Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do.

What are some conclusions drawn from this book about human intervention.? Is it beneficial or harmful? What would you change or alter?

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.

Herbicides and pesticides represented the very worst kind of “cave man” thinking—a club “hurled against the fabric of life.”

Hilarious

In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up. Extinction rates are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geological time. The losses extend across all continents, all oceans, and all taxa. Along with the species formally categorized as endangered, countless others are headed in that direction.

Why would you classify this as a great extinction event? How could this affect the human population?

In a bleaching event, it’s the corals’ relationship with their symbionts that breaks down. As water temperatures rise, the algae go into overdrive and begin to give off dangerous levels of oxygen radicals. To protect themselves, the corals expel their algae and, as a consequence, turn white. If a heat wave breaks in time, corals can attract new symbionts and recover. If it’s too prolonged, they starve to death.

Because the algae supplies coral with oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen compounds. When they are expelled the coral become malnourished. The algae are protists zooxanthelle