Kos’ Science Friday
Posted on | September 15, 2006
Daily Kos always offers something interesting on Friday morning, but today’s installment is particularly absorbing, being an overview of the relationship between oxygen and global warming gases in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s the story of life itself, and of how global catastrophe means evolutionary opportunity. The long view offers a bit of odd comfort–that life will go on, somehow–despite the intimidating power of nature it reveals.
So remember, as a pale blue flame of methane fries up your bacon and eggs this morning, or while you luxuriate in the hot shower before work: that colorless, odorless gas not only makes our lives easier, it helped bring life as we know it in to the world–and it can take it out as well.
Let me recommend a few fascinating books that you may have seen bubbling up in my Library Thing rotation (lower right of this page): Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth and Ward & Brownlee’s marvelous Rare Earth and The Life and Death of Planet Earth, the latter two of which define the frontiers of the new science of astrobiology (the view of life as something that happens not just on planets, but to them).
Life changes everything, and is changed by everything.
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