Posted on Feb 7, 2021 in Climate Change, Environmental, Science
Our climate models may be missing something big, warns Peter Brannen, author of Ends of the World, for The Atlantic “Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses,” writes Peter Brannen. “Of more immediate interest today,” he observes, “a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston. That negligible wisp of the air is carbon dioxide.”
We are pushing our planet into a place it hasn’t seen in tens of millions of years, “a world, writes Brannen, “for which Homo sapiens did not evolve.” To comprehend the analogues for the kind of warming we’ll likely see in the coming decades and centuries, “we will need to move beyond the past 3 million years of ice ages entirely, and make drastic jumps back into the alien Earths of tens of millions of years ago. Our future,” Brannen warns, “may come to resemble these strange lost worlds.”
Warnings from Earth’s ‘Third Pole’ –Climate Change at the Crest of the World
In an earlier 2017 study, MIT geophysicist Daniel Rothman observed, “How can you really compare these great events in the geologic past, which occur over such vast timescales, to what’s going on today, which is centuries at the longest?”
Read more atThe Atlantic, The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record
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