"A Climate Of Unparalleled Malevolence" - The Permian Extinction And How Deeply The Rate Of CO2 Output Matters

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While the heat devastated life at the poles, the Earth’s searing midsection had become plainly unearthly. As CO2 sent global temperatures soaring, the ocean in the tropics became as hot as “very hot soup”, perhaps sufficiently hot, even, to power outlandish 500mph “hypercanes” that would have laid waste to the coasts. In the continental interiors, the temperature would have leaped even further off the charts. In the planet’s most miserable hour, much of its surface came to resemble less Earth as we know it than the feed from a lander probe on some hopeless and barren exoplanetary outpost. Earth, in its darkest hour, was losing its Earthiness. In fact, the postapocalyptic ocean was so vacant that carbonate reefs all over the world came to be built again in the recovery not by animals such as the archaic corals and lamp shells that were driven extinct, but by calcified mounds of bacterial slime.

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Now let’s pull back from the brink. However similar to this era our modern experiment on the planet might first appear, it’s worth acknowledging, even stressing, that the end-Permian climate catastrophe was truly, surpassingly bad. And on a scale unlikely ever to be matched by humans. Upper estimates for how much carbon dioxide the fossil-fuel-burning Siberian Traps erupted, ranging up to 120,000 gigatons, defy belief. Even lower estimates, of say 30,000 gigatons, constitute volumes of CO2 so completely ridiculous that matching it would require humans to not only burn all the fossil fuel reserves in the world, but then keep putting ever more carbon into the atmosphere for thousands of years. Perhaps by burning limestone for fun on an industrial scale for generations, even as the biosphere disintegrates. As it is, industrial civilisation could theoretically generate about 18,000 gigatons of CO2 if the entire world pulled together on a nihilistic, multicentennial, international effort to burn all the accessible fossil fuels on Earth.

But while the sheer volume of CO2 generated by the Siberian Traps dwarfs our present and future output, that total was achieved over tens of millennia. What is alarming, and why it’s worth talking about the Siberian Traps in the same breath as industrial civilisation, is that even in comparison with those ancient continent-spanning eruptions, what we’re doing now seems to be unique. It turns out that the focused, highly technological effort to find, extract and burn as much of the world’s fossil-fuel reservoir as is economically feasible, as fast as possible, has been extremely prodigious at getting carbon out of the crust – even compared to the biggest LIPs in Earth history. (Ed. - LIP - Large Igneous Province - as in the Siberian or Deccan traps). In fact, the best estimate is that we’re emitting carbon perhaps 10 times faster than even the mindless, undirected Siberian volcanoes that brought about the worst mass extinction ever.

This matters because it’s all about the rate. There’s almost no amount of carbon you can pump into the atmosphere that, given enough time, Earth couldn’t buffer itself against. Volcanic CO2 is supposed to enter the system. Without it, none of this works: the climate wouldn’t be habitable, life would run out of raw material, and oxygen would run out. But everything in moderation. To maintain its homeostasis, the planet continuously scrubs CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans so that it doesn’t build up and cook the planet. But this process is very slow on a human timescale. It buries this CO2 in coals, oil and gas deposits, and, most importantly, ocean sediments that turn to carbonate rock over millions of years. When more modest-sized eruptions inject a massive slug of CO2 to the atmosphere, threatening to overwhelm this process, the Earth has several emergency handbrakes.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/19/a-climate-of-unparalleled-malevolence-are-we-on-our-way-to-the-sixth-major-mass-extinction