"We've been talking about rising sea levels and extreme weather events," said author Thom Hartmann. "Now we need to talk about extinctions."
Filmmaker Leila Conners and Producers George DiCaprio, Earl Katz, and Mathew Schmid have joined with Hartmann and writer/researcher Sam Sacks to produce a new short film - "Last Hours" - about the most extreme possible outcome of global warming.
Our planet has nearly died before. Five times in the deep geologic history of planet Earth, massive quantities of greenhouse gases have been released through the Earth's crust. One was provoked by a meteorite strike, others by tectonic and volcanic activity. In each case, these massive releases of greenhouse gases warmed the planet enough to cause global mass extinctions – the death of more than half of all life.
"Last Hours" is a film that explores the possibility that we could be close - centuries or perhaps just decades -to tipping points that could lead to a sixth mass extinction, and relies on input from some of the world's leading scientists.
"It's almost impossible to know when you have passed a tipping point," says Hartmann. "You only see them in retrospect. So we have to do everything we can now to avoid inadvertently hitting tipping points that might lead to catastrophic methane releases." Hartmann's most recent book "The Last Hours of Humanity," goes in depth on the topic.
While climate scientists rarely study mass extinctions, geologists are quite familiar with them. And, increasingly, they are speaking out about how our extraction of carbon fuels from beneath the earth and burning of them into the atmosphere is mimicking processes that, in the deep geologic past, have caused mass extinctions.
prnewswire
