Peter Ward: We’ve entered the Age of Mass Extinction – Goodbye fish and a whole lot more

By Scott Thill
8 August 2011 Mass extinction is finally fighting its way back into the news cycle, thanks to recent scary reports on climate change from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, the United Nations Environment Program and the July issue of Science. But University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward has been there, done that, and he’s still depressed as hell. “I wrote a book in 1994 called The End of Evolution: A Journey in Search of Clues to the Third Mass Extinction Facing Earth that said, within in a decade or two, we’d be seeing these monumental destructions, and people laughed at it,” Ward explained by phone from Seattle. “I wrote a book just last year about sea-level rise called The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps, saying that things look pretty desperate for the next 60 to 80 years and got almost no reviews. Luckily, I’m not going to be alive to see the worst of it. But the sad thing is that it’s horrible to be right, just horrible. Somebody gave me the foresight to see what’s coming, and I don’t like it.” […] His understandable professional and personal concerns about mass extinction continue. This summer, he’s been hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to journey to the Philippines and the remote Pacific Ocean to study the mysterious cephalopod Nautilus, a living fossil, over 500 million years old, that just might be reaching the end of its expansive evolutionary rope. “If you want a canary in the coal mine, how about one that has lasted 500 million years?” Ward asked. “If it’s going under because of global extinction, then we really have to wake up. This is the toughest creature on the planet, so if it can go, anything can go.” […] ST: The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) put out a report claiming that ocean life is in line for a mass extinction of some sort. You’ve studied extinction events. What’s your take? PW: What we’re mostly looking at are fisheries, because they have the best scientific sampling. People want to sample fish populations, so we know where they are and how to catch them, and we have a good idea what the stocks are. And it almost looks like everything is OK, except for the fact that all the damn fish we eat are going extinct. And of course they’re going extinct, because we’re taking them out. That should not be a big surprise. Neither should the other aspect, which is that the human population just keeps rising faster and faster. And habitat destruction has always been the No. 1 cause of plant and small animal extinction. […] ST: So how do you see climate change unfolding in the next 50 years? PW: Unless we do something about human population, I doubt we will be able to do anything. The thing is, we’re good enough at fixing diseases and feeding ourselves that we’re not going to lose 20 to 40 percent of the human population. But if we could drop human population back down to four billion, we’d have a fighting chance. But we can’t. I truly believe that we’re heading to 10 or 11 billion by the end of this century, at the latest. We’re increasing longevity with wonderful medical advances. But people don’t realize that by increasing lifespans a decade or more around the world, we’re decreasing the death rate as the birth rate keeps rising. So we’re in a runaway human population situation and have been since the ’80s and ’90s. The scary thing is that we’ve got an intersection of declining freshwater and too many people. And the freshwater decline is due to global warming, which is raising the snow levels in the mountains. California is a prime example. When it gets to the point that it rains all winter in the Sierra Nevada, what do you have when the hot summer arrives and you need that water for irrigation? When there’s nothing to melt anymore by March or April, you’ve got a desert. So the agriculture of the San Joaquin Valley is in deep trouble from decreased freshwater and soil that is turning salty because of sea-level rise. This is the case all over the planet. The lowest lying lands have the richest soil, and these are the lands that rising sea level is going to salinize. […] ST: Although extreme weather variation is a climate change no-brainer, the party line for the Republican base is that snow of any kind is evidence that global warming is a hoax. PW: It just drives me crazy. Why do they think we’re getting more snow? Because there is more water in the atmosphere! And why is that? Oh yeah, it’s warmer. If we could teach science in school, these guys would get a clue. These are enormous wet-air masses that are anomalously produced in winter, and work their way across North America and push up against the Arctic cold. Of course it turns to snow! It’s more water than has been in that area than ever before. […]