Peter Brannen: "Deep Time, Mass Extinctions, and Today" | The Great Simplification  

This is another in a long list of brilliant, intelligible, and informative conversations that are so germane to the present moment. Personally I think that the Great Simplification should be an academic requirement for all high school students, politicians, seminarians, and prospective parents. The truth IS out there.

Having watched the changes during my 35 years as a soil scientist, I think the process is more advanced than what many other scientists have suggested. Furthermore, now that the impacts are accelerating in very dangerous ways, I suggest a episode or two on how individuals can learn to evaluate their risks so that they can mitigate them asap.

Hope every human older than 6 yrs gets to hear this discussion in full ASAP! Bravo Peter & Nate🙏

Wow. This guy is a master explainer of these things even though you can tell he might not think so because he comes across with so much humility and open-mindedness. I love'm. Definitely one of Nate's best guests ever. Thank you, Nate.

As an earth scientist close to retirement, it’s great to finally get a global perspective on deep time and historical events & linking it all to our planetary crises. Much needed in many respects.

Information like this is gold. We hear so many different narratives, at least half of them fictional, that it becomes difficult to discern what's real. Thank you SO much for this podcast and this amazing guest. Pure gold. 💕🙏

I watched it twice, the second time while thumbing through Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky". Thanks for this Nate and Peter B!

Thank you from an 81 year old Great Great grandmother. So informative and so easy to follow. Love all these podcasts …

What a wonderful, intelligent and humble guest! Looking forward to the next interview with him!

Another great podcast. Thanks Nate and Peter!

As someone with a lifetime in horticulture and several years study in reforestation and regenerative systems I find Peter to be well versed in the geological and chemistry aspects of earth systems collapse, and spot on about the rate of change being the critical factor for survivability of species. What he doesn’t appear to be aware of is that the threshold is already in the rear view. We’ve already passed dozens of climate tipping points, already entered a period of abrupt climate change. Annual crop yields are decreasing exponentially, every ecosystem on the planet *still living is already in a state of distress or collapse. In fact we’re already losing ecosystems at an alarming rate. Because all the many interconnected interdependent species that make those systems functional are already going extinct- at an alarming rate. What that amounts to, what all the educated studied minds humanity has to offer don’t seem to grasp(I believe because their time is spent staring at screens and hypothesizing instead of interacting with the natural living world, because modern humans no longer have a connection to the living world that affords us life) is very basic, very simple; loss of habitat = loss of species, loss of species = loss of habitat. We can expound infinitely on all we’ve learned, identifying the problems and imagining the solutions.. all the while the super organism is bombing and bulldozing and polluting and gobbling up the last vestiges of human habitat- the living world. Simple!: We save life on Earth because life on Earth is in sum human habitat, or we go extinct. Right on the heels of every other species we ourselves depend on for life. Of course we’re not going to do that, still too busy subjugating all other life so.. farewell my fair-weather friends! May you at least find keen awareness of what your own life depends on before it ends.

Great topic. More on deep time please.💐

Thanks Nate for your covering questions and Pete for your informative responses.....one of the best overall.

Good afternoon Nate and Peter 2024 for me is like being stuck in time for sure. For many crazy reasons. Think we are also experiencing the massive extinction of The Experienced Nurse in these times. Not a good situation for our health nation. Super grateful for you both. Sensemaking brain gym. 💜

Nate Hagens, Sir, thanks a lot for your podcast. You are doing humanity a very great service.

This was a trip. I loved it. Deep time is so interesting. I have yet to read Peter Brannen's book. I will next week. It is great to live in a time with access to these stories. That's something to be thankful for, indeed.

Yup, he said it at the end..."maybe i dont know what I'm talking about." When it comes to our future, this journalist is super high on hopium. I predict he will be very surprised as he actually digs into our current predicament and grasps the immensity of the term "poly-crisis."

I love people who care naturally

Incredible session. Grateful.

"There is some failing in our science communication..." 0:57:10 That is an understatement. There are so many lies on every side that it's impossible for anyone who doesn't make it their full time job to parse the noise to make sense out of it.

If you want to talk about co2 sequestation, then the person you need to interview is a gentleman by the name of Gabe Brown. He wrote a book called Dirt to Soil. He explains that if every farmer and rancher were to do what he has done on his ranch, a whole lot of Co2 would be locked up in the soil and contribute to cooling our planet.

Deep time to me is knowing Wisconsin had two huge mountain ranges that got worn down to the nub. That's deep time.

Fascinating conversation. Thanks guys!

Probably my favourite installment yet. The comment towards the end about nuclear waste in 100,000 years is something i think about a lot. Any nuclear enthusiasts i mention the waste problem too dismiss it as not a problem. But they think short term. With the literal tectonic changes on earth, nuclear waste will be spewed to the surface, leaving parts of the Earth uninhabitable in 100,000 years or so. What a way to treat our distant offspring. Can the nuclear activists address the deep time issue?

Brilliant interview - Peter just sold some books! Well done Nate - your show is amazing and you choose great guests! Thank you💕

What a thorough deep dive into deep time.

Thank you Nate and Peter! I too found it comforting in a strange way to hear that there were such massive changes in the nature of life on earth so many times before in the distant past... And that one of those massive changes was caused by trees?!! So I plan to read your last book Peter, and am looking forward to the next one. Nate, I feel like I should be paying you tuition, I learn so much from these podcasts. And you are bringing in experts that I would probably never come across by myself. If I somehow come in to some riches (right now my husband and I, in our late 60's, are living kind of month to month with a little cushion) those gains will be generously shared with you!!!

Nate, thanks for keeping the heat low in your office. I wear a snow cap at work also to save on heat use.

Really interesting video. LOVE your work Nate!!

Most people don't know this stuff partly because most high schools don't offer earth science classes.

Global Industrial civilization failure‽ I picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue!

I am a geologist, a fairly frequent commenter on your programmes, and very skeptical of the "climate-change" narrative being used to herd us into a dystopian Reset World, for all of the same reasons, Nate, that you asked Peter, IF the problem wasn't couched as "climate-change" but instead as the Carbon Pulse Problem, which is easy to understand how Peter explains it, then, as a result of everything I have learned from Peter on this programme, this the very best programme you have done, and the best argument for why we should all change our lives to minimise the chance of a runaway Carbon Pulse.

Great discussion - thank you. Around 45:10 Peter talks of heat dissipative structures like hurricanes and compares them to life. There is some power in that, but it seems to me to be far from an optimal view of life. Around 1:35:00 Peter talks about working to unite disciplines, and at 1:38:00 about the bizarre series of accidents, and at 1:39:08 about how the society around us is constructed and at 1:40:00 about the importance of alkaline hydrothermal vents to the emergence of life. One of the many bizarre accidents in my life was being in the first undergraduate class on the planet devoted to teaching the theory of plate tectonics (History and Structure of the Earth - at Waikato University in NZ) - when my primary interest was biochemistry and the emergence and structures and systems of life. I now have a definition of life as: Systems capable of searching the space of possible systems for the survivable. Viewing evolutionary history, geological history, through that systems lens; has allowed me to see a lot of things that are not normally seen. So I agree with Peter that alkaline hydrothermal vents seem very probably to be a critical part of the emergence of life; but there is another critical part, that of PCR, which seems very probably to have been driven by temperature change delivered by massive tides (some 100m every 3 hours in that early time when the moon was much closer and the Earth was spinning much faster). It also seems very probable to me that a collision large enough to make a moon is an essential part of initiating plate tectonics - given that we do not seem to see it on Mercury, Venus or Mars. So that seems to be a reasonably big filter - right there. When you view life through that deep time lens, complexity is very slow to emerge. When you look deeply into why, then it becomes clear that it is new levels of cooperation that allow for the emergence and survival of complexity, and that competition tends to drive systems to local minima on the available complexity landscape. The idea that seems to dominate in economic and political circles - that competition is a good that promotes complexity - is wrong - it is a dangerous (potentially terminal) over simplification of something profoundly more complex. Getting cooperation to survive, long term, requires effective mechanisms of cheat detection and mitigation. Arguably cheating systems currently dominate most of our social institutions. And this is a deeply complex subject, and the idea of life as Search for the survivable is deeply, recursively, important. Search has a component that looks like freedom, the ability to go beyond the known. Search also has to develop systems that tend to avoid self terminating vectors in that highly dimensional vector space. Humans deliver a new level of search, beyond the mechanisms of replication with variation. We are exponentially faster and more powerful than any other life form; and our tendency to over simplify, is our greatest danger. Under this definition of life, life is an eternally open system. The degrees of balance and equilibrium we see in it are required to degrees at each level, and at every level, life is eternally exploring conditions at and beyond those boundaries. That appears to be a fundamental part of what it is to be alive. It is not surprising that most over simplify it. To me, there is one clear conceptual transformation that needs to happen within economic and political systems. They need to see the fundamental need for cooperation in diversity, or the human experiment self terminates. Part of that is seeing the need for cooperation in diversity, as the only possible way to explore beyond the known with any degree of long-term security. And we need to explore beyond the known, to solve many of the issues we have, that have no solution in the known, and for other reasons. Another part is seeing the need for cheat detection and mitigation systems at every level of complexity, as ongoing evolving ecosystems, and seeing any level of all out competition as instances of cheating. A useful definition of cancer in our bodies is: any set of cells that stop cooperating and start selfishly using resources without appropriate regard to communication from the systems around them. That seems to go well, right up to the point that everything dies. We seem to be close to that. Economic and political cancers seem close to bringing human society to an end - and that is through a general over simplification of what is actually deeply complex, of necessity. I have been one of those interdisciplinary autistic spectrum geeks for 60 years. It is all so clear and obvious to me, but so few people seem to be deeply interested in, or able to deal effectively, with the real complexity evidently present. Most seem to be trapped in the simplistic models that their subconscious systems assemble and deliver to their consciousness as experience, and don't appear to be interested in going beyond it.

Awesome! The fact that life is nothing other than the second law of thermodynamics playing itself out in Aries of negative entropy. Love this guy.

Wow, just to touch on various points made, another great guest! And no, I was not familiar with Peter Brannen. And... Yeah, it's amazing. The human experience on this planet so far doesn't even amount to baby shit, and yet we've had such an impact!

To get a sense of the importance of CO2 level, realise that the blackbody equilibrium temperature of the earth is -18C (1) the only thing making the earth a cozy average of 15C is the greenhouse gasses CO2 and H2O. So 250ppm of CO2 elevates the temperature by 33C. An extra 170ppm of CO2 is definitely NOT trivial. Cutting down the forests ( significantly changing CO2 levels 8000 years ago) was our first really big mistake. (1) We have known the radiation equilibrium temperature of earth since the 1850s. It is the temperature of the upper atmosphere ( look at the outside temperature as the plane climbs).

Whatever the cause of climate change, we are still heading for a great simplification 😢 Preparation is surely what is needed.

This has been a great listen and watch.

Thank you. Book ordered!

Most excellent!

Best guest yet! Thank you Nate

Excellent interview. Couldn't reallty see too much to disagree on with Peter Brannen, except I'm far less optimisitic about the outcome for all life, when one takes the preceding collapse - by whatever forcing - of industrial civilisation, subsequent loss of service industries and the impact that might have on the 440+ nuclear power facilities peppered around the globe; my concern not being the direct impact, reactor meltdown, or even localised irradiation (Chenobyl), more the effect that those radioacitve aerosols released from nuclear waste, spec; spent fuel rods, reaching the sparse stratospheric ozone shield, where it is now being realised there is a correaltion between increased atmopheric radionuclide aerosols and O3 depletion [post 'Cold War' - atomic weapons testing era research] Strip away the O3 shield and we really will be talking - GAME OVER. For EVERYTHING that lives on the Earth's surface; terrestrial and marine euphotic. NOTHING survives pronlonged exposure to intense high-frequency UV. . One thing we share passionately is the study of 'Deep Time' and especially to use that perspective to lend scale and credence to the less well informed. To understand the current biospheric dynamics; largely outside modern human frames of reference - one must start with 'Deep Time' - there it is all foretold.... --------------------------------------------------------------- Once again - great work Nate!

Love the conversation. Weird music though. Maybe something a little less dungeon dark?

Nate, I'm wondering, is the world going to be a El Nino or La Nina world? * I realise this is the wrong question, but more it should be are we just all going to be hot and wet for a very long time instead of the current idea I think in most people's minds of just dry and hot. Australia was planning for a super hot, drier summer, the warmer oceans around NZ and AU, east coast, a marine heatwave in nz for ages, has meant some major rain instead. The severity of the storms on xmas day ( summer ) meant tens of thousands without power, still today 11k, tree's down all over the place, then storms ever since, 300mm of rain, people are cut off, with no food, no air conditioning and no neighbours to put the xmas pavlova in their fridge, only yesterday the rescued 44 people by helicopter from camping ground. Couple of the days were 35c afterwards. The amount of lightning strikes in the last xmas period was 38,000, this same xmas period it was 3.5 million. The point I made to a friend who is very hard to convince in this, is every 1c hotter the atmosphere holds 7% more moisture, so if the days storm is on a day where it's 5 degrees warmer than normal, then it's 35% more volume because what goes up must come down, what if it's 10 degrees and 70% more volume and all drainage is based on exceptions of the past, not the future, what will 70% more volume mean, on a normal basis.. 5% more volume in some people's house gutters could be the difference between flooding or not, and is more volume like the difference between categories of cyclones. 70% more volume means a 70% increase in weight, will retaining walls, roads, bridges etc etc handle this? I'm starting to wonder if we will be 100,000 years of rain?

Superb discussion. Thank you 🙏

Peter Brannen seems like a really chill dude.

Fascinating discussion Peter and Nate. Thank you! I read your book Nate, "The Ends of the World". Now I'm really looking forward to your next book.

Great guest!

Great tension and depth, shared and explored at a patient pace. Master courses of direct and balanced discussions pertaining to most divisive yet critical to get right in the early stage. Doh! ShakeUp XR Entropy sucks and the current regime is sucking the life out of us. double whammy.

The Canadian Prepper is trying to get Alex Jones on his show. You might want to distance your brand a bit, your initial instincts and hesitancy there were correct

REally soothing to listen to. Pleasant voice , clear description . At the same time a strange situation to listen to our enfolding catastrophe and enjoy the narration. But I suppose, thats the stage we are at meanwhile.

I loved Peter's qualified conclusions.

Am a 60 year old educator. Since "Covid" (Thanks China) began, I have studied Climate Change. I take a pessimist understanding of our future. The out of control feedback loops: Arctic Ice, Methane Explosion, Loss of Amazon, Desertification of most Farmland Tierra, Geo-Political Chaos from millions trying to flee VARIOUS Humidity Kill Zones, throughout the Equator. Not to depress anyone, but should this present EL NINO result in Arctic Ice less than 1 Million Kilometers, I think WE, THE EARTH, lose the ability to grow food because of drought. I hope I am wrong.

It doesn’t matter how much someone studies it or makes a podcast about it as we have seen. We have enough of that. As long as fossil fuel companies and rich deniers pump millions into confusing the public and buying lawmakers your podcast don’t matter. What you are doing is way too safe to make a difference, and you know it.

I really loved this episode. I'll go check out his books.

Thanks for this perspective. It’s the best broad discussion on this topic and the first I’ve come across (in over a decade) that ranges from mass extinctions to Milankovitch cycles in its analysis. Looking forward to the discussion when his next book is published. I’d happily pay for a copy to be sent to Greta Thunberg.

The world today is awash in PhD's, academics, researchers, expert witnesses of every stripe imaginable. A quasi-leisure class that is itself a byproduct of the carbon-pulse. They produce libraries full of information that i would argue is an end unto itself, much of it being of fascination. Yet here we are. The mistake we make is in thinking any of this provides the means to anywhere better than where we've already arrived after multiple generations of exposure to this class of people and their works. For any of this knowledge to lead us somewhere exalted would require a driver of the bus. And as you point out, Nate, there is none. There is simply this vast, insatiable, mindless amorphic mass that is humanity as a body. That's all there is, and all there will be. It's already been as good as it will ever get for us, somewhere along the way, and we blew right through it like a drunk running a traffic-light.

Contrasting day-to-day to evolution time scales deserves its own episode!

New Music! New Year.

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🌍 *Civilization may be more fragile than the biosphere; a regular climate event, not just mass extinction, could threaten it.* 02:35 🌐 *Geologists shifted from asteroid impact explanation to intrinsic Earth system causes for mass extinctions.* 04:18 🚨 *Earth is showing early signs of stress, similar to historical mass extinctions; geoscientists are the "mechanics" to address it.* 06:34 🕰️ *Deep time helps understand Earth's history; human perception is limited, but geologists use mnemonics like fossil raindrops.* 10:42 🌐 *Earth's history involves vast time scales; human actions today are unprecedented over this span, highlighting the importance of responsible actions.* 23:03 🌋 *Volcanic gases, not lava proximity, caused mass extinction, releasing CO2, mercury, and ozone-depleting chemicals.* 24:14 🌍 *End-Permian mass extinction, caused by volcanic CO2, saw a 10°C temperature rise, ocean oxygen loss, and acidification.* 25:06 🔄 *While unable to match Siberian Traps' CO2 emissions, current human emissions are about 10 times faster, impacting climate and ocean acidity.* 26:57 🔥 *Humans emit about 100 times more CO2 annually than all Earth's volcanoes combined, influencing the planet's carbon cycle.* 30:36 🦖 *End-Cretaceous mass extinction linked to asteroid impact and Deccan Traps volcanic activity, with ongoing research on their relative impacts.* Made with HARPA AI

Awesome chat, looking forward to the new book!

Buzz Holling says that the entire Holocene is merely a front loop phase of a larger planetary panarchy cycle

Amazing podcast. Just hope we make it

Wonderful podcast. Peter is extremely knowledgeable and knows how to explain scientific knowledge.However, my main takeup is the fact that the Earth does not need humans to stage mass extinctions, which means that we might starve ourselves to death to reduce CO2, but then an unexpected event may create a "natural" CO2 pulse, and fuck up the live on Earth anyway. So, maybe we should abandon the idea and pride of control, and just try to leave as long and as happy as we can.

Great interview. The guest mentions the role of volcanos and co2 for life. The other time i heard that was in Frankopans's The Earth Transformed postulated a relationship between climate and plate tectonics. Think ice ages crunches the plates and warmer periods loosen them causing volcanism and warming up the earth.

Although Ben Davidson from Suspicious 0bservers is a bit of a Bell End, his model for extinction cycles is pretty close to actuality.

Thank you for another great guest Nate, just keep them coming, I’ve put Peter Brannen’s book ‘The Ends of the World’ on my book list and noted he’s working on another, I’ll keep a look out for it🤔

there's a reason why aligators are cold-blooded

Regarding the 3 parts vs 4 parts per thousand concentration of CO2, the question is misleading because you are comparing a non-precipitious greenhouse gas to a whole bunch of other stuff that isn't a greenhouse gas. Nitrogen (79% of atmosphere) is not a greenhouse gas, Oxygen (20% of atmosphere) is not a greenhouse gas, Argon (

Brilliant !!!!

Really interesting talk between you two. It's fascinating to ponder the notion of life being a sort of energy dissipation mechanism "invented" by Earth to help maintain system equilibrium. Life in the service of the second law of thermodynamics. Wondering who's written about this explicitly... so now I'm reading Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by E. D. SCHNEIDER and J. J. KAY (1994). Thanks for the nudge.

If it is El Niño we need to build the cycle into our replaceables programme..i'm off grid at a spot where clouds from the Atlantic tend to shed their loads..2023 has been hot and wet. We have had almost a year of rainfall in 2 months. No sun and little wind. No power tool use and reduced to using the diesel truck as a charging point for phones.

thanks for giving me another scientisti/author and thoughtlleader to follow - Peter Brannen

Outstanding guest and discussion! Well done.

Yeah, Nate. It's amazing that we, as one single species among 8-10 million, can comprehend Earths history, and fate. But it's not that we are so special, but because the evolution of complex brains will always go this far, and much further, unless, or until, it destroys itself. This situation is something I suspect may be very common throughout the cosmos, whenever the conditions of a planet allow such a thing to take place. Our bizarre intelligence is as natural an evolutionary outcome, as is microbial life, and the best evidence is that we exist.

Stateing the obvious truth hidden from the masses still wadeing through religion and politics. How fragile and precious we were How blind those who can see how deaf those whom hear ❤

Warming events in the Cenozoic do not correlate to mass extinction. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum PETM (55mya), a time when the Earth warmed rapidly to temperatures far in excess of today's, only resulted in a noticeable extinction of some benthic foraminifera. That was so small of an event it doesn't even show up on a marine extinction intensity chart for the Phanerozoic. There was, in fact, a more general flourishing of life at that point, especially terrestrial. Many major mammal groups appeared and spread around the globe including hyaenodontids, artiodactyls, perissodactyls, and primates. So if he's right we've got that to look forward to. The next largest extinction event, since the dinosaurs bit the big one, is the Eocene-Oligocene transition ("Grande Coupure" = The Great Rupture). This seems to have been connected with cooling (rapid Antarctic glaciation), not warming. Oh dear.

Best in show!!!!!

I wish you had not cut him off in your discussion about 2% lower oxygen in the ocean and the effect of lower oxygen in the atmosphere.

I think the pores in plants Peter Brannen is referring to are called stomata.

45:00 The Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. "We gotta get these two together." "I think that would be a very bad idea."

I calculated one time a model of the solar system based on a schoolroom 12 inch globe, which puts the Earth and Moon about 31.6 feet apart, and in which the Sun is a 110 foot diameter balloon (the size of a ten story building) 2.2 miles away... at this scale the most distant Trans-Neptunian Objects (the crop of minor planets beyond Pluto) is over 220 miles away and loops out as far as 3,000 miles away in its elliptical orbit. At this scale, the speed of light is about 16 mph, and the nearest star would be halfway to the planet Mars... Similarly, I was interested in doing a deep time "map" using a trip of 1,200 miles I drive twice a year to the inlaws in Indiana from our home in S. central Texas. I figured up for the 4.5 billion years of Earth history, EVERY INCH of the trip would be equal to SEVENTY YEARS or a human lifetime! Going down the freeway at 70MPH, you pass over 1,232 inches per second (102.66 feet per second), or 86,240 years of Earth history every second! It's a 22 hour drive straight through, though we usually break it into a 12 hour day followed by a 10 hour day the next day. This is the mind-numbing extent of deep time, and of course the history of the universe is 3X longer roughly...

Deserts have shrunk considerably since the 1980's. The Sahara shrank by 12,000km² per year 1984-2015(Liu & Xue, 2020). The Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime. "The greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year"(NASA, 2019). Observations of Earth’s vegetative cover since the year 2000 by NASA’s Terra satellite show a 10% increase in vegetation in the first 20 years of the century. Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016 (Nature, 2018). As well as human intervention, the reasons for this include forests expanding polewards aided by additional CO2 and a slight rise in temperature. Increased CO2 causes this in two ways: it has a direct fertilising effect (the CFE), and it increases drought tolerance by reducing stomata. This greening of the Earth due to CO2 is now "an indisputable fact" (Chen et al, 2024). In fact, 55.15% of those areas greening have been doing so at an accelerated rate since 2001. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the Earth's primary productivity has increased by more than 30% (Campbell et al, 2017 and Haverd et al, 2020).

I have always thought it would be fun to build like little rooms to simulate what it would feel like at different points in time. Almost like an amusement park thing. "COULD YOU SURVIVE THE TRIASSIC, TEST YOUR METAL AT THE NEWEST EXHIBIT".

47:03. "Restrain ourselves." Homo Sapiens will use whatever is easiest and at hand. Our current system removes observable consequences from visible causes, such that all together we create outcomes none of us even intended. To remedy that in line with the known tendencies of homo sapiens (to use whatever is available) the responses to the climate crisis must include removing the harmful choices from being available, easy, affordable, and expedient. This requires changing the systems by connecting actions with results for immediate feedback in real time.

It's like a recent history is an episode of "The Itchy and Scratchy Show." I'm happy to be my age and having dodged that whole getting married and having children thing.

Great conversation, thanks guys. The one dynamic that never gets addressed is, how much of the Earth's carbon can be buried in the crust and the mantle before life on the surface is extinguished? You mention that CO2 went down to 180 PPM in the Pleistocene; I've have read that that is near the point of collapse for photosynthetic organisms. Homo sapiens have been roaming around for 200,000 years--the proverbial blink of an eye--and releasing carbon from its tomb for what? 150 years. An immeasurbly small span. Perhps humans are a blip in service to the biosphere. Also hydrocarbons below and oxygen above is a battery; nothing more natural than the incipient chemical reaction.

It’s appropriate for Peter to talk about the planet balancing us out over centuries. We already know that global temperature and arctic ice will be changing for centuries based on what we’ve already done, plus what we will do. It will also take centuries for our population to come into balance (hopefully! It’s a really bad outcome for us if that is abrupt.) And it will probably be centuries before we truly figure it a sustainable energy system. That’s what he’s talking about. None of that will be resolved by 2050.

Everyone praises the interview but the tough question doesn't get asked. I'd show the graphs and charts where the global sea surface temperature is at 6 sigma, records being broken by wide margins.. Earth Energy Imbalance where at least 4 Hiroshima size explosions of energy is going into the system every second. . Rate of change far faster than previous extinctions. Yet the guest hesitates slightly at minute 48 when the interviewer says something like, did you really mean Centuries, how about Decades.. Guess I'm missing the charts and graphs which show how quickly this is going exponentially. I'd appreciate conversation over on my Facebook group Extinction Education, where we only present the actual Science about Near Term Human Extinction.

I read this book - very entertaining. To his credit, Peter Brennan interviewed paleontologist Douglas H. Erwin for his book. Douglas said he doubted we are currently in a mass extinction.

I love to see the bookshelves of smart people!

Very interesting and a little bit (?) scary, how fast humanity changes everything and doesn't want to realize it.

Making deep time relevant is hard. I'm trying to figure out how to shift from a wood burning stove. (Fearing the electric bill) Getting old I spend more time becoming ok with joining deep time. Such a hard task, to let go and to love more.

Excellent guest and a fascinating perspective. Certainly better than the fanatical/delusional McKibben. Too bad Pete didn't expound about deep ocean floor rifting, tectonism and the subsequent contribution of heat emanating from these geological features. You both touched on RCP8.5 yet as a UC Boulder guy, Pete didn't mention fellow Boulder professor Pielke Jr. Pielke has a disdain for any use of RCP8.5 in climate discussions bc it's so unrealistic.

Audio is in left channel only until ~ 1:20

Carbon is on the rise in the upper atmosphere is not coming from humans as Carbon does not rise it sinks. The only possible way it could be found there is coming from above. That is why carbon detectors in homes are always found near the ground and when indoor gardening and you want higher yields you introduce Co2 above the canopy of the garden or it is wasted and the plants never receive the Co2 because it is heavier than the air we breathe.

I can't watch nature documentaries any more - they make me sad, too.

'Deep Time' can be defined as the entire history of the Earth prior to the evolution of Hominidae primates [~6.5My - 4.5Gy BP] Though more commonly taken as the Earth's history prior to 'modern humans'; more loosely refered to as 'prehistoric'.

It should be noted that the vast majority of ecological devastation so far has not been caused by climate change but rather by other factors, such as overexploitation and habitat loss. From what I recall, biodiversity (by some metrics) has declined by something like 70% in the last 30 years, and who knows by how much before we started measuring it. That decline has happened before climate change really kicked in.

Great program, Nate and Peter. Since we are discussing past extinction events and how we can draw some conclusions as to what to expect in the decades ahead, i wonder how the climate change anthology series 'Extrapolations " on Apple tx applies here?