The Fire Next Time

For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains.

..........................Deuteronomy 32:22

Is the end nigh, if we don't change our ways? (and I don't mean Angela Merkel's.)

And are enviromental alarmists prophesying it? So RA has claimed.

Well I suppose some are. There are ecowacko's afterall. But I didn't think that it seemed too likely that any mainsteam scientists were, so I did a little research.

Eventually, of course, the Sun will expand and first fry and then engulf the Earth. That doesn't sound good, but we should have at least a few hundred million years to prepare for it, so I'm not planning to panic soon. The biggest die off we know about was the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which killed off most species and presumably almost all individuals. According to the Wikipedia article
For some time after the event, fungal species were the dominant form of terrestrial life.

The cause was probably global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption by the then dominant amphibians and trilobites.

OK, I was kidding about that.

Suspects do include the massive Siberian traps volcanism that occurred about then, a nearby supernova, rearrangement of the continents causing drastic climate change, and sudden temperature triggered release of methane gases into the atmosphere. The combination of the first of these triggering the last might raise the global temperature by about 10 C - likely enough to kill off most species - and a bit more than the worst case scenarios envisioned for our current warming event - unless, of course, it were to trigger a giant methane release.

The most dramatic version of the methane release scenario I heard of had the methane suddenly filling the atmosphere and then being detonated by spark or lightning, with the air turning into an ocean of fire. A fittingly biblical fate, I guess, but not too likely sounding to me. It seems pretty implausible that the whole atmosphere would reach ignition mixture simultaneously. The slow cooking scenario, on the other hand...

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