“If you look over the entire … last 66 million years, the only event that we know of … that has a massive carbon release and happens over a relatively short period of time is the PETM. We actually have to go back to relatively old periods. Because in the more recent past, we don’t see anything [even remotely] comparable to what humans are currently doing.” Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii in a recent paper published in Nature.
*****
(Annual human carbon emissions are about 150 times that of all the volcanoes on the Earth, 10 times faster than a hothouse extinction that occurred 55.8 million years ago. Image source: La Rosa Rossa.)
Let’s be very clear. The human fossil fuel emission is outrageous and unprecedented on geological timescales. An insult the Earth has likely never seen before. For the pace at which we are…
View original post 844 more words
