Environment

When Life Kills Life

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I thought the major extinctions of life in Earth’s history had mainly been caused by wildcards like asteroid strikes and massive volcanic eruptions. But it turns out that the biggest wildcards may have been delivered by life itself. I had almost no science education at high school, but I did eventually hear in my thirties, I guess, that our oxygen on this planet was created by photosynthesis. Before living creatures developed that ability this was an oxygen-free world. When the oxygen was first produced by living beings, it was a terrible pollutant, and most creatures then existing died.

Environment

Now for the good news

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For someone who is so steeped in the horrors of what we are doing to our environment, Roger Gottlieb is amazingly upbeat and positive. I loved the passion in his review of Poisoned Profits in the current Tikkun and I expected an angry man on our Phone Forum last night. Instead I heard him say that the greatest good news story of recent decades has been the rise of religious environmentalism. Listen to it here. [Roger Gottlieb is professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts.

Environment

This is Terrifying

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ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 degrees C.
Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. That’s the start of an article in New Scientist that I read two months ago that has haunted me most days since (see the map better here, but you have to subscribe). I have read a fair amount about global warming, in a lay person’s sort of way, but when I read that James Lovelock, the Gaia Hypothesis guy, said that most of humanity would be gone by the end of the century I thought he was just an old man going a bit off his rocker. I was also so deeply affected by doom scenarios in my twenties, none of which turned out to materialize, that I had become skeptical of new ones.