by Ponderer on September 21, 2024 7:50 am

Really good article, me. Thanks!


But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.

In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.


For some time now, Donna and I have been of the opinion, from everything we've seen, that even if the "volcanoes" of fossil fuels being dumped into the atmosphere were to all stop today... it's simply too late. The feedback loop mechanisms that have been put into motion will not stop now, even if all of humanity dropped dead later this afternoon and all fossil fuel burning stopped entirely.

We are still totally in favor of switching to renewable energy. We're about to get solar on our home in fact. We should at least try to make the world as habitable as possible for whatever time humanity has left. Trying to lessen our catastrophic impact on our ecosystem is always a good thing. Even when it's hopeless.