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Carbon Dioxide: Earth's Thermostat
Season 29 Episode 4
This week, award-winning science writer Peter Brannen returns to Decouple to explore the 4.5 billion-year story of carbon dioxide on Earth. Grounding our discussion is his new book, The Story of CO2 Is The Story of Everything. From the alien world of the Hadean eon to humanity's emergence as the "pyromaniac ape," Brannen reveals how this trace gas has shaped every aspect of our planet's evolution, through Snowball Earth, mass extinctions, and the rise of complex life, culminating in humanity's unprecedented ability to burn fossil fuels.
We talk about:
The origin of life and early carbon chemistry
Why Earth needed fossil fuels to create an oxygen-rich atmosphere
The Great Unconformity and Snowball Earth's role in building the rock record
The Carboniferous period as the age of giant insects and coal formation
The Permian mass extinction and Siberian Traps volcanism
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum as a climate analog
The ice age world that shaped human evolution and the rise of agriculture
How megafauna extinctions marked the beginning of human planetary impact
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