It Happened Before, Is It Happening Again?

“We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising.” 

Carl Sagan

Ask any well-versed-in-the-rhetoric-of-climate-change denier or marginalizer, and they’ll tell you that this pattern of climate-related natural disasters, the rising temperatures around the world, are simply part of a natural pattern that nature has cycled since time began. Mankind’s influence, they insist, played little part in what we face today. Or perhaps, they will point to post-diluvian (the Great Flood, the era of Noah) purported Biblical “pledges” from God not to wreak such global havoc on mankind again… accompanied by other purported Biblical pledges that mankind should use the bounty of the earth as it sees fit. Putting aside the religious interpretations and just focusing on that natural cycle theory, they just may be right… for the wrong reason.

The fact is, “Warming rocked the Earth before. But today it’s worse… At the end of the last ice age, the rate of climate change was roughly 10 times slower than now — and it wiped out species.” According to Michael E Mann – presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania – writing for the September 24th Los Angeles Times. A visit to the famous La Brea Tar Pits here in Los Angeles can certainly confirm the death of many of these now extinct mammals in the transition ending the great Ice Age. That was indeed a global warming event that man had nothing to do with. Indeed, as climate change deniers have correctly maintained, our planet has indeed survived dramatic warming before… and one way or the other, it will again. But there’s a catch. An incalculable number of plant and animal life perished then, some adapted, but even the shape of the earth itself changed.

Will mankind survive? Adapt? Will the earth reshape? Yes, to all of these. But it will not be pretty, and that is assuming that we are unable to stop and reverse global warming under so many mantels of denial, from those enumerated above to the momentum of “progress” itself, the unwillingness to accept inconvenience, the power of profits and the joy we seem to enjoy by reveling in ignorance and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, there are no real signs that our planet will actually do what is necessary to sustain life as we know it. Mann continues with some hard, scientific reminders:

“What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet.

“Consider the warming event that paleoclimatologists point to as the best natural comparison for the rapid greenhouse-driven trend we’re seeing now. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum happened 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, which itself was caused by climate change (a massive asteroid impact event led to a global dust storm and, in turn, rapid cooling). The PETM warming resulted from an unusually large and rapid injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Global temperatures increased by approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit in as little as 10,000 years, rising from an already steamy baseline of 80 degrees Fahrenheit possibly up to a sauna-like 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

“That warming rate of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit per century is extremely rapid by geological standards. But it’s still roughly 10 times slower than the warming today.

“The impact event and Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were, ironically, fortuitous for humans: They paved the way for our ancestors. The extinction of the dinosaurs (except the ancestors of birds) created a new niche for early mammals, and the stifling conditions of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum selected for small, arboreal mammals, including the oldest primate identified clearly by fossil materials, a primitive lemur-like creature named Dryomomys. Without either of these two events, our species likely wouldn’t have arrived at this moment — in contrast to the current warming, which plenty of evidence shows is a threat to our existence.

“Extinctions followed another warming period in our more recent past, when the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago. Driven by Earth’s changing orbit relative to the sun, and boosted by a heightened greenhouse effect as warming oceans gave up their carbon dioxide in the same way an open bottle of warm soda loses carbonation, the planet warmed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the subsequent 8,000 years.”

We’re doing what took thousands of years as the ice age passed in about two centuries… and we are right smack in the middle of it, perhaps past or close to the tipping point where no matter what we do; the pattern of releasing greenhouse gasses will simply feed on itself. Look at what happens at that tipping point. We know that white reflects heat, and dark absorbs it. So as glaciers and polar ice melt, that white ice is replaced with darker ocean water or land mass. So, the planet absorbs more heat rather naturally. That lovely permafrost (tundra), which has encased the rotting plant and animal life (that gives us oil deposits as well) also holds the methane that that decomposition created… would continue to be released into the atmosphere whether we continue burning fossil fuels or not. That methane has about 23 times more ozone-layer blocking power than carbon dioxide is very troublesome.

Mann is a tad more optimistic: “What finished off the dinosaurs and the mastodons was a climate that shifted too rapidly away from what they were adapted to, in the first case cooling and the other case warming. That’s our challenge today… Can our big brains save us this time? They can if we make proper use of them and learn the lessons offered by Earth’s past… The end result is that we can trust these models to peer into our climate future. They tell us that we can avoid a catastrophic trajectory for our global climate if we reduce carbon emissions substantially over the next decade. So this fragile moment in which we find ourselves is in fact a critical juncture.” We can blame other countries, allow well-heeled corporate lobbyists to prevail or… we can lead and solve.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while politicians and their rabid supporters can rail and protest, they cannot change the laws of physics; nature just does not care!