The Medea Hypothesis: Is Multicellular Life (i.e., us) ultimately suicidal?

[villager]

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That book, The Medea Hypothesis, posits not one but five hydrogen sulfide extinction events, including the Great Dying, throughout Earth's history. Going further, it flips the Gaia hypothesis on its head by suggesting -- with increasing persuasion, given our current climate crisis of too much carbon dioxide in the air and too little oxygen in the oceans -- that Earth is not seeking an optimal physical and chemical environment for its life.

In fact, Ward argues, its multicellular life is actually suicidal in nature, whose doom will eventually return Earth to the microbes that have dominated most of its history.

Although the truth probably lies somewhere between Gaia and Medea, Ward seems to be right about one thing: Hydrogen sulfide is an unheralded executioner.

"If ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of hydrogen sulfide," Ward wrote in a Scientific American clarion call titled "Impact from the Deep."Virtually no form of life on the earth was safe."

Ward -- who has also written the books Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future; Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe; and the forthcoming Our Flooded World -- concludes his Scientific American piece with the obvious question: Could it happen again?

All the pieces seem to be moving into place. Global warming is a runaway train, carbon dioxide levels are exponentially rising, and oceans are subsequently losing oxygen. There are even hydrogen sulfide blooms being found in Namibia and other places where industrial pollution is spilling waste into the water.

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Ward says that the Obama administration has been cool to the possibility of anoxic oceans and the various hydrogen terrors that lie in wait on its floors or its chemical processes.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/140912/thanks_to_our_fossil_fuel_addiction,_we_may_be_setting_ourselves_up_for_a_catastrophic_natural_event