One reason I hate hippies is their strange idea that one can or should commune with nature. The problem is, nature hates us. It's constantly trying to kill us. It creates new diseases, environmental catastrophes, and animals with way too many legs all the damn time.

That, and the only reason North American hippies feel like they can really commune with nature is that we've killed pretty much everything that represents a threat to human life. And I'm not just talking about grizzly bears or malaria. How about the freaking screw-worm fly? Talk about nature sucking, this thing would plant it's eggs into any open wound and they would then eat your flesh until they hatched and fell out.

Nowadays we can walk around the woods and commune with nature, but only because we've killed enough of nature that we're comfortable being in it. Nature is a bitch without some serious modifications.

Now I'm reading in Scientific American about the next way nature will try to kill us. Apparently it will be a global warming-induced suffocation by hydrogen sulfate gas.

Their studies indicate that enough H2S was produced by such ocean upwellings at the end of the Permian to cause extinctions both on land and in the sea. And this strangling gas would not have been the only killer. Models by Alexander Pavlov of the University of Arizona show that the H2S would also have attacked the planet's ozone shield, an atmospheric layer that protects life from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Evidence that such a disruption of the ozone layer did happen at the end of the Permian exists in fossil spores from Greenland, which display deformities known to result from extended exposure to high UV levels. Today we can also see that underneath "holes" in the ozone shield, especially in the Antarctic, the biomass of phytoplankton rapidly decreases. And if the base of the food chain is destroyed, it is not long until the organisms higher up are in desperate straits as well.

Kump and Arthur estimate that the amount of H2S gas entering the late Permian atmosphere from the oceans was more than 2,000 times the small amount given off by volcanoes today. Enough of the toxic gas would have permeated the atmosphere to have killed both plants and animals--particu-larly because the lethality of H2S increases with temperature. And several large and small mass extinctions seem to have occurred during short intervals of global warming. That is where the ancient volcanic activity may have come in.

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But the most critical factor seems to have been the oceans. Heating makes it harder for water to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere; thus, if ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of H2S. Oxygen-breathing ocean life would have been hit first and hardest, whereas the photosynthetic green and purple H2S-consuming bacteria would have been able to thrive at the surface of the anoxic ocean. As the H2S gas choked creatures on land and eroded the planet's protective shield, virtually no form of life on the earth was safe.

Kump's hypothesis of planetary killing provides a link between marine and terrestrial extinctions at the end of the Permian and explains how volcanism and increased CO2 could have triggered both. It also resolves strange findings of sulfur at all end Permian sites. A poisoned ocean and atmosphere would account for the very slow recovery of life after that mass extinction as well.

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Most troubling, however, is the question of whether our species has anything to fear from this mechanism in the future: If it happened before, could it happen again? Although estimates of the rates at which carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere during each of the ancient extinctions are still uncertain, the ultimate levels at which the mass deaths took place are known. The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That is something our society should never find out.

Charming. I also hear dengue-fever is moving north, hence I'm more down with the Monty Burns view of Nature:

"Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese."

Although C. Montgomery Burns was discussing the despoiling of natural resources as a good thing, I like his quote because I believe not in communion with nature, but more of having detente. I still think we should make a few species extinct in revenge for Katrina though. That would show her.

Kidding aside, I am serious about environmentalism, that's why I harp about global warming. But it's not because I love nature or have some crystal-clutching hippy earth mother love for all living things. Rather, I just suspect if we're not careful that bitch will kill us.