Our World on Fire

In talking about the movie Oppenheimer, with a friend of mine he raised a rather frightening question. Even though the tests at Trinity didn’t ignite a firestorm that would engulf the whole planet, did we perhaps set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire without realizing it?

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At one point in the movie, as well as in real life, Edward Teller calculated that there was a very good chance that the explosive power and incredible heat from an atomic bomb could ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. Teller’s math chops were second to none and he was taken seriously. We all know that thankfully, the test at Trinity did not set our atmosphere on fire. But what if it's now on fire anyway?

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Recent data shows alarming increases in planetary temperatures worldwide. A post in the journal, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, published in 2019 estimates ”“that the amount of heat that Earth’s oceans are absorbing is the equivalent of detonating five Hiroshima atomic bombs every second over the past 25 years.“

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A post in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in 2020 notes that as of February 2020, “our climate has accumulated the equivalent of 2.8 billion Hiroshima bombs worth of heat since 1998“ (yes, billion with a b). That's a staggering number to contemplate!

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James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis – that the Earth is a self-organizing, living system – pointed out in his final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, that both organic and inorganic intelligence aka, Artificial Intelligence, share the same goal: keeping Earth/Gaia’s atmospheric temperature below 47oC (116.6oF). Should average temps go above that number it is game over for life on Earth – including artificial intelligence.

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In 2023 we saw temperatures soar to 53.3oC (127.7oF) in Death Valley, 54oC (129.0oF) in Kuwait, 53.9oC (129oF) in Iraq and numerous places in Europe and the USA experiencing ?record-breaking temperatures such as Phoenix, AZ with multiple days where the temp didn’t dip below 32oC (90oF) even at night. All indications are that things will continue to heat up – every second that passes adds the heat of five Hiroshima atomic bombs to our atmosphere – with more and more heat records being smashed each year.

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I was long of the opinion that even if humans were to be so foolish as to wipe ourselves out, that in a few hundred million years there would be another Cambrian-like explosion of life to reseed our world. But Lovelock disabused me of this notion. Note the following passage from Novacene:

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“High temperatures make us vulnerable. We are currently in a warm period of the glacial cycle and if we now suffered a catastrophe?–?an asteroid strike or super-volcano eruption?–?that led to a failure to pump down carbon dioxide, we could be in mortal danger. The Earth's average temperature could rise to 47°C (116.6oF) and, comparatively quickly, we would enter an irreversible phase leading to a Venus-like state. As the climatologist James Hansen vividly puts it, if we don't take care, we will find ourselves aboard the Venus Express.”

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It is long past time for humanity to wake up and smell the charring of our world and to take action to keep our planet cool. Failure to do so will almost certainly lead not just to our own extinction but to the end of all the life in the Universe that we know of.