A lesson learned from THE STORY OF CO2 IS THE STORY OF EVERYTHING: HOW CARBON DIOXIDE MADE OUR WORLD, by Peter Brannen

Humanity's current global economy is unleashing geologic forces we do not comprehend.

    Every now and then I switch up my History books to try and get updates from what's new in the world of science (a topic I might have focused in instead, had I not wanted to do all the math classes involved, haha!), and on one of my summer adventures I discovered a fascinating title from Peter Brennen called The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World. Though long and perhaps a little in-depth for the lay reader, Brennen's book is an absolutely fascinating history in its own way, as he tries to dig through the deep geological ages of Earth's past to reconstruct climates from millions and billions of years ago. In the process he tackles some of life's deep mysteries, and I'll only provide a brief summary of his arguments here. While the book's main takeaway--that modern humans, with our obsession with carbon burning, are actively courting apocalypse like we could not image--is undeniable, Brennen in the process reconstructs long-extinct climates with a vivid detail that makes the book essential reading for anyone who has long wondered how exactly the planet might have evolved and functioned in the deep past when the world was so geologically different it resembled what me might find on an alien planet today.

    That climatic history of Earth's geological ages constitutes a majority of Brennen's book. He describes a primordial-soup earth with an atmosphere that was almost devoid of oxygen or carbon dioxide, one which for large stretches of its ancient history might have suffered from ice ages so deep and extreme (what geologists call the "Snowball Earth" theory) that massive glaciers probably covered most of the world, and bacterial life could only survive in isolated warmth pockets. The dynamic forces of tectonic plates finally unleashed an explosion of life after billions of years of relative stagnation, and lifeforms began to add those crucial gases into the atmosphere. That led to some geological eras that looked like the stuff of nightmares (like the oxygen-rich Carboniferous Era where giant insects ruled a world that was constantly on fire), and others like the warm tropical Cretaceous where giant reptiles prospered for tens of millions of years. Alarmingly, Brennen notes that geological events such as massive volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, and ocean acidification events led to spiking and crashing levels of CO2 that resulted in mass extinctions, and in much of the planet becoming uninhabitable as the Earth went through its painful climatic transitions. He notes that humanity evolved at the end of Earth's history in a tiny sliver of time of relative climactic stability, when the planet would gradually transition between ice ages and pleasantly warmer periods. It was then that humans discovered there were massive stores of carbon from previous geological eras stored within Earth's crust that when burned generated massive amounts of energy, and that fueled a sudden and spectacular era of global economic growth. Alas, it also meant that humans began a massive experiment as to what happens when huge amounts of ancient CO2 are suddenly dumped back into the atmosphere; Brennen sees the geological disaster such experiments unleash with almost terrifying certainty.

    Brennen's book has a dark ending where he notes that our entire modern economic model, which assumes endless growth, will reach a point where it simply cannot continue on a finite planet, and that the world will deeply regret its current carbon-burning experiment. He does not pretend to offer any easy solutions, and that means the book's final chapters are a much more depressing read than its earlier ones with their gripping take on Earth's geological history. That means the book may not be for everyone, especially those who wish to remain more optimistic about our current planetary prospects. That said, I'm still very glad I checked out this random book with a fascinating title, and I strongly recommend it to all geology nerds who are in the mood to imagine long-extinct climate worlds that our current system might be bringing back to the surface.