Letter: Food for thought

The modern hypothesis is based on life-destroying itself by its own actions. Over two billion years ago the second great extinction of life occurred. Before that time, life was bacteria eating and giving off gases that would be poisonous to most life today. Along came bacteria that changed its exhaust gases from toxins to oxygen. As oxygen levels increased, 99 percent of life died. That oxygen allowed for multicellular life to evolve. Several extinction events afterward nearly wiped out life, but the Great Oxidation Event was the first where life itself nearly made the Earth barren of life again.

If one species was able to wipe out 99 percent of life two billion years ago, is our heating up the Earth going to do the same thing? We know Venus didn’t always have the lead-melting, high-temperature cloud blanket it has today. We are about to have a runaway climate change here that humans are causing. Could it be that we will continue to cause hundreds of species to go extinct each year until almost all are gone?

Is each of us participating in making that extinction event possible? That possibility should be lots of food for thought. - Chuck Johnson, Morris