Ten Years After: Extinction

Captivated by global warming and shortly before I called it cli-fi, I researched and reported the myriad ways life on Earth could die. Few were more terrifying than hydrogen sulfide.

The paleontologist and extinction author(ity) Peter Ward and I discussed that particularly nasty catastrophe, and many others, including methane hydrates and more, in the article below. Long ago, when we had a better chance.

In the last ten-plus years, I have studied and reported on the fearsome kinship of the climate crisis and extinction with regularity, as the exponological constant — too slow, too wrong, too often — hung darkly in our background like a grim reaper. And I have learned some valuable, hard lessons.

There is zero good news when it comes to what we are currently doing — to say nothing of what we haven’t done, which goes back centuries — about the climate crisis and extinction. And the bill has finally come due. How much we pay is still up for debate, but it’s probably the difference between too much and everything we have.

Catch up with what I have reported so far on the climate crisis and extinction below, and into the beyond. It would be worth writing books about it, if I didn’t want to kill what tress we have left.