Who Cares About Global Warming?

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 08/16/14

Dr. Conca reports that long-term changes in global and local temperatures kill animals. Plants, too. We geologists have a good understanding of changes in global temperatures through time and some things are pretty clear. First, major climatic changes have happened over and over again for the last billion years. Whenever it occurs, there follows lots and lots of death. Second, it is not about the absolute temperature or the absolute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It is about the rate of change. Temperatures have been much higher many times in the past. Atmospheric CO2 levels have been much higher than today, many times in the past. Third, we are in a major glacial period, and have been for the last 10 million years. CO2 levels are quite low relative to much of the past. Major glaciations like the present have occurred about ten other times in Earth history Conca suggests. Be careful in reading this famous hockey-stick graph as the time scale is vastly different for each of the five general time segments, going from hundreds of millions of years per segment, to millions of years, to thousands of years, as the more recent periods have greater detail in the data. The Earth goes through minor changes often within these overall cold or hot periods. So we should not be worried since this is all natural, right? Wrong....