Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future
Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future – Review
In UNDER A GREEN SKY, Peter Ward approaches global warming from the captivating view of historical geology and paleontology. Ward notes that when many scientists and the general public discuss global warming and its repercussions for humanity, they tend to place it in the context of CO2 emissions and a broad increase in temperature. Ward wins this discussion and extends it to the various mass extinctions that have plagued the earth over the last few hundred million years. The biggest and baddest extinction of all time was undoubtedly the one that struck at the goal of the Permian, roughly 230 million years ago. Scientists currently think that more than 90 percent of all life, both on land and in the seas, was quickly extinguished. Ward focuses on the different causes of that extinction and on the one that completely wiped out the dinosaurs at the close of the Cenozioc some 65 million years ago. He notes some commonalities. It is true that a massive asteroid struck the earth in the latter case, but he notes that in the Permian extinction and to a smaller extent in the Cenozoic was a witches’ brew of global warming, a belching forth of volcanic toxic gases, the slowing down and eventual end of the Atlantic Ocean conveyer belt of warm currents from the Equator, and largely devastating of all, a change in the chemistry of the oceans themselves from oxygen producing to anaerobic oxygen depletion. Ward believes a dreadful meeting of events that begins with global warming and leads to a sky that is tinged with a permanent green, hence the title. At this point, it is too late for any living species to do no more than to try to burrow into whatever low finely ground hole they can find. What makes UNDER A GREEN SKY so powerful is Ward’s ability to yank the new reader from the happy world of today and metaphorically transport him back to a number of past aeons where the sky was more green than blue. As that reader treads the very earth that is nearly choking under a fierce cloud of choking fumes, he will surely ponder whether history will repeat itself yet one more time even as supposedly clever species like us can foresee such crises still refuse to derail them. UNDER A GREEN SKY is the charge of the decade.