The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Peter Ward: "Oceans - What's the Worst that Can Happen?"

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

On this episode, we meet with author and paleobiologist Peter Ward. Ward helps us catalogue the various risks facing Earth's oceans, how the Atlantic Ocean's currents are slowing due to warming, what happened in Earths history when ocean currents stopped, and why a reduction in elephant poaching is contributing to the destruction of coral reefs. About Peter Ward: Peter Ward is a Professor of Biology and Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. He is author of over a dozen books on Earth's natural history including On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions; Under a Green Sky; and The Medea Hypothesis, 2009, (listed by the New York Times as one of the "100 most important ideas of 2009"). Ward gave a TED talk in 2008 about mass extinctions. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/08-peter-ward

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Over the years, I've read many books by Mass Extinction expert and University of Washington biology professor Peter Ward, which is easy to do because he's written 20. Eventually I reached out to him and we have become friends over the last five or six years. I lean on his knowledge about upcoming risks and probabilities regarding the biosphere

and the natural world, especially the oceans. Today, and what I expect will be the first of numerous appearances of Peter on this podcast, we discussed the slowing currents in the Atlantic Ocean due to warming. We cataloged the various risks to Earth's oceans from the current human extraction of fossils. And we discuss how a reduction in elephant poaching is leading to destruction of coral reefs. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Peter Ward. Good morning, Peter. Good morning, Nate.

How are you? I am good. There's a lot we could talk about, my friend. I have long been a fan of your work, of your, I think, 15 books. I have five of them here. And as you know, I talk about the economic superorganism, which is humans and energy and money and growth and emissions are downstream of what we do as a global economy of sensation-seeking hominids with access to fossil carbon. But environment of the present and of Earth's past are incredibly

relevant to the story of our time. And so I kind of wanted to unpack all this with you under a broad question, which I know you're very interested in, which is what can the past, which you're an expert in, paleontologists, biologists, Earth systems expert, what can the past tell us about our current trajectory and the future. Well, I'd like to think of carbon dioxide, CO2, is the most dangerous molecule ever produced after the Big Bang. Carbon, of course, comes out of supernova, CO2, just that little bitty thing.

And what is, I was telling my class yesterday, I'm teaching 100 undergrads, in this room we're breathing all these gas molecules. And let's say, let's take a million of the gas molecules. And out of that million, there are about 400 or 410, depending on how you do it, that are CO2 carbon dioxide. If we were just double, just double. Okay, if there are 800 of those CO2 molecules, industrialized life, industrialized civilization, everything we know and take for granted right now are going to be gone relatively quickly. CO2, a little tiny bit of CO2 is absolutely necessary.

without any CO2, the whole planet would be frozen. So we need some of those 400, but we don't need 800 and we don't need 1,200. And every time we've gone from the levels we're at now up to 1,000 even, has created a mass extinction. So what we're doing, of course, is every time we get in the car, is putting more of those CO2s into the atmosphere. And if this isn't collective suicide by Homo sapiens, I don't know what is. So what was the mechanism of these prior mass extinctions? Well, we've got an awful lot of record from the fossils that tell us the good and the bad and everything else.

One of the funny things that strikes me is that my partner and friend Don Brownlee, we wrote the book Rare Earth. Don thinks and laughs a lot about what we're calling what is an Earth-like planet. And what Earth-like to us is the climate that lets us be comfortable and go to the beach and hang out and not where is shirt and not have to wear long chants, but on the other hand, not have to be so hot that we are dying as many of us did in Seattle, Washington last June. The number of humans who died skyrocketed during the heat. And we've seen this over and over in France and Germany and every place in Europe where we had excessive heat. Older people die and they die quickly. We are just not set up for the really hot days. And yet that's really what we're.

we're heading for. And in the deep past, when we've had really spiking CO2, and it comes from in the past volcanoes, volcanic activity, just normal earth processes are always pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. So if we could just turn off the volcanoes now, we can drive all the SUVs we want, no problem. Unfortunately, you can't turn off the volcanoes. We're always going to get that stuff. So we're adding to something that is already at a very high level. Can you briefly go through the five previous mass extinctions in like a few sentences each? Sure, but there are a lot more than five, and that keeps sort of always getting me a little cranky. We talk about five mass extinctions in the time of animals, but you know, well, Nate, that life on this planet goes back almost four billion years.

Animals have been around just about a little more than a half billion of that four billion. There have been 10 or 12 mass extinctions in the time of animals, but many, many more prior to that. So mass extinctions are things that have happened over and over. Everything is such a delicate balance in terms of the gas that we have in the atmosphere and how we as living organisms need to be in balance was not just atmospheric CO2, but temperature, pH, all that stuff. And so in the past, when things go out of whack and the earth seems to have a way of doing that, what a great deal of magma, a lot of lava pours up through the earth, we get extra CO2. So we have really good models from deep time. What happens if in a short period of time you pump the atmosphere full of CO2?

And what happens is mass extinction? And what is the usual mechanism of that mass extinction historically? Yeah, there's a step-by-step process. So number one, for whatever reason, deep mother earth says, oh, my God, I've got some flatulents coming. Here it goes, and there's a big fart of CO2 into the atmosphere. Everything gets really warm all over the globe. Now, the problem is that the globe doesn't quickly or even in long term heat up at the same temperatures everywhere. For instance, for all the CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere now, the tropics, the Amazon, the places on the equest,

they're not getting much hotter. They've been hot, they are hot, they stay hot. And there's something about the physics of atmospheric heating that I don't understand, but people do very well. Instead, the poles get way hotter than they were. The equator doesn't. So what happens is the poles, the high latitudes get hotter and hotter and hotter. The mid-latitudes and the equator stay the same.

So you're reducing the heat differential between. the poles in the equator. When you do that, you slow down currents. Ocean currents slow down, wind currents slow down, wind velocity slow down. Everything gets more and more stagnant. The oceans, which are right now very oxygenated because of all the vigorous current activity, they stop being this nice swirling mix of water. Our global ocean goes from someplace where you can sail America's cups, big sailboats, to some place where you would just sit on a raft in a pond, and all beneath you, you were getting this hotter and hotter swamp. Swamps are places with a lot of nasty, toxic aspects to them.

In the past, that's what happened to our oceans. Swamps weren't the little thing behind your house. Swamps became all the ocean, and out of them comes a lot of other kinds of gas, most dangerously hydrogen sulfide. When was the last time that we had such a slow-moving, swampy ocean without the circulation type that we have now? Well, the last most devastating time is actually during the Jurassic, we had a number of these things in the Triassic and the Mesozoic.

But even the Cretaceous and then the most recent of all was something called the Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal maximum, the P-E-T-M. And that, too, is where the temperature of the Earth went up, I think, a six or seven to eight degrees centigrade over a few hundreds of thousands to a million years. So that six or seven is a pretty small number until you look at global temperatures. It's a catastrophic number. There was no ice on this planet, even in the far north and the far south during that. No ice.

So, Nate, there's no glaciers, there's no floating. ice sea level is a couple hundred feet higher than now and the whole world is a steaming myasmic jungle so that really is what we're aiming back towards because we are now heading very quickly towards the CO2 that led to that so if we get up to a thousand ppm we're right back there we're right back at pete m times which was 55 million years ago we'll get to that in a in a minute i don't think anyone knows what's going to happen to climate or what the eventual CO2 levels will be. As you know, I am skeptical of the fossil fuel availability that a lot of economists say that we will access this century because they look at all the fossil fuels that exist as available to humans,

but it takes energy to get energy. And I think a lot of the coal and natural gas and oil that exists will be energetically remote and we won't be able to access it. But I'll come back to that. In your book, Under a Green Sky, you talked about something called a Canfield Ocean, which is kind of like the swamp you were just describing. Can you explain what a Canfield Ocean is and why did you title the book Under a Green Sky? Sure. Well, we have times when we, let's just go back to that scenario where the poles are really warm relative to the equator. So we've shut down circulation. Most ocean circulation we think about is taking place on the surface of the ocean. It's from point A to point B for north to south, south, the north. But the ocean also circulates from top

to bottom. You have places where there are enormous amounts of surface water, very cold, full of oxygen, that just sinks. And it sinks down to the very bottom of the bottom of the the ocean and then slides in the different direction along the bottom. We think of this as a conveyor belt. The best example is one that has been in the news lately. We have the Gulf Stream, which goes along the coast of East Coast of North America. It's very warm all along Florida and then up the Carolinas. And then the findings decides to take a cross-atlantic trip and go visit Britain so it heads up ever northward. As so, it heads into north. warmer latitudes, the water gets colder and colder and colder and colder and cold

and cold water has a much higher density. And the other thing is that cold water absorbs more oxygen than warm. So as it moves north across the North Atlantic, it fills up with oxygen. Finally, it gets so heavy because it's cold and oxygen-laden that just south of Greenland and Iceland, it sinks. And so you've got this conveyor like. the downward part of an escalator, bringing to the very bottom of the North Atlantic oxygenated water. That oxygenated water then moves south, heading back towards South America. Big conveyor belt.

So very warm, low oxygen water on the Gulf Stream, very high oxygen water on the bottom of the ocean. A can feel ocean is you turn off the conveyor belt. You've gone to Macy's, you just hit a button, turn it off the conveyor. Nobody can get up. Nobody can get up. can get down. There's no more oxygen going to the deep bottom. And when that happens, the deep bottom loses a large component of the animals, plants, microbes, all the stuff that's down there dies. And how many times has that happened in the past? Oh gosh, over and over. The more profound it is, the larger the mass extinction. The largest times were, again, at this Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. It happened then.

Happened at the end of the Triassic. Happened at the end of the Permian. Happened twice in the Jurassic. Happened three times in the Cretaceous. Happened in the Devonian. I was just over and over and over. It happens when we have loss of heat differential pole to look later. It's a very common thing.

Every one of those is associated with volcanic events. And right now our Volkswagen's and Volvos are acting like the volcanoes from the past. Yeah, absolutely. We are We are now heading in that galloping fashion. Look, I really hope you're right, because I know you've been arguing for years that we will get to this thousand ppm because we'll have used up the cheap available coal and oil.

But again, you've noticed the last few weeks, the Chinese, of course, coal businesses, they are running into problems. But the Australians, all the lovely Australians, are exporting coal ever faster. And they have really low-grade nasty sulfur-rich coal, which they're shipping to China as fast as ships can get there. Don't get me wrong. I am not sanguine about climate. The natural world, other species, future generations of the natural world is what I care most about. And there are some ways that the IPCC models are wrong in the opposite direction, which you and I have talked about in the past. Yep.

They overestimate the emissions from fossil fuels that will be possible this century. But I think they dramatically underestimate the biological feedbacks because there are so many. You mentioned one to me the last time we spoke about the grasses in the shallows in the ocean. Can you remind me of the details of that? What's happening there? Sure. One of the really alarming aspects of the modern day. And again, look, you and I both know that you can talk.

yourself into an ever greater sort of frizzone of horror. My wife, Farrow, watching The Conjuring last night, a horror movie. She finally said, turn it off, turn it off, don't go down into the basement, right? So you can make, ah, you can make you so scared. But there are scary things happening. And the scary ones that are close to home, and I had a grad student, Ricky Dooley, whom you met here, Ricky's PhD was to look at the shallow water grass fields in the ocean. And so we have huge, what used to be, huge areas of seagrass is called.

And there's a couple of species, one is Zostra Thelasanoides. Those things are a grass that looks just like your lawn grass except they're in the ocean, salt water, but they're very shallow. Why are they important? Most of the world's important fisheries, baby fish hide in the seagrass. Seagrass is a hugely important aspect for fisheries. And don't get me started at fisheries, of course. But if we want to have lots of fish, we want these seagrasses. So what's happened in Puget Sound, and I live in a place where the native, the most common forests were old growth, gigantic cedar trees, and enormous Douglas firs.

And these are big trees. I mean, we're talking big trees. Those forests went all the way down to the shoreline. There are a couple of wonderful books about how the first people to Western Washington, They hated the forests because they're really dark where they lived. They're underneath this canopy. We get low light, clouds all winter. It's like nighttime in an old growth forest.

They hated it, and they did a very good job of cutting down most of it. Where they cut down first were the places you could get the trees, big trees, out fastest on the shoreline. You could cut down the trees that went right to the shoreline, right to the ground, you've got your boat right there, you haul it off to the mills. The first trees to go, lined Puget Sound, which is hundreds and hundreds of miles of glacially cut beautiful shoreline areas with bays and inlets and all this stuff, and then there's rivers.

Well, when you cut down all those trees, trees grow back, but what grew back and what is common everywhere are gigantic big leaf maple trees. This was a conifer forest, replaced entirely by deciduous leaf dropping trees. Pusia Sound, the estuary, every fall now, has untold tons of leaves falling into it that never fell in it before. Never. All those leaves fall into the shallow area.

They get buried quickly and they rot. As they rot, they produce hydrogen sulfide, it's very toxic gas. So Ricky and we had this instrument. you poke it into the sand, it tells you how much H2S is there. Everywhere in these places that used to be seagrass are now completely bubbling up a toxic killer gas, hydrogen sulfide. It's killed a seagrass. It's not just here. Seagrass is dying all over the world.

This is a huge global problem because seagrass does what? It takes CO2 and it turns into oxygen. We're removing one of the biggest areas for, it's like a rainforest in the, ocean, the Chalboreen. Those are going away. So my understanding is a year old, at least on this, but I think oxygen in the oceans has dropped by 2% in the last 40 years. Is that correct? I don't keep up on those figures. You are a much better figure person than I am. I just know that I do look and I see the ecological changes taking place around here. And we think of oxygen in the atmosphere as a constant number it is. But remember that in water it's a whole different situation.

The water doesn't mix. And so if you're at a low oxygen content, even in shallow water, that can be completely decoupled from the atmosphere above it. So yes, we could have a lower oxygen level. We're still 21% in the atmosphere. But the shallow water areas are themselves lower, and it is dropping. So it's going to be a case-by-case. basis to your number. But the lower oxygen and marine systems really affects a lot of stuff. And the other aspect that is affecting us to, Nate, is acidity. As you know, I grew up in Puget Sound. One of the great pleasures here is to walk around and get an oyster off the rocks. The area at the North Pacific is now so acid rich. I mean, the acidity is so high that oysters

can no longer naturally grow in this area. that have been have oysters for literally millions of years. The spat are so tiny, the little vealers or larva, they've got a little bitty shell in the back. The acid is so high that the shell dissolves off their back and they die. We can't grow oysters here anymore. When you talked about earlier this summer when Seattle hit 107 degrees, wasn't there that those weeks? There was like several billion sea creatures died from that heat wave, including oysters and mollusks and everything. Oh, way more than that, Nate.

I actually had a student who will apply. It wants to be a grad student with me. And she said, what's the best problem you can think of? I said, well, we've just had a mass extinction event here. You could look at the inner tidal from Seattle, all of Puget Sound, but go all the way up to BC, all the way to Alaska. What happens to those untold billions of shallow water animals that they're in the low tide, the heat fried them and cooked them in their shell.

Do you imagine the stink we had, the rotting smell, the hydrogen sulfide, but now we have a layer that we can go back to one day. This is the dead zone. So getting back to your books, you referenced, yes, we had CO2 pulses from volcanoes, but that the real death blow to creatures on land wasn't from higher temperatures. It was from that self-same H2S hydrogen sulfide gas that was a product of the oceans becoming more still and less circulation and less oxygen. So 10 years ago, when you were writing these books, you were clearly aware of the parallels between the human dredging up mining and burning ancient sunlight at a much smaller scale than the lable basalt. volcanic provinces of old, but thousands of times faster, that you had to be aware of the risks

in coming centuries to this repeating. But here we are in 2021. Honestly, would you have imagined what just happened this summer a few years back, you know, this soon happening? No, I mean, the beauty about being a, what was the name of Cassandra? Who is the creature? I'm chicken little. I've been called that over and over too. But to say that the sky is falling, the sky is falling, well, this summer the sky fell. The sky's hot, and a hot sky fell right all over to the northwest. It killed a lot of people.

I mean, even with our air conditioners and even with neighborhood areas where people could get out, look, only 30% of houses in Seattle, Washington, have air conditioning. So you think about that. This is not just houses, buildings, everything else. We are a city without air conditioning that went through a week of 95 to 110 in some places. Every day, as you know, and we have all these brick buildings. Every day of brick building without air conditioning gets hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter.

Not to belittle that experience, but I have friends that work in Saudi Arabia. And I just don't know how the Middle East is going to cope with the coming years. and you talk about a positive feedback. As it gets warmer, you need more air conditioning that's powered by coal and natural gas, which makes more emissions, which makes it hotter. Yeah, it's a real problem. Can you explain how H2S then was an extinction mechanism that it wasn't just the heat per se? Can you explain that a little bit?

I think very few people have heard about that. Yeah, hydrogen sulfide is a nasty stuff. It's that rotten egg smell that makes us all gag. What I find incredible, I'm not sure how far into off the wall you want to be in this podcast, but let's just say that you and I sit down to the biggest bowl of chili. Peter and Nate's, I've made chili, and we're going to eat chili for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all day. And we keep talking because, look, if you were in the same room, we'd be talking for hours, right? And some hours after that, if we're in a closed room, it's starting to get uncomfortable, Nate.

There's a certain bad smell. Our noses, mammals' noses are so attuned. We are consummate hydrogen sulfide detectors. We're able to detect a few parts per million hydrogen sulfide molecules because the stuff is so dangerous. Wait, that was selected for? Oh, hell yes. Oh, absolutely. Hell yes. Explain.

Explain. Hydrogen sulfide is so dangerous that mammals, reptiles, we have detectors. We know if we are around, why do you think we go, if we smell hydrogen sulfide, we don't go, oh, that's the greatest smell. Oh, I love that smell. I wish I could have more of that. Somebody pump that in here. Oh, that's the beautiful smell of pine trees and the beautiful sunshiny day. I love that H-2-S smell.

Hydrogen sulfide can kill you really fast. 400 parts per billion will kill a human. The thing about hydrogen sulfide poisoning is so awful. Where it kills humans are in the gas fields in West Texas and the oil fields. Now we're killing people and where, in my area, every person who is digging wells, they have to have hydrogen sulfide detectors now by law in their drilling units because we have so much forest products that were buried over the last 200 years. They've been now buried enough to have started rotting, not with oxygen, but rotting without oxygen.

And when that happens, you have microbes that are producing hydrogen sulfide as a byproduct. Rotting without oxygen around it can produce H2S. And this comes up, if you go hit a pocket of this old logging waste that we have so many, hydrogen sulfide comes out. It will kill you fast. So hydrogen sulfide is also this interesting stuff. As you know, we began experimenting with it. I mean, the quick story was that, again, I had a grad student,

and we were very interested in mass extinctions. So if hydrogen sulfide was involved, it appears to have it involved, what does it do to plants? How quickly would a plant react to hydrogen sulfide? So we were doing an experiment, and we had hydrogen sulfide solution. We had bean seeds, and the plan was we were going to put them in here, put the bean seeds in. The students would come in the following Monday, and they would see these bean seeds rotted and turned into this awful, terrible. Oh, my gosh, there's a hydrogen sulfide smelling dog on your face, Nate.

Careful. So the bean seeds, and Monday morning, of course, the crux is a story. it was jacking the bean stalk. These things had sprouted, and they'd grown. And noblously fast. I mean, we had these great little bean plants. Little bits of hydrogen sulfide are a fertilizer. Lots of hydrogen sulfide will kill you.

And your books claim that the kill mechanism are many of the prior extinctions for creatures on land was an abundance of H2S near the shorelines and everywhere. Yep. Lots of stuff died that way. So you think that there was a bottleneck event at some point where a lot of humans or pre-human ancestors died out and those that were sensitive to the smell that became an adaptation, which has been conserved over all those years? Yes, even more interesting to that.

Nate, great experiments taking place at the Fred Hutchinson Institute here, which is our preeminent Cancer Institute, big money. these guys actually have Nobel Prize winners in there, they started subjecting mammals and reptiles to similar levels of H2S. And mammals are 10 to 100 times more sensitive. So the level that kills the mammal does nothing to a reptile. And it's all about war-blooded versus cold-blooded. War-blooded-blooded mechanisms are extremely sensitive and susceptible to rapid death

from low levels of hydrogen sulfide. Cold-blooded animals are barely affected. So let's look at the biggest hydrogen sulfide extinction. At the end of the permeant, we had two kinds of animals on land. We had mammal-like reptiles, which at all sense purposes, physiologically mammals. And we had reptiles in the form of a whole bunch of alligator, crocodile, pre-dinosaurus. Mammals are completely wiped out. Why do we have an age of dinosaurs?

We have all these reptiles which skate through these hydrogen sulfide extinctions. Cold-blooded animals are not affected by it to the extent that warm-blooded are. So the thing that leads to a H-2S explosion is a cessation in the currents in the ocean. And right now the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the AMOC, has already slowed by 15 to 20 percent. in the last 30 or 40 years. Oh, gosh, yes. I mean, what I wrote about in Under Green Sky was, oh, my gosh, two or 300 years from now,

we may see this thing start slowing. Here it is. Wait a minute. In Under Green Sky, you researched this in the past, and you said, oh, because humans are emitting carbon, that the AMOC might slow in two or 300 years. And it's already slowed 50. Yep, I predicted.

And now we know it's already slowed 15 to 20%. Yeah, I hate being right. Well, that's like your freaking horror. movie you watched with your wife last night. So let me ask you this. And guess what? We didn't get through it. We turned it off. It was too scary. And that's what society is doing. We're turning off the horror movie. Well, as my friend, other than books by you and a couple other scientists that I really admire, I read almost all fiction now at night because my day is filled with nonfiction stuff like this, that I have to read like the Hobbit for the third time or things like that.

Because this is, I mean, we would talk about evolving H2S receptors. We didn't evolve to handle this much toxic information about the long term. We handled immediate crises. We didn't handle abstract scientific synthesis of 10, 20, 100 years from now. And 100 years from now will all be dead. And so this is someone else's problem, except it won't be their problem. There will be nothing they can do about it. We are acting today on behalf of future generations of ours and other species.

And we'll get to that in a second. But let me just ask you this. Let's set aside the climate models for the moment. Let's say we do get to a thousand parts per million, either via an explosion in coal use later this century or in combination with biological feedbacks like Pine Beas, needle die-offs of forests and a tipping point in the Amazon. We've lost 15% of the Amazon right now. It's projected that if we lose 20%, it will irreversibly tip into being a carbon sink, a source,

and not a sink because things will die. But if we do go to a thousand parts per million, as a scientist, as someone who's researched the past, how likely will it be that this Canfield Ocean and H2S sort of trigger? will happen in that scenario. Well, again, the mass extinctions have not all been as bad as the end of the Permian. That was the one that kills off. Well, the number of species that die off is apocryphal, but certainly more than half the species. People like to say 95% of all life, that's all nonsense.

We have no clue. I mean, we are just sort of waving our arms. But let's say that if you're going to kill off even half the species, to kill off half the species, you're killing off 99.99.99% of all individuals. So there is a gigantic die-off that takes place. No one expects that that could happen in even a century scale. These things would be tens of thousands of years. And we have enough feedbacks that I think simply killing off enough humans

we're going to go back into a lack of industrial scale producing CO2 into the atmosphere and the various feedbacks will start pulling us back to where we were. But again, the other aspect and side effect of this is, Nate, what scares me more than the rapidity of H2S events is sea level rise. And I think we're starting to see the first effects of what will become increasingly common of enormous populations of humans flooding the, borders of the places where you can find fresh water and food and you're not imminently going to die. That is what's going to be increasingly common over the next decades are ever greater migrations of humans.

Well, for context, and this is not something we really consider, but in the last 20,000 years, sea level has risen around 450 feet, and it will continue to rise from the last glacial period. I mean, that's huge. And now we're talking, it might go up another three to six feet this century. But I think you've written about and talked about how many of the world's ports are built that a three-foot rise would inundate those ports and they have to move inland. I mean, that's one thing. And then there's the migrations not only away from the coast, but how much do you know about the wet bulb temperature?

I've read a little bit, but you can reinforce my scanty knowledge. now. Go ahead. Yes, I know what you're talking about. The wet bulb warm. Well, there's a combination of relative humidity and temperature that at certain combinations of that, humans are no longer able to sweat to cool themselves. Because even if you're in 120 degrees, if it's really dry and you drink enough, the evaporation from your sweat will cool you. So as long as you have enough water, any high temperature like that is bearable. But if you're unable to sweat, there's this wet bulb temperature. I'm not an expert on it that you can't sweat and therefore you cannot cool yourself down and

therefore you die. And so what's happening is these wet bulb temperatures are decreasing around the world, meaning a lot more places are going to be literally physically uninhabitable as as climate change and temperature warms. And so that also is going to cause migration issues. And there's one further part of it, Nate, that's also a part of this puzzle, is at what temperature can mammals reproduce. So early on in the whole controversy about what killed the dinosaurs, there was this very interesting set of experiments looking at what is the temperature at which mammalian sperm become inactive. They deactivate because of high temperature.

That temperature is way lower than the temperature that will actually kill the mammal. So now people are really trying to judge in the very high temperature areas. Where are the areas where no longer can you grow mammalian livestock? Now, let's face it, in a large part of the world, mammals do play a huge part of food supply. So the central part of Australia, certainly there's going to be big swaths of Africa. You just follow the equator. We're now looking at areas where the temperatures just have to go up a little bit higher and you can't raise mammal livestock.

No cows, no goats, no pigs, maybe chickens, but maybe not. That too is going to be part of this. I've got to get out of here and move my family to a different spot. You can't just like go in the basement or a shaded pen to procreate sort of thing. I mean, what you're saying is that it's not the, temperature itself that would kill them. It's the temperature that would allow them to reproduce is going to happen before the temperature that would be fatal. Absolutely. So again, you're going to have to dig a big, deep basement under rocks in some place cool, and you can't feed them there. I mean,

we're really looking at a very existential threat to the amount of food that we reproduce, produce. Oh, man. Well, we're facing multiple, multiple risks in coming decades. We just had COVID, which is a pretty freaking low bar for a society and a culture to overcome. And we're bickering about this or that or vaccines or masks or whatever. I mean, when we talk about the things that you're discussing here, I think humans are capable of massive change. We have. before. I think we're not dumb. I think we're ignorant, generally, as a society about these issues, but it's very daunting to me to communicate. I mean, climate change, I think a lot of people are becoming aware of, but it seems superficial to me because how many thousands or tens of

thousands of college classes are there? You teach not a climate change class, but you teach Earth Systems historical climate class, how many climate change students and teachers are there that say this is what's going on where there's climate? It's pretty dire. And at the end of the class, it's like we need to buy solar panels and electric car and, you know, congrats on getting an A in the class. The ask of what we're asking ourselves and our young people is puny compared to the scale of the challenge. is point number one.

And point number two, which is another reason I got interested in your work, is of all the climate-related risks, I think the ocean is the ugly stepchild of the story that hardly any people recognize the six or seven massive risks from the ocean, sea level rise being one, acidity being another, warming temperature being another, lower oxygen being another, the Canfield Ocean and the stop of the circulation being another, H2S being another. What did I forget? Oh, you pretty well summed them up. Yeah.

So anyways, the question we wanted to unpack in this initial conversation is what can the past tell us about the future, if anything, and how can we use that information? Lots of different ways to go with this, but I might actually even come out. at it from a side point of view. I had lunch yesterday with a man I spent 35 amazing days with in Antarctica, Eric Steig. This is 2009. I went back three times after that. Eric only went on our first trip, but Eric has been back multiple times. Eric is the person who sits at the South Pole in a tiny little hut while they drill ice. So ice cores, as you know, one of the major ways that we're really been studying past climate.

And these people are heroes that go down, the conditions in which you have to live in these places are abysible. So we had lunch yesterday. We're talking about the trip we took all the good things. And he said, I finally want to write a book. And I said, well, Eric, great. What's it going to be about? Antarctica

and climate and all the stuff. And he said, no. He said, I want to write a book about science literacy. I said, oh, yeah, you're getting a little overwhelmed. by the fact that there are, I mean, just something you brought up. How could we, as a species, have taken something so simple as masks and turned it into a political point where the level of ignorance will kill you, will kill you?

But when Eric brought up, he said, you know, it's not just from what we call the right, but there is a level of fascism and ignorance of science, or not ignorant, but being used as a political casual from the left as well, that surprised me. I never thought that, and he said, look, it's coming from both extremes. It's the two end members. Some of it is ignorance, yes, but a lot of it has to do with the exponential algorithms of social media and that they actually will highlight the more polarizing, more angry, more extreme articles and research and populate those up as being more viral and more shared, even though

people don't necessarily believe those things or see those things. It's the innocent trying to build community civic sort of responses that get down-arrowed in these algorithms because these companies like Facebook, they make money from more clicks, more attention, more likes. And so part of this has to do with exponential technology layered on top of existing tribal biases and polarization and short-term focuses. So I think we need to fix the information ecosystem before we can have objective science literacy like your friend Eric, because as an educator and you are one too, I care about objectivity and replicability and science and systems.

And if we can't have a discussion on what's real or not with COVID, how are we going to have one about the oceans, ecosystems, and Earth systems and our collective future? I think I do the same thing you do, Nate, is that both of us are information junkies, and both of us are feeling humans. How could you not be? Because what I see and what I'm experiencing out here

is just at a crazy level that what I've, do is what you do clearly, you need to get away from it. And what's better to get away from it than having a dog sit on your lap, lick your face, and say, look. There's no way that I can do this work without dogs. I have three dogs. We use dogs. But what do people do? My students, the level of stress in my classroom, I have 100 kids. The area is. The level of stress in my classroom has gotten to the point where I can just see it on their faces. And then I try to bring in the stuff about mass extinctions, they're already so stressed. And they just say, you know, not another damn thing on top of that. I know. I'm not teaching. I didn't teach last year or this year because I'm working on getting my

class in eight to ten hours of short videos that I'll share for free for everyone in the world to be able to take the class. But the year I taught last was 2019 before COVID. And I was talking to one of the administrators and 40% of the students at the University of Minnesota were on some sort of anti-anxiety, OCD, antidepressant sort of thing. And why would Minnesota be different than anywhere else in the country? I mean, it is a perilous and scary time to be alive and aware of these things. And yet, we kind of have to, we either have to totally ignore it and eat, drink, and be merry, but then we're headed for the cliff. So I think we need those. Those people that are psychologically mature enough and ethically aligned with a better future and they have the wherewithal to be involved, they have to roll up their sleeves and play a role.

And that's one of the reasons I'm doing this podcast is we have to know what we face. We have to know how the pieces fit together because a lot of the plans for society right now are using the wrong map. You know, we're going to screw up Earth, so we're going to colonize Mars as a plan. That's bat shit crazy for one thing. You know, we're going to replace all the fossil fuels with renewables. I mean, I am pro-renewable, but we're going to have to pair that with reduced consumption. A switch to renewables will not mean a 17-terawatt global economy or an American economy where the average American uses 100 times more energy exosomatically outside the body than

we eat in terms of calories. That's where we are right now. Of course, it would be lower than that if you exclude the military. And of course, as you know now, there's a big difference between the median and the mean because a lot of people have close to nothing. 20% of Americans during COVID lost everything. They have nothing now. So these are, I mean, you're right.

We are information junkies. I've spent 20 years learning from world experts like you on these issues. And I'm pretty stressed about it, but I'm also somewhat hopeful that we are approaching a cultural tipping point where more people are aware that things are not normal. And I call them the walking worried. They don't know about the Canfield Ocean, but they know something is horribly wrong. And that's why this podcast is. It's called the Great Simplification.

We have a simplification on the horizon that is inevitable. And I'm hopeful that a lot more people will understand how the pieces fit together and play a role in our cultural change. So, you know, like you said, we could talk for hours, I'm sure. From a climate, oceans, natural systems standpoint, I guess I asked. most of my guess, what do you think the base case is and what is the best case? Because we don't really talk about the worst case because people kind of infer it. But with you, I might ask you, what is the worst case? What's the worst case, Peter?

Well, the worst case I finished my book under a green sky, and that was a couple of Seattle residents sitting on a hill we call Queen Anne, in which they're looking out of the space needle. Of course, this iconic Seattle thing is 600 feet tall. and the lower third of it, the lower 200 feet of it's underwater, that's the worst case. The scariest thing to be still, Nate, is sea level rise. And I just published, actually booked over 20, but it's in German. The Germans, I wrote a book in English.

The Germans translated it into German. The American publisher, it's an update of my book, Our Flooded Earth. The American publisher said, we won't publish this, because nobody will buy it in America, but the Germans, the European, so maybe my hope is that we've got places in the world where they take it more seriously or are politically more, or the scientific literacy is better. I don't know, but I couldn't publish that book in 2021 in America. Would Germany be threatened by higher sea level, not relative to many other places? Yes, oh, way more. I mean, the whole plane, the whole German plane all the way into the

low countries into France, everywhere where they had those tank battles, that will all be underwater. The whole northern plain of Europe is the most threatened area. But this isn't in our lifetimes, though. I think, no, but the kids I'm teaching will see it. I mean, the kids that I'm having now that it's 2021 and they're 18, 19, and 20 years old, a lot of them because of good medical stuff, some of them will hit 2,200. Some won't. No, I'm sorry, 2100. I'm completely losing it here.

Yeah, but some of them will make it to 2080, right? And by 2080, I fully expect that we're going to have six feet of higher sea level, which means that we'll have lost a big percentage of the world's rice crops. That's the one that scares me the most, Nate. It's not so much you get flooded, but as you know, saltwater goes sideways. It's the soundization of the low-level rice, which is the number one food source for the largest proportion of humans today. If we lose the rice crops, what do we do?

Right. I remember when you lectured my class, you had a chart that showed, I think it was Bangladesh that near the coast, that via osmosis, the saltwater went 200 miles inland and then it basically poisoned the ability to grow crops in that soil, which right now is a great fertile crop area. Oh, yeah. They get four crops a year, four rice crops a year in Bangladesh. Bangladesh can still feed itself. But by the end of this century, Bangladesh will have only one-third of this current land area where you could grow anything. So what do you think is the best case?

And how would that come about? Best cases there are an increasing number of people like you. So you're my hero, by the way. I mean, what I looked at the best of what humans can do, it's you. that you're not only know and see what's going on, you're educating yourself, but you're doing this podcast. That's what we need more of people like you. That's the best case.

Look, Nate, it's all about people. Yeah, I agree with that. The word gets out that we're open to information. We're able to get rid of some of our political biases and have the judgment to weigh what we're seeing and what we're having. Our problem is there are so many, the information overload coming from so many different sources. And as we've already said, I got off Facebook years ago.

I don't do Facebook. I don't do Twitter. I just stay away from all that stuff because it's like a, I'll drown, right? Yeah. The information is an ocean and it's increasingly toxic salt water. I can't breathe it. I can't live in it. It's drowning me.

So I just stay out of the water. Yeah. No, it's true. I'm still on Facebook because I, post pictures of my dogs and my farm, but other than that, I don't use it. So what gives you hope? I mean, for me, I loved teaching young people. And yes, it's bittersweet because some of them are very anxious and worried about the future. But as 19-year-old humans, they're not yet, they're smart enough and they're mature enough to understand these things, but they're not yet

sucked into the consumption vortex of a boss and a mortgage and baby and, and, and, and, you know, payments and all that stuff. And it's this fascinating window to see what young humans, young Americans could be capable of in the future. And it was very energizing to me. It was the most meaningful thing I ever did was teaching college students. And thank you for all the times that you got up early to do guest lectures for them. But what gives you hope? And what are you working on that that fires you up knowing the gravity of all these things? What gives me hope? I have 100 kids and I said early in the quarter, how many of you would like to do independent research? And I've got about a quarter of the class

has volunteered, just volunteered. Secondly, what you need to know, most of science really do in science, it's drudge. I mean, getting the numbers, getting the science is hard work. It's hard work going to the library, getting yourself up to speed of what the best people are doing. It's hard work actually, usually taking measurements. There's a lot of boring aspect to it. I try to discourage them. But also stuff that I'm seeing that makes me so hopeful. Yesterday I went to a meeting in Seattle, here's a hopeful guy that you should get on your podcast.

Sam Wasser, W-A-S-S-E-R. Sam Wasser is a great big bear of a guy. He's in his late 60s. He should be late career. He has single-handedly almost stopped the illegal ivory trade in elephant tusks. What Sam did, he figured out a way

if you give me a tusk, Sam will take a scraping of it, run it through his machines. He gets DNA out of tusks. He can tell you he's built a map of Africa that DNA from a single tusk will tell you down to even some cases to a few square

miles where that elephant lived. Once you know where the tusk was taken, you know what area to look at. He goes out with Homeland Security all over the world. He needs Homeland Security because the ivory people will kill him if they

can and they look at these seizures of ivory, identify it, and they're able to prosecute. We found out in the media yesterday that the United States government is about to put $50 million into a new lab to be run by Sam

that will do rapid tests on illegal. And the reason Homeland Security is interested, the bad guys who transport illegal wildlife don't just do wildlife because what you find is all done in shipping containers. Homeland Security in the United States is very interested in shipping containers. What do you find in shipping containers?

Oh, small nuclear weapons, drugs, arms, people, all the bad things that we transport. And there is never just elephant tusks. Elphin tus and pankulins and opium and weapons are generally what you find altogether. Homeland Security is about for 50 million bucks into this new lab. And so I'm part of this group. We're going to go way beyond elephants. And so what gives me hope, I'm now studying giant clams, tridactna.

Great big clams, right? Hey, you've seen them in gardens, people use them for bird baths. It's both the hope and the hate. I hate what humans can do. Because Sam turned off ivory, there are hundreds of thousands in Asia, all in southern China, mostly, that are now taking giant clams. It's the new ivory. In the middle of a giant clam, there is a shell material that mimics ivory, perfectly. The Pacific Ocean tropical reefs where giant clams live are almost now denuded of the clams,

all going to southern China, where they're being carved, to replace the elephant ivory. Do people know that they're clams and not ivory, or they just like how it looks? People don't care. They're trinkets. They're just little doodas. Their first crap. Why do we kill elephants so you can have an ivory doo-dad? But there are billions if people want them. Or it's worse than that. I used to live in China. I lived in Taiwan and China. And they had all these night stalls where they had horn toads on a stick and stuff like this.

It's just tiger penis and all kinds of crazy folk remedies. And that's the one thing that doesn't give me hope is our delusionality and short-term novelty seeking as a species. I don't know how to how to quell that, but it's balanced by people like your friend Sam and a lot of yours and my students that have a deep, abiding, dare I say, spiritual reverence for nature that we need to reconnect with. And we've lost 50% of the animal population since I was born on this planet in the late 60s. And of course, even when I was born, we had already lost a lot in the last 10,000 years. But what we share this planet with, even in its diminished state today, which we don't really notice because of shifting baselines today looks like last year, looks like the year before. So we've lost a lot.

But what we have today is still a paradise. And like heaven, really, with the 5,500 mammal species we share the earth with, with the 10 million other possible species of insects and life in the ocean. is unbelievable the nieces, nephews, cousins, and nature that we share this planet with. In a lonely universe, we will miss them when they're gone. And I think the hope that I have is that more people widen their boundary of concern from profits and what I'm doing this weekend and playing Candy Crush on the Internet and Instagram likes towards the value of a living valuable ecosystem outside our windows, in our counties,

in our states, in our nation, on our planet in the future. Because life that we share this earth with is the most valuable thing we have. I just hope it's not too late before we realize it. Why don't you tell us about your other passion, which I don't know if you can see this or not. You gave me this hat a few years ago. The Save the Nautilus, could you talk a little bit about that? Well, oddly enough, Save the Nautilus is what got me in to Save the Clamps. What we've been doing is through Sam, I have a new grad student.

He's from the Philippines. And of all the places I've been all over the planet, the Philippine Islands are by far the most ecologically perturbed. We have a gigantic human population. population that have been living off the sea is the Philippines are mostly a very mountainous, and most people live right on the shoreline. So the ocean has been food, but the way to get at that food has been despicable to the Philippines, dynamite, cyanide, get fish any way you can.

The Nautilus is a shellfish that's been around for 500 million years, and it is now very much threatened. but we've been working through Sam's lab to figure out how to get DNA out of Nautilus shells. So what we're doing now, scientists for years have been among the most rapacious of awful people for killing stuff. I mean, if you go back to Hawaii back in the 1900s, they'd be beautiful little land snails. Entire species went extinct because scientists had to get every single one for their collection. I need one of every species. kind of like a reverse Heisenberg principle. I think some of us have a collecting gene where we just have to have stuff, right?

You see it, lots of people, lots of things, bottle caps, who knows? A lot of people want seashels. And so the seashel trade is absolutely wiping out rare species. We scientists, to study the DNA of seashells, we go kill another seashell. So we're perfecting a method where I could go to a museum. I can take off the tiniest little piece, and I'll get you the DNA of that sea show. We don't need to kill it anymore. This is sort of the last gasp of my career, I think, but this is going to be 10 years,

so I've got to last until in mid-80s to make this happen. But it's working. It's working. This is going to be a great gift. So we are going to be able to, in the giant clams, help stop. And the reason this is real, last six months ago in the Philippines, $25 million, of giant clams were discovered, going into containers to be shipped off to China,

at about two cents a pound, there were literally tons and tons of giant clam shells being jammed into container ships and being carried away. So are giant clams at risk of extinction, or are they endangered or what? Oh, they're already extinct in most of the Indo-Pacific. These are two or three hundred-year-old animals. and they rip them out of the bottom.

In so doing, it tears apart coral reefs. This is one of the greatest destruction actions on coral reefs happening today. Ripping the clams out, rips all the corals because they're cemented in place. You need gigantic block and tackle. You pull them out. You rip up the reef, and they are extinct. The Spratly Islands, the Chinese have taken. The president of the Philippines tried to say,

I'm not going to go to war over clams. but the Chinese have gone into the Philippine territory and taken every clam they can find. So yes, they are functionally extinct over much of the Pacific. And this is because of a shortage of elephant ivory, they switched to preference for giant clans? Oh my God, what a species. Yes, the unintended consequences. Stopping the death of elephants is destroying coral reefs. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel shitty.

I mean, no, I don't feel fun. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a public interview that we're having together, but we often have conversations like this where we inform each other about something else we didn't understand kind of horribly happening with our current culture. Unattended consequences. That's right. But I think we have to understand this stuff.

We have to be aware of it for there to be any chance of a cultural change. We, you know, we can shift the prices, which is. something I'm working on. We've underpaid for the main input to our economies for a century, which is coal oil and natural gas. We might be able to shift the incentives, which is do we want to compete for GDP as a goal of our culture, of our society, when most of the best things in life are free after basically needs are met? But can we change the values? Can we have a change in consciousness of what it means to be human in our present form with our neural scaffolding and our physiology that we inherited from our ancestors at a time of ecological overshoot

where all these things that you're mentioning, you know, it's, it is, it's hard at times. One of the points that I keep thinking is also cultural insensitivity. It's very easy for us and me. Let's go back to this whole idea you're talking about, um, I've been in Asia too. I've been in China. I've been in Hong Kong. And I was horrified the open-air markets where every,

you could do a zoology of South Asia just going to the markets. Because you'll see every wild animal they have for sale to eat. So the cultural insensitivity, I always thought you could probably save a lot of the animals on the planet if we just got Viagra, had the US government buy $20 billion of Viagra, and give it free to anybody in the world that wants it. Because so much of this is driven by male libido, I'm getting old.

I need something. So I need rhino horn. That's what's going to make sure that I can have sex. That doesn't work. Well, that brings up a couple other things. First of all, I lived in China and I went to the zoos. This was 30 years ago. But when you went to a zoo, people would throw rocks at the animals to see them move.

And then they would laugh. And it just pained me. I was so disgusted and distraught at that. And yet, China was just coming out of the cultural revolution and decades of poverty. And so I ask myself, is the fact that you and I have had the privilege to spend our careers studying and learning about the natural world is an environmental ethic a product of fossil surplus to begin with that our country has a lot. You make me so uncomfortable, Nate, because you're hitting really, that's absolutely a beautiful thing to say that's probably so true. Again, I'm a product of my culture. And my culture, I was lucky enough to be born in a family with two parents that awarded sensitivity that seems to have continued in me.

I was given every educational opportunity. I mean, I worked hard, but nevertheless, I was. a reader, we have this possibility. And then to say to so many Chinese, panglins, panglin scales are now the second most trafficked of wild animals. Why? Panglet scales used to be used for a variety of cosmetic needs and this and that. And then various people started informing the Chinese or whoever's buying them. Oh, by the way, you shouldn't do that as killing the panglans. and the one guy started saying what panglin scales are also for your libido. And that completely changed everything.

And now panglin scales are being just shipped everywhere. These poor, strange, scaly animals are being killed because people think. And their cultural upbringing tells them this is okay and you need this and go ahead and use it. So we can sit here and say, let's stop this trade, but what we can't do is say your cultural upbringing is wrong. We can't. I mean, that becomes just cultural imperialism. Well, the only thing we can do is start a new culture with our own young people

towards something that's an antidote to that. But I agree with you. Well, let me tell you another story that builds on this. I read about Maasai warriors that as a rite of passage, They go out with a spear and they kill a lion. And I'm like, God, there's not that many lions. What a horrible thing. Because I've been to Africa many times and I just love it there.

But you think of the Chinese and people in Africa and how they're destroying their natural habitat for animals and such. Right here, where I live on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota, I lost 13 chickens this year to coyotes. We have three packs of coyotes. I love coyotes. They're canines. My Frank came from common ancestor with a coyote. But we have three packs that are close to our house. And now there's one coyote that comes in the broad daylight,

tries to sneak to our chicken place and grab a chicken or a guinea. And at first I thought it was kind of interesting. And now I'm like, I'm losing all my chickens. So yesterday, broad daylight, this coyote is there. I would never shoot one. I just couldn't. No matter what, I would rather lose all my chickens. But I did have a BB gun and I shot next to it to scare it.

It didn't even scare it. But the point of me bringing this up is the boundaries can shift on you. I am a nature lover. I am an animal lover until it's threatening my chickens on my farm. And then my brain, there's a phase shift in my brain. And how different is that than the pangolins or the messai? we just have a more richer, a material, comfortable lifestyle. I don't know the answer, but we have 8 billion humans that are expecting economic growth coming in the future.

And that future is not going to arrive. We also have 10 million other species and ecosystems and mammals, et cetera, and how we navigate things, how we put things of value through the bottlenecks of the 21st century. is a critical question. Not only species, ecosystems, humans, but also knowledge, values, education, things like that. It's a big freaking question, Peter, for sure. Well, what gives you hope, Nate? I have lower expectations than the average person. I've already grieved for the futures that most people still think are on the table. And all futures are not functionally equivalent. So I think 10 billion humans living like people,

in Seattle in the year 2100 with a climate that hasn't changed so much with the certain amount of biodiversity that we have today, that future doesn't exist in my mind. So I think there are still many wonderful futures that can exist. And I think we need to meet the future halfway and change the initial conditions of what people understand, what they care about and what they're capable of doing in the coming decade. And so I think ultimately what gives me hope is the average person knows what's right and what's wrong. And I think humans are naturally good and we don't need all this material stuff to be happy. So I think there's going to be some chaos in the next decade. But ultimately,

we may a stair step down into a lower throughput culture and a lot of weirdness is going to ensue. But I think humans in the past have responded to crises in emergent ways. And that gives me hope. And meeting, you know, hundreds of people from various backgrounds all kind of working towards a better future. I think we've had enough things come our way now that we're going to have some amazingly horrible things happen and some amazingly beautiful things happen. and we can't predict how this is all going to unfold.

I have hope in humanity because humans, you know, 300,000 years as a species, 10,000 years after the agricultural revolution, 200 years after the Industrial Revolution, this is not who we are. This is who we've been to this point. And that's why I think educating young people, both in our country and worldwide, is my greatest hope towards aspiring. living differently than we have been. But you got to know the whole story, I think. You got to know how our human brain and our evolved drive towards in-group and towards surplus and towards comfort and novelty and these things can act as a constraint and an opportunity.

And you have to, I mean, our culture is absolutely energy blind. We're also H2S blind, but we don't realize how our existence is power. by ancient carbon right now and how that is not only destroying the future ecosystems, but also it's going away. This is a pulse, just like a volcano's pulsed for 10,000 years in India back in the day. This is a few hundred year pulse of carbon energy that we're unearthing to give us an amazing economy in the near term. So I ultimately have hope in youth and in humanity and in emergence.

Emergence, not emergency, but emergence. That is the quality that we can't quite spell out on how things combine. And yeah, I'm scared. I'm anxious, but I am hopeful. And maybe I'm naive, but I'm hopeful. Yeah, the alternative to hope isn't much fun. We'll have to do this again, Peter. you are just a wealth of knowledge and insight, and I know you care about the same things I do.

So any other closing thoughts? All right. So let's end with some positive news. Good news. Look, evolution is an amazing thing, right? And here's the best news of the last week. Scientists have found that in the areas where the most obscene killing of elephants for their tusks has taken place, there is a rapid evolutionary shift to tuskless elephants.

They are rapidly evolving the inability to grow tusks because the people, it turns out the 7 or 10% of female elephants don't have the gene to make tusks. And the tuskless elephants are never killed. So there's been a huge increase in that gene going through the population of elephants. We are rapidly seeing national selection produced elephants without tusks.

No tusk. Nobody kills you. Elephant populations without tusks are rapidly evolving in Africa. Yay, evolution. A sad way to get there, but I guess that is a positive thing. Oh, it is. If you love elephants, it's a very positive thing. The unintended consequences can go right sometimes.

We don't have to be Dr. Death and Dr. Doom. Look, good news. Bad things can cause good news, too. So there we go. Okay. Thanks, Peter. To be continued. I'll talk to you soon. All right. All the best. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.