As shown on the chart below, Earth has been prone to extreme climate variations over the past 450,000 years. We see numerous ups and downs, mostly ice ages (Glacials), alongside periodic warm intervals.

The important thing to notice, however, is that the climate is almost never stable — except, for some reason, during the past ~11,700 years. And that's where we are today, within the current geological epoch, which scientists call the Holocene.

So, what caused this unusual flattening out of those climate variations?

It turns out we did. Humans did, via unintentional geoengineering.

Albert Bates explains it this way --
https://medium.com/the-shadow/a-science-bomb-cyclone-for-the-new-year-ead342259ae2
_________________________

Humans have been geoengineering the climate for at least 8000 years.

The reason we are not entering another ice age now and had all those millennia of gorgeous, predictable weather and unvarying coastlines upon which to build cities and found civilizations was because we warmed the Earth ever so slightly by conversion of forest to farm starting 8000 years ago and the methane released by rice farming starting 6000 years ago. We also mined and burned peat, killed the great whales that ran the deep ocean carbon mixing, and domesticated animals.

We accidentally achieved a beneficial climate stasis for the first time in Earth’s history. But we just couldn’t leave well enough alone. We had to dig and drill up Earth’s stores of fossil carbon and litter the atmosphere and ocean with that, which is what got us into our present predicament.
_________________________

That predicament he refers to is global heating, the climate emergency. As I'm sure you know, CO2 in the atmosphere is off the charts and temperatures are rising fast.

Things have already changed so much, in fact, that many scientists believe the Holocene has ended and that we now live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

Can we survive these changes? Or will humans have to live (and die) with the embarrassing realization that we once lived in paradise, then burned it up?

#GlobalHeating #ClimateEmergency #geoengineering