A Republic of Insects and Grasses

Abstract

While insights into the nature of the world in the wake of warming by several degrees Celsius and a nuclear war cannot be reached in detail, a number of projections arise from paleoclimate science and from current observations and trends. The increased concentrations of CO₂ above 405 ppm and CO₂e (equivalent CO₂ including methane) are tracking toward the stability threshold level of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and sea levels many meters higher than at present. Given sea levels in the range of 25 ± 12 m during the Pliocene pre-2.6 million years ago, the world’s delta, low river valleys and coastal zones, the focus of much of human agriculture and civilization, will be flooded by sea water. As the Earth warms, the balance between increasing aridity in heated desert regions and enhanced hydrological cycle and precipitation in other regions would result in sharp climate gradients and intense storms. With a plutonium-239 half-life of approximately 20,000 years, the effects of radioactivity would decline. At this stage, large habitats vacated at the onset of the Plutocene due to climate tipping points and high radioactivity would be re-occupied by tropical flora and fauna, notably the Arthropods. Accelerated speciation is observed during rebounds from mass extinctions and pulses of speciation appear sometimes to be associated with climate change.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains, round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

After Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth