Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy
Although the current 413 ppm CO2 in our atmosphere may have been experienced as recently as the Miocene ten to fifteen million years ago, we have yet to see some of the radical effects of such a CO2 level. Seas were a hundred feet higher, and average surface temperatures were 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the Miocene. One explanation may be that nowhere can we find a rate of change (upper 200s ppm to lower 400s ppm of CO2 over a period of a couple hundred years) as rapid as this, as far as we know, in the past three and a half billion years that life has been present on planet Earth.
Because of this blink-of-the-eye rise (geologically speaking), there may be a significant lag time before the Earth starts to once again look like the Miocene. Because we are so short-lived, we scoff at people that warn us of these future changes. Yet, when these changes come along we think of them as normal because that’s the way it’s been most of our lives. This life span problem is a major disadvantage to our species. It ranks up there with greed and stupidity.
If we do manage to transition to lower CO2 levels and successfully reverse climate change, we should then be ever vigilant of our greenhouse gas outputs and our use, or misuse, of energy.
