06 May 2005

This oughtta scare ya

From The New Yorker: Annals of Science: The Climate of Man - II, May 2, 2005:

...By studying Antarctic ice cores, researchers have been able to piece together a record both of the earth's temperature and of the composition of its atmosphere going back four full glacial cycles. (...) What this record shows is that the planet is now nearly as warm as it has been at any point in the last four hundred thousand years. A possible consequence of even a four- or five-degree temperature rise -- on the low end of projections for doubled CO2 -- is that the world will enter a completely new climate regime, one with which modern humans have no prior experience.
...
A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me -- only half jokingly -- this way: "It's true that we've had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs."

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