Hello and welcome to Episode Thirty Four of Page Turn: the Largo Public Library Podcast. I'm your host, Hannah!
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The English Language Transcript can be found below
But as always we start with Reader's Advisory!
The Reader's Advisory for Episode Thirty Four is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you like Braiding Sweetgrass you should also check out: As Long As Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, All We Can Save edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Keeble Wilkinson, and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake.
My personal favorite Goodreads list Braiding Sweetgrass is on is Ecosocialism & Degrowth.
Happy Reading Everyone
Today’s Library Tidbit is on Climate Change.
Let’s start at the beginning, what is climate change? According to NASA climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional, and global climates. Global warming is the long-term heating of the Earth caused by human activity since the Industrial Revolution. The burning of fossil fuels has added unprecedented levels of CO2 to the atmosphere which is causing rapid global warming.
The Earth has gone through several periods of climate change during it’s history. It is believed, based on geological records, that 2,400 -2,100 million years ago, during the Paleoproterozoic era, that the Earth’s surface froze over in response to the atmosphere and the ocean’s experiencing a rise in oxygen. This is referred to the Huronian glaciation. Fun note here our ocean’s are currently rising in temperature as more CO2 and methane are added to them. The event that is believed to have caused the Huronian glaciation is referred to by a few different things but most often the Great Oxidation Event or GOE.
The rise in oxygen in the atmosphere over the next hundred of millions of years caused several different glaciation periods and mass extinction events. The differences between them being uninteresting unless you’re studying prehistoric geology or paleontology. Note paleontologists do not just study dinosaurs but all fossilized animal, plant, bacteria, and virus
Around 251 million years ago the Great Dying or the Permian-Triassic extinction event occured. This event saw the most extreme mass extinction ever to occur on Earth to date with the extinction of an estimated 83% of all genera. Genera is the plural of genus which if you remember way back to biology is the rank above species in the taxonomic rank. Reasons for this mass extinction event are unknown but models using the available data say that it would have been caused by ocean acidification. The reason for this acidification is unknown.
At about 199 million years ago the Triassic period ends and the Jurassic period begins. The Jurassic period is also the Age of the Dinosaurs. Scientists widely believe that the cause of the mass extinction that ended the Triassic period was increased volcanic activity in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. This volcanic activity released large amounts of CO2 in to the atmosphere raising the overall temperature of the Earth and causing ocean acidification. In general times of extreme cooling of the Earth have been caused by raised oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the oceans and times of extreme warming have been caused by raised CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the oceans.
At about 66 million years ago the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began. This also marks the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic era. This is also the event that caused the extinction of all dinosaurs but birds. There are a few theories behind this mass extinction event. One is a meteorite impact at the Chicxulub crater which is large enough to impact the climate of the planet and lead to potential extinction. Two the Deccan Traps in India, a large range of volcanic activity,
