Sea level has risen 450 feet in the last 20 thousand years, and it will continue to rise. Humans are no longer able to sweat to cool themselves at high temperatures. The wet bulb temperature is decreasing around the world meaning a lot more places are going to be physically uninhabitable as climate change and temperature warms.
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