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences by an international team of scientists who track the data on the oceans temperature since 1958, last year was the hottest for the planet's oceans and the top five years of ocean heat have come in the last five years. The study concluded that over 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases gets absorbed in the ocean making it one of the best, if not the best indicator for an incontrovertible proof that the Earth is warming. Scientists also concluded that there’s oxygen from ocean phytoplankton in every breath we take and believe that this plants contribute between 50 to 85 percent of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. A study of ocean plankton led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics (specializing in ecological mathematics) from the University of Leicester’s Department of Mathematics has shown that an increase in the water temperature of the world’s oceans of around 6°C (which some scientists predict could occur as soon as 2100), could stop oxygen production. Direct measurements has also shown that oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have been falling rapidly for the past fifty years as well as the oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere that has been dropping at higher rates (2 to 4 times) than just the amount of CO2  increasing from burning fossil fuels and accelerating since 2002-2003. The paper Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics under the Climate Change was published in late 2015 in the Journal Applied Mathematics. To put the ocean phytoplankton crisis into a terrestrial perspective in each 5 year span over the past 50 years an equivalent amount of ocean green plant life and photosynthesis has been eradicated as if an entire Amazon Rainforest were cut down. So in the past 50 years we have eradicated the equivalent to 10 entire Amazon Rainforests while the world is full of alarm and concern about the present state of the Amazon because it has suffered a loss of just 20% of its trees. Petrovskii have explained that Global warming has been a focus of attention of science and politics for about two decades now. A lot has been said about its expected disastrous consequences; perhaps the most notorious is the global flooding that may result from melting of Antarctic ice if the warming exceeds a few degrees compared to the pre-industrial level. However, it now appears that this is probably not even close to the biggest danger that the warming can cause to  humanity with the depletion of atmospheric oxygen on a global scale that will likely trigger mass mortality of animals and humans.

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Now as these events keep unfolding, the climate target that governments have agreed on is not even close to being achieved and by 2050 the global median temperature may increase up to 5°C and no 3°C as it was thought before and the 2°C agreed target that we are failing to reach is not a safe limit and even if we were to get rid of fossil fuels immediately, but continue to use traditional methods of animal agriculture at the current scale, by 2030 we may still significantly exceed the limit of carbon dioxide need to stay below 2 °C.

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Whether this is going to happen in 80 or 200 years, the question still is if we are going to do something about now that we still on time to cut carbon emissions or we are going to continue with our ignorance, idleness and denial attitude in favor of a high emissions scenario which now predicts temperature increases of 5°C by 2050.  

 

It can definitely be done! Is possible and most important we still have the time to do it.