'If the world ends in 2100, we’re probably OK' [View all]

[chervilant]

There’s a myopia in the climate discourse today.

“Everyone is focused on what happens by 2100. But that’s only 2 generations from today. It’s like: If the world ends in 2100 we’re probably OK!” says Professor Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawai’i. “But It’s very clear that over a longer timescale there will be much bigger changes.”

If the next century seems impossibly far off, bear in mind that if you have a young child now, we’re talking about the world her or his grandchildren will be trying to raise their kids in.

Scientists who take the long view on climate change see parallels between global warming today and mass extinctions in Earth’s past: “Apart from the stupid space rock hitting the Earth, most mass extinctions were CO2-driven global warming things,” says Professor Andy Ridgwell of Bristol University in the UK.

It has been a consistent pattern throughout geological time: “If you screw with the climate enough, you have huge extinctions,” says Ridgwell.

For more, go to this edition of Skeptical Science.