New information on what we know about how soon and how climate change might kill us all

This actually has a happy ending, MAYBE, if you read through to the end and take action different from what all the current climate activists are talking about. This is what I sent today to some folks I hope will be willing and able to do something: ============================================================ MOST URGENT: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/ward-peter-6323/ The "Save the World" podcast just now, on ocean currents and the threat of human extinction by the worst types of climate risk, was a great dialogue, informative to all of us, even those of us who have worked hard to track these issues for decades with real science. NOTE THE URL above. I call it "urgent", not because it requires urgent action directly in the policy world. Rather... it is about an important radio broadcast COMING SOON. Peter told us that this is a national broadcast going out to millions of people -- with a heavy right-wing tilt, but that is one of the important audiences which needs to understand what is going on. They may also be a good venue for understanding how space technology could play a crucial role in averting these risks. Metta will probably be posting today's discussion soon on her general web site, https://youtube.com/c/ToSaveTheWorld Two main take away points hit ME hardest today: (1) Many people naturally assume that the scenario of death by H2S must be further off in time than sea level rise and whatnot. (Ward has a new book, published in German, on that issue.) "After all, if the PT extinction happened over millions of years, shouldn't we expect it to take a long time now?" No. Not really. At werbos.com/Atacama.pdf, I even have a slide on how it can be done overnight in an aquarium!!! Microbes can proliferate VERY quickly, once the conditions in the water cross a tipping point. (I think of it as a hypersurface in state space.) We all agreed that knowledge in all aspects of these threats are far less than what they could and should be, with even a moderate NSF-level focused effort on the right questions (though it would help to have Navy or NOAA data on more dimensions of what is happening, BOTH near Arctic AND Antarctic). In point 5 of my proposed action strategy, http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm, I include AQUARIUM LEVEL research to better understand exactly what the tipping point is. What are the conditions of regular chemistry (fertilization) and oxygen level (and maybe T and P, maybe) which separate conditions where the dangerous archaea go nuts and when they don't? And how fast do they go nuts when they do? We also agreed -- Peter can contact Lee Kump, one of the other crucial leading scientists on climate extinction, whose work is essential to all the issues we discussed today. We hope that he AND Peter can discuss these issues for Metta in a future podcast. (2) Stratified ocean is NOT ONLY about Antarctic/Humbolt/Pacific, what I have focused on the most. If the Gulf Stream conks out, it implies BOTH a freezing of Western Europe ("fimbulwinter") but ALSO stratified ocean in that region. Peter Ward, Lee Kump and I have all talked a lot about the "Great Dying", the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, based on H2S and radiation enough to kill every mammal on earth, based on H2S produced by archaea in the deep Pacific Ocean. But there was ANOTHER mass extinction, much smaller, based on H2S from the Arctic and North Atlantic, described in ANOTHER chapter in Ward's older book, Under a Green Sky. That was far less fatal. Large enough to wipe out all the LARGE mammals, but still leaving the mice and rats alone. (Or at least the aardvarks.) Such a small event, bad enough only to wipe out creatures like humans and cows, all over the earth. But since that is coming much sooner than what I have been talking about, maybe we should pay more attention. Most startling to me is how little we know about the TIMELINE for the cutting out of the Gulf Stream, to lead (immediately?) to fimbulwinter and stratified ocean in the local region. I was glad that Metta's guests expert in Arctic waters know that the changes in Gulf Stream due to fresh water pouring out more or less from Greenland is NOT the only (or even main ) effect we need to worry about, even though it was the dominant effect in the past. But when exactly will surface water temperatures, at the prevailing level of saltiness, cross the line to where heating does not increase the density of sea water any more? (That line is where the Gulf Stream conks out, a sharp tipping point coming soon.) HOW SOON? Is it decades or months? Or is it months for part of the year and just a few years for the whole year? We really need to know the exact timing, and control factors. ======================= =========================== By the way, we did discuss timing of what happens when H2S poison starts outgassing. I was very relieved for a few days when I first started reading this literature years ago, and learned that H2S outgassing from the oceans comparable to that of the worst mass extinctions in the past would still take a few thousand years to reach the level deemed as poisonous to humans. But as Peter Ward noted in the discussion today, people like Lee Kump worked out these aspects in some detail many years ago. The FIRST effect is a massive production of H2S byproducts in the atmosphere, some rising to the stratosphere, causing massive acid rain and radiation, within just a few decades, starting immediately. It is no coincidence that books depicting the Great Dying typically show drawings of barren muddy landscapes, trees mainly burned out and washed away. Phenomena like blindness and reproductive behavior disorders usually occur at H2S levels far less than outright death. Coming first to Western Europe? Best of luck. We really need it. Current COP26 work will do nothing to stop this, and the ocean economy mitigation efforts will either make this happen sooner (to EVERYONE) or have little effect; we do not yet know. See the R&D proposed under POINT 4 of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm. But better market design and other types of new technology could prevent these problems at no cost or even a profit, if only the right information could get to the right place? (See points 1 to 3 of http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm, the kind of areas NSF actually hired me to work on from 1988 to 2015!). ============================================ Just for this blog post: I still believe that threats from bad syndromes on the emerging Internet of Things are even bigger and more imminent, but as I think over the Gulf Stream issue, I do start to wonder.Both might even come to a head in my own lifetime, old as I am!! Still, this was a break from new work crucial to the internet side, which requires science much harder than climate. After all, we had convection currents and aquaria in eighth grade science class! It amazes me how little our species seems to have digested that!! But getting the internet straight requires intelligent systems and quantum math beyond what they could teach me even in the Harvard PhD program in Applied math in the 1970s!!