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Under a Green Sky: Global Warming,
The Mass Extinctions of the Past,
and What They Can Tell Us
About Our Future
by Peter D. Ward
2007, Smithsonian Books
242 pp., $26.95, hardbound
Green is my favorite color, so naturally I was drawn to the bottle-green skyscape on this book’s cover. A green sky might be a nice change after eons of cerulean, I thought. Well, I’m here to tell you that Ward is not talking about a lovely lime-green sky. He’s talking about “vomitous” green.
We all know about the asteroid that struck Earth 65 million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs and a large percentage of life on this planet. Scientists loved this theory and attempted to apply similar catastrophic strikes to every other mass extinction. But evidence does not readily support rapid extinction in any era but the Cretaceous; other extinctions took longer and came in waves. For example, the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, which Ward calls “The Mother of All Extinctions,” killed 90 percent of all species in several pulses over perhaps 165,000 years.
Pieces of scientific knowledge are coming together to give us a clearer picture of mass extinctions, thanks in part to research and theory contributed by Ward, which he happily acknowledges here. According to him, almost all mass extinctions in the history of life on this planet are greenhouse extinctions caused by rapid climate change and “really fast” global warming. Methane and carbon dioxide are triggers. You probably know where I’m going with this. To make a long story short: “The next two centuries will be an interesting time.”
Despite occasional melodramatic prose and some convoluted explanations, Ward contributes an interesting book to the growing genre of scary true science. If for no other reason than to nip this genre in the bud, we should stop driving our cars.
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