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Sleep Walking Into A Sixth Extinction…

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about science, and the environment. She is staff writer at the New Yorker and now, the second pulitzer prize winning journalist to have joined this podcast.

This podcast does the major themes from her book, The Sixth Extinction. We do the sensitivity of the oceans and how CO2 messes with it. The unreal scale of it all. Understanding 440 million years. Climate change, climate skeptics, then of course, a bit about Elizabeth, her journalism and the rest. 

#162 of ‘The Curious Worldview Podcast’ with Elizabeth Kolbert.

Or a link to the book here.

Forward this email or share this podcast episode with a mate who either doesn’t buy the climate change narrative or is so on board with it he won’t keep it down.

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
Could you put on a timeline the five mass extinction events in Earth's history and if possible, the most significant thing we learned about each one of them.

Elizabeth Kolbert
I don't, I honestly don't think I can do that at this point. The earliest is the end or a vision. That was about 440 million years ago. That seems to have been a climate related event. The.

I think it was the one in the middle, it was the biggest evolved in the end, Permian extinction, I believe that was the third, it's about 250 million years ago. That seems to be also have been associated with a huge release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That was a very, very significant extinction event, came pretty close to wiping out, multicellular life, not quite obviously, because here we are. And the most recent, the fifth, is the, called the KT event, the end cartesius event. And there's a pretty broad consensus at this point that it was caused by an asteroid impact. And the attendant, you know, disasters that ensued from that. And that was 66 million years ago and did in the dinosaurs most famously, but a lot of other very significant groups of organisms, the ammonites, I mean, just a huge number of groups. So that's a sort of a synopsis of the big five mass extinctions, but I've left out two now, which are sort of less well understood, how's that, that's one issue with them.

Ryan
And out of the fifth, when the dinosaurs were eliminated, there were these super meek, absolute bottom of the food chain mammals that almost lived underground, who inherited the earth and became us.

Elizabeth Kolbert
Yes, I think, you know, there are all these questions if you replayed the history of life on earth, how differently would it turn out. And I think there's pretty broad agreement among biologists and palaeontologists that if you replayed it without the end Cretaceous extinction, we would not be here today. There were mammals at the end of the Cretaceous, but as you say, they were kind of little you know, insignificant creatures who are trying to avoid the dinosaurs, trying to avoid getting eaten, scurrying around, not very big. And for whatever reason, and this reason is not well understood, they survived this extinction event and the dinosaurs did not. The non-avian dinosaurs did not. So now we have, you know, birds and mammals, but no dinosaurs.

Ryan
And as you point out, it's like to the best of our knowledge, what are the biggest visibility gaps in us drawing that line between those tiny little mammals and us.

Elizabeth Kolbert
Oh, well, there's, you know, there's 66 million years of evolution there, obviously, and, you know, we do have now many, you know, hominin species that may or may not have been our direct ancestors, but we do see over that time, you know, we get primates, we get primates pretty early on, maybe, you know, 50 million years or so ago, and then from there we see the evolution to our ancestors or creatures who are like our ancestors, you know, starting our ancestral line diverged from chimps, let's say around six million years ago, I believe. So, you know, we do have obviously gaps. We don't know who are, even who are direct, who humans are directly descended from, which species, but we have a lot of information on how these sort of proto-humans, what they were, what they looked like and how they lived.

Ryan
You mentioned the first mass extinction was 440 million years ago. As a journalist, a communicator, have you figured out a good way to explain that?

Elizabeth Kolbert
Well, 440 million years ago is a long, long time ago, and the world was very different, very different place. But it wasn't completely unrecognizable to humans. And one of the, I think, important messages that we have is that, you know, there is everything that is alive today had to have come through all of these mass extinction events. So had something that turned out to be, you know, the ancestral mammal and we don't know what that is, we don't know what that creature is, you know, not come through that extinction event, we wouldn't be here. So that, I don't know if that brings it home to people, but it suggests how everything is connected through the history of life, back towards our last common ancestor of all life, which we haven't figured out exactly what it was, it was presumably some microscopic organism. We are all connected on this tree of life…

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.