The atlantic meridianal overturning circulation, the amo has already slowed by 15 to 20 % in the last 30 or 40 years. We've lost a 15% of the amazon right now; if we lose 20%, it will irreversibly tip into being a carbon sink and things will die. And i think we're starting to see the first effects of enormous tions of humans flooding places where you can't find fresh water and you're going to die. That's what's going to be increasingly common over the next decades.
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 Earths 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.
For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/08-peter-ward