Peter Ward: “Oceans - What’s the Worst that Can Happen?”
Episode 08
February 23, 2022
(Conversation Recorded on October 23, 2021.)
On this episode, we meet with author and paleobiologist Peter Ward.
Ward helps us catalogue the various risks facing Earth’s oceans, how the Atlantic Ocean’s currents are slowing due to warming, what happened in Earth’s history when ocean currents stopped, and why a reduction in elephant poaching is contributing to the destruction of coral reefs.
About Peter Ward
Peter Ward is a Professor of Biology and Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. He is author of over a dozen books on Earth's natural history including On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions; Under a Green Sky; and The Medea Hypothesis, 2009, (listed by the New York Times as one of the “100 most important ideas of 2009”). Ward gave a TED talk in 2008 about mass extinctions.
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
00:45 - Peter Ward website and books
03:00 - We need a little bit of CO2, but it’s easy to have too much CO2
04:20 - Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (co-written with Dan Brownlee)
04:40 - Excessive heat and mortality
05:12 - Volcanic activity responsible for past CO2 spikes
05:40 - Previous mass extinctions
05:57 - Non-animal mass extinctions
07:18 - Uneven atmospheric heating
08:00 - Ocean currents and how they work
08:51 - Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S)
09:12 - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
10:25 - Fossil fuel availability
10:50 - Under a Green Sky
11:50 - The Gulf Stream
13:22 - What lives at the bottom of the ocean?
15:13 - Shallow ocean grasses and climate
19:11 - Oxygen in the ocean has dropped 2%
20:20 - North pacific ocean increasing acidity
20:48 - Billions of sea creatures died during summer ‘21 heat wave
23:11 - 30% of houses in Seattle have air conditioning
23:50 - Positive feedback loop
25:00 - We are highly attuned to smell hydrogen sulfide
25:45 - 400 ppm of hydrogen sulfide will kill a human
28:25 - Fred Hutchinson Institute
28:50 - Warm blooded animals are more sensitive to H2S than cold blooded
29:45 - Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has slow 15-20% in the last 30-40 years
31:56 - We’ve lost 15% of the amazon, if we lose 20% it will tip into a carbon source
34:10 - In the last 20,000 years sea level rise has gone up 450 ft
34:30 - How many of the world’s ports are built 3ft above sea level
34:52 - Wet bulb temperature + *Factual Correction - Higher wet bulb temperatures do not prevent sweating, it makes sweating less effective by preventing evaporation
36:15 - What temperature can mammals still reproduce at
40:10 - Eric Steig
41:48 - Social media algorithms encourage polarization and extremes
44:25 - 40% of students at the University of Minnesota are using some mental health aid
45:39 - A switch to renewables completely will not fix all of our issues
45:45 - The energy Americans use outside of the body is 100x the amount they eat
46:08 - 20% of Americans lost everything during COVID
48:13 - The Flooded Earth
48:41 - Northern Europe most at risk for sea level rise
49:46 - Rice is the number one food source for the largest portion of people
49:53 - Bangladesh rice crop destruction via salinization
53:31 - Sam Wasser
55:58 - Giant clams are replacing ivory
57:23 - We’ve lost 50% of animals since the late 1960s
57:55 - 5,500 mammal species and 10 million other species we share the earth with
59:07 - Save the Nautilus
1:01:25 - 25 million dollars worth of clams being shipped to China
1:01:49 - Giant clams are extinct in many places
1:03:23 - We’ve underpaid for the main income to our economies
1:03:30 - We can shift away from GDP as measure for success
1:04:49 - Male libido and the exotic trade market
1:06:25 - Pangolin scales second most trafficked item
1:12:10 - Human biases and drives
1:12:31 - We are energy blind
1:13:00 - Emergence
1:13:40 - Elephants have evolved to be tuskless because of the ivory trade