Thinking Citizen Blog — “Scientists Have Captured Earth’s Climate Over The Last 485 Million Years — Here’s The Surprising Place We Stand Now” (Washington Post)
Thinking Citizen Blog: Wednesday is Climate Change, the Environment, and Sustainability Day
Today’s Topic: “Scientists Have Captured Earth’s Climate over the last 485 Million Years — Here’s the Surprising Place We Stand Now” (Washington Post)
Mirror, mirror on the wall, what is the most important climate change chart of them all? How about the most important three? seven? In order? Are you up to the challenge? Can you defend your choices with three sentences each? Let’s find out.
For years the iconic chart was the “hockey stick” chart which tells the simple story that recent human-induced climate change has warmed the earth to historically unprecedented levels.
But recently there was an article in Science magazine that featured the following chart which tells a very different story over a different time horizon. Or does it? Is the message beneath the surface the same? Is the ultimate message that carbon is the “master dial”?
Actually, this is nothing new at all. The graph below was published ten years ago:
Today some excerpts from an article in the Washington Post last month on the findings of the new study. What are the most interesting climate change facts that you have learned over the last decade that have reinforced or changed your view of climate change?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE DRAMATIC STORY FROM NO POLAR ICE CAPS TO DRAMATIC COOLING AND MASS EXTINCTION, TO VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN THE PERMIAN…..
1. “At the timeline’s start, some 485 million years ago, Earth was in what is known as a polar hothouse climate, with no polar ice caps and average temperatures above 86 F (30 C). The oceans teemed with mollusks and anthropods, and the very first plants were just beginning to get a toehold on the land.”
2. “Temperatures began to slowly decline over the next 30 million years, as atmospheric carbon dioxide was pulled from the air, before plummeting into what scientists call a cold house state around 444 million years ago. Ice sheets spread across the poles and global temperatures dropped more than 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius).”
3. “This rapid cooling is thought to have triggered the first of Earth’s “big five” mass extinctions — some 85% of marie species disappeared as sea levels fell and the chemistry of oceans changed.”
NB: “An even more dramatic shift occurred at the end of the Permian period, about 251 million years ago. Massive volcanic eruptions unleashed billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing the planet’s temperature to shoot up by about 18 F (10 C) in roughly 50,000 years. Acid rain fell across the continents: marine ecosystems collapsed as the oceans became boiling hot and depleted of oxygen.”
“SCIENTISTS HAVE CAPTURED EARTH’S CLIMATE OVER THE LAST 485 MILLION YEARS. HERE’S THE SURPRISING PLACE WE STAND NOW”
1. “An effort to understand Earth’s past climates uncovered a history of wild temperature shifts and offered a warning on the consequences of human-caused warming.”
2. “This timeline…is the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced, the authors say. Created by combining more than 150,000 pieces of fossil evidence with state-of-the-art climate models, it shows the intimate link between carbon dioxide and global temperatures and reveals that the world was in a much warmer state for most of the history of complex animal life.”
3. “At the hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year.”
“THE REVELATIONS ABOUT EARTH’S SCORCHING PAST ARE FURTHER REASON FOR CONCERN ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE…THE TIMELINE ILLUSTRATES HOW SWIFT AND DRAMATIC TEMPERATURE SHIFTS WERE ASSOCIATED WITH MANY OF THE WORLD’S WORST CLIMATE MOMENTS — INCLUDING A MASS EXTINCTION THAT WIPED OUT ROUGHLY 90 PERCENT OF ALL SPECIES AND THE ASTEROID STRIKE THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS”
1. “At no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now.”
2. “In the same way as a massive asteroid hitting the Earth, what we’re doing now is unprecedented.”
3. The new study “portrays a global climate that was more dynamic and extreme than researches had imagined…the new timeline is full of sudden spikes and abrupt shifts.”
“CARBON DIOXIDE IS REALLY THAT MASTER DIAL”
1. “In keeping with decades of past research on climate, the chart hews closely to estimates of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with temperatures rising in proportion to concentrations of the heat-trapping gas.”
2. “That’s an important message in terms of understanding why emissions from fossil fuels are a problem today.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
New Study Shows 485 Million Years Of Earth’s Temperature
Hockey stick graph (global temperature) — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test
Cognitive dissonance — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
A LINK TO THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED BY THEME:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
ATTACHMENT BELOW -
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to climate change or the environment.
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to climate change that the rest of us may have missed. Your favorite chart or table perhaps…
This is your chance to make someone’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart.
