Graph of the Day: CO2 and Extinction Events January 31, 2011

Peter Ward’s book, “Under a Green Sky”, kept me awake for several hot summer nights a few years ago. It’s a description of the ancient greenhouse event that kicked off the “Great Dying” – the Permian Extinction, the most catastrophic period in the planet’s history, a near total wipeout of all species. A large body of evidence has been accumulating that most of the extinction events in the planet’s history have followed greenhouse events.

I wrote to Ward to find out more, and he sent me the graph above, which is eloquent.

You can see Ward interviewed on the NOVA program I posted last week, and his piece in Scientific American is useful and informative.