How Understanding the History of the Earth ’s Climate Can Offer Hope Amid Crisis

There is no longer any debate that global warming is real, and that it is happening now at an alarming rate. It is transforming the global climate system before our eyes. The rise of fossil-fueled economies over the past 200 years, and especially the accelerating CO2 emissions since the end of World War II, is clearly the cause of our mounting climate crisis. But even though 99% of climate scientists recognize what is happening, it can still be difficult to grasp something of such magnitude. “Climate change” inherently involves a historical perspective. As world leaders convene on Monday for the 2019 Climate Action Summit, we need to set recent change against the record of history, both human and geological. We need to think about what physicists call “rate” and “state.” Doing so—taking a deep historical view on an issue that can seem like a contemporary problem—helps us understand the scope and scale of our problem, while also offering hope that it is not too late to mitigate this crisis. We have already entered a new state: a warmer world; a world of greater weather extremes, of rising sea levels, more frequent floods and more frequent droughts; a world subject to massive hurricanes and raging wild fires. Worse, the rate of climate change now vastly exceeds anything observed in the last ten thousand years. Since roughly 1850, atmospheric CO2, the dominant greenhouse gas, has grown at an explosive rate, close to what mathemati...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Environment Opinion Science Source Type: news