Scientists: What We're Doing To The Earth Has No Parallel In 66 Million Years (washingtonpost.com)

mspohr writes from an article on The Washington Post: We haven't seen this much CO2 added to the atmosphere in 66 million years: "If you look over the entire Cenozoic, the last 66 million years, the only event that we know of at the moment, that has a massive carbon release, and happens over a relatively short period of time, is the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)," says Zeebe. "We actually have to go back to relatively old periods, because in the more recent past, we don't see anything comparable to what humans are currently doing." [New research suggests, even the drama of the PETM falls short of our current period, in at least one key respect: We're putting carbon into the atmosphere at an even faster rate than happened back then.] "The anthropogenic release outpaces carbon release during the most extreme global warming event of the past 66 million years, by at least an order of magnitude," writes Peter Stassen, an Earth and environmental scientist at KU Leuven, in Belgium, in an accompanying commentary on the new study. "Given that the current rate of carbon release is unprecedented throughout the Cenozoic, we have effectively entered an era of a no-analogue state, which represents a fundamental challenge to constraining future climate projections," the study concludes.

Comments

Re:Notice how all dissenting views get modded to -

[MightyMartian]

Ah, the denying fucktards with mod points are out in force. Imagine being so fucking childish and retarded that you think the laws of physics should give your preferred ideology a leg up.

The Universe doesn't fucking care about your SUV or whether the fucking Koch Brothers make a profit this year. It will fuck up our climate quite happily, particularly when we help it fucking trap huge amounts of solar radiation in the fucking atmosphere because we're barfing out long-sequestered CO2, at least half a billion years worth, in the space of three fucking centuries.

Re:Questioning isn't "denying"; it's science!

[MightyMartian]

There is no fucking Marxism in the US. Jesus fucking christ, pal. The US hasn't had a meaningfully Marxist movement since the 19 fucking 30s. Even in Europe, the number of real live walking talking Marxists in any particular institution is incredibly small.

The right wingers aren't going to buy AGW simply because there's only one long-term solution, and that's to stop vomiting megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere from fossil fuels. The solutions boil down to "don't use fossil fuels". Since that is a threat to a current business model, automatically anyone who makes that suggestion is a "Marxist" to the Heartland Institute and all the halfwits in places like /. that repeat their memes.

It doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Within the next couple of decades, it will be irrefutable even to the most wide-eyed Ron Paulite. Of course, by that point, the economic damage will be enormous, and the cost of dealing with the effects will be huge. But by that point the big energy players will have enough money sitting in the bank to isolate themselves, which is what this is really about.