“We’re in a different situation now — carbon dioxide is the major player in our current world,” said Princeton University geophysicist Yuzhen Yan, lead author of a new climate-change study based on two- million-year-old ice cores from Antarctica. “If we want to look into the geologic past for an analogy of what’s going on in our world today, we need to go beyond 2 million years to find it.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“Lots of people just don’t understand that there’s a darker side to Antarctica,” says Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. “What we’re seeing is great power politics play out in a space that a lot of people think of as just frozen wastes.”
There are thresholds, non-linear evolutions that are not yet incorporated into current climate models. Fifty-six million years ago, the Earth experienced an exceptional episode of global warming. In a very short time on a geological scale, within 10 to 20,000 years, the average temperature increased by five to eight degrees, only returning to its original level a few hundred thousand years later.
