Supertopics:
My takeaways:
* The past 60 million years (while mammals have flourished) has been a lot colder than the last half billion years were up until then.
* Carbon dioxide has been the biggest factor in atmospheric temperatures over that half billion years.
* The global mean surface temperature is now rising faster than ever before in that half billion years, due to humans rapidly burning millions of years of fossil fuels in only a few centuries (a brief moment of geological time).
Putting those points together suggests that the Earth may be rapidly returning to temperatures that are much hotter than any that humans and their forebears have ever experienced, and more rapidly than we could adapt to them.
Documents:
| web | Smithsonian | phys.org | 2024-09-19 |
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