Climate Change, or Why Long-Range Planning May Be Not For You

There is an article in the current issue of Scientific American that looks at the two previous periods of global warming.

Those two periods are now known as the Cretaceous Hothouse and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The Cretaceous Hothouse didn't result in extinctions, the PETM resulted in some extinctions. Most species adapted.

Could that play out now? Probably not. The Cretaceous Hothouse lasted for millions of years and the planet warmed up at a very low rate, basically one quarter of one ten-thousandths of a degree per hundred years. (0.000025C per century). The PETM lasted for thousands of years and the planet warmed up at a rate of a quarter of a tenth of a degree per hundred years (0.025C per century).

Now, however, the globe is warming up at a rate of at least a degree per century and may accelerate to 4C per century. There are signs that the warming rate is too fast for many of the species on the planet to adapt.

Climate change may not be solvable. It should be solvable, but it requires cooperation on a global scale and I just don't see that happening. We can all shift to driving plug-in hybrids with power generated from wind/solar/tidal plants (and burning hydrogen produced using power from those plants) and it won't make a bit of difference as long as China keeps building coal-fired power plants at the rate of one a week. And if the planet warms up enough that the Arctic permaforst starts melting, then we may have started a thermal avalanche.

Humans are conducting a global science experiment and we have no other place to go if we have triggered a catastrophe. It's as though we have been playing with matches inside a locked house.