Breathe or count money…choices. A particularly relevant meme for today.

I’ve been posting about near-term human extinction for several months now–ever since I became aware of the work of Dr. Guy McPherson. I was acquainted with his theories after the death of Michael C Ruppert, a fabulous hot mess of truth and conspiracy who told it like he saw it and had some amazing insights. I’ve blogged about this a bit already, so if you want to catch up, you might go here. There’s also information about McPherson’s planned tour in NYC here. And you can also catch my Sex And Politics interview here.

And now I’m watching the stars. I’m reading the tea leaves. I’m looking for evidence to confirm (or dispute) the predictions that McPherson and other scientists are making. And the headlines are coming fast and furious now that I know what I’m looking for. First, there’s the articles I’ve already posted. And there’s Guy’s statements such as this, where he ties economic failure and climate failure together. But Dr. McPherson isn’t the only one looking for the signs now. Thanks to warmer winters in the temperate zones(or winters where cold does not last long enough to wipe out parasitic species), there are billions of extra bark-beetles surviving the winter and lunching on trees. Whole forests are now at risk. Trees are the lungs of the planet, converting c02 to oxygen. And they provide a big chunk of the world’s oxygen as well as a significant amount of mitigation of overland heating. Here’s a relevant quote:

Ahead of us we have the possible destruction of forests, vital in maintaining oxygen levels necessary for life, in the control of carbon dioxide, and in water cycle balances. Notably, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere has dropped from 35 to 21 percent from prehistoric times to now, and the carbon dioxide has increased in part by the human growth pollution in cities with high oxygen levels, which often comprises only 15 percent of total air. So at this rate it is obvious that in these cities we will render the “air” unbreathable. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a botanist, says, “the abuse of forests and pollution of the oceans has caused them to produce only half the oxygen (they produced) 10,000 years ago.”

Loss of millions of trees from the world’s forests (and thus millions of tons of oxygen) is a bad thing because the other major supplier of world oxygen (responsible for half of it) is phytoplankton. And now, thanks to higher ocean temperatures (and resulting ocean acidification), phytoplankton are dying. There has been a 40% decline in plankton since 1950. Since plankton are also the bottom of the ocean’s food chain, that’s not a small thing–what’s going to feed the Krill and other food sources that supply the ocean food chain?

Is that how the end comes? Animal life doesn’t have enough oxygen count in the air to sustain life? Or will it be something else?

Perhaps we should all be thinking about the possibility that we have short time left on this planet. Scientists are. In a recent article Dahr Jamail, who writes about the depression overcoming many in the climate science business, quotes Professor Camille Parmesan, whose work work focuses on the current impacts of climate change on wildlife:

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan said in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report. “It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again,” she said in reference to an ocean reef she had studied since 2002, “because I just know I’m going to see more and more of the coral dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae.”

There was a point in my formative years when I was a follower of a Jesus Freak group that was part of the Maranatha Crusade back in the 1970’s. One of the things that adherents used to spend lots of time doing is looking for ‘signs’ of the Second Coming. There’s a danger in looking for signs of impending crisis–you tend to view everything through a filter of gloom and doom. It certainly doesn’t make you popular with family and friends when you have fallen into this pattern of thinking. And you always face the strong possibility that you are wrong. My friends really believed we were living in the End Times and The Late Great Planet Earth was compelling prophecy about our future.  And now, forty years later, I’m once again faced with dire prophecies, though these are based on science and not faith. And the good news for Christians from Dr. McPherson (such as it is) comes here—prayer is the only thing that can save us at this point.