The title has the delicious scent of clickbait but it's an hour of serious science about the causes of the extinction of ninety-five percent of life on Earth. The explanations are outstanding and are worth your time if you're willing to spend it.
The relationship to current time is based on the huge deposits of methyl hydrate at the bottom of the ocean and how little it takes in temperature change to destabilize it to the point of releasing free methane. The consequence of that is greatly accelerated global warming which further exacerbates the destabilization of the methyl hydrate.
Dismissing this as sci fi is taking the easy out since the entire Permian Extinction was based on an average temperature change of only ten degrees in two five degree shifts. The change wasn't the sole cause of all the deaths because volcanic activity released enormous amounts of gas at the same time. The aspect of global die-off is not the same without the volcanic release but the consequence is similar to the last stage of the Permian Extinction in which the methane was released.
We probably won't make it since even the underground nuke war shelters are said to have supplies only for a few years and the weather consequence from the release of the methane would last much longer than that.
You know the editorial already. Risking that for short-term corporate goals is insanity on a geological scale.
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