collapse will accelerate global warming<\/a>. Could be, although I doubt it would accelerate the extinction crisis, environmental decay, or myriad other predicaments in which we’re enmeshed. And I can hardly imagine a situation worse than the one we’re in — except, of course, the forthcoming climate-driven extinction event — and yet we add to the worsening predicament every day.<\/p>\nBy what mechanisms does climate change become climate chaos? Rapidly increasing temperature, along with rapidly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has two primary impacts of note. Firstly, the resulting ocean acidification is likely to kill nearly every marine species, including phytoplankton (i.e., food and half the planet’s oxygen). Secondly, the resulting extremes in temperature likely will kill nearly all land plants (i.e., food and the other half of Earth’s oxygen). Additional concerns include wet-bulb temperatures high enough to induce death in mammals (the large-bodied ones will go first, and the tropics will be impacted before the temperate regions), loss of planetary ice (never mind albedo, I’m thinking about fresh water throughout the world’s temperate regions), and the millions of tiny organisms comprising living soil that will be unable to migrate rapidly enough to keep up with changes in temperature and moisture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Audio I was interviewed for The Refreshment Center’s radio show on Friday, 1 February 2013. The interview is embedded here, although most of my interview was lost to a techno-disaster. I’m scheduled for another visit in a few weeks. ______________ Video Below I include two short clips used in the making of Michael Sosebee’s forthcoming…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[966,788,959,77,380,76,87,15,38,515,33,858,965,967,826,31,913,968],"post_series":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4391"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4448,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391\/revisions\/4448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4391"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=4391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}