Kickin' It Old School
You gotta admit, however kickass our man-made Global Warming is becoming, it's still nothing compared to the massive Global Warming at the beginning of the Eocene period, 55 million years ago. For reasons apparently not yet understood, trillions of tons of carbon were dumped into the atmosphere over several thousand years, causing tens of thousands of years of atmospheric changes, oceanic upheaval, extinctions, and flora & fauna turnover.
I didn't know about any of this before reading about it just now. It's like the musical scene, man: everyone can sing the contemporary climate-change tunes that got popular, but no one knows about the hard-core early roots when "Global Warming" still meant something dangerous and new. Like changing all the oceanic circulation patterns, and putting jungles in northern Canada, and so forth.
Anyway: Here's what taught me about this, a very cool and vivid account from science writer Carl Zimmer, focused on the Eocene spread of early primates. This is also a neat portrayal of different scientific disciplines coming together to bear on a common point of study. (I recommend Zimmer's blog, which is mostly about evolution; I came across it recently and it's consistently fascinating.) Wikipedia is also informative.
It's worth mentioning that the scope of carbon release & concentration was vastly greater in the early Eocene than today — up to 2–3,000 ppm of CO2 in the air, compared to our current 380 ppm. So, even with our own troubling warming-feedback issues (let's pull something off the internet: here), we're obviously not doing the same thing yet. (This, in turn, is not to say that our own smaller-scale Global Warming problem won't cause us unpredictable and potentially huge problems, especially given population pressure.)
I think it's pretty awe-inspiring to think about these kinds of natural upheavals. The idea of tropical trees spreading up through North America over 10,000 years is pretty wild.
Also, when you're talking about timeframes beyond the reasonable expected lifetime of human civilization as we know it, you're more apt to get a "Life Goes On" vibe from the thought of the same thing happening again, even if we do manage to touch off something of this eventual scale and duration.
I didn't know about any of this before reading about it just now. It's like the musical scene, man: everyone can sing the contemporary climate-change tunes that got popular, but no one knows about the hard-core early roots when "Global Warming" still meant something dangerous and new. Like changing all the oceanic circulation patterns, and putting jungles in northern Canada, and so forth.
Anyway: Here's what taught me about this, a very cool and vivid account from science writer Carl Zimmer, focused on the Eocene spread of early primates. This is also a neat portrayal of different scientific disciplines coming together to bear on a common point of study. (I recommend Zimmer's blog, which is mostly about evolution; I came across it recently and it's consistently fascinating.) Wikipedia is also informative.
It's worth mentioning that the scope of carbon release & concentration was vastly greater in the early Eocene than today — up to 2–3,000 ppm of CO2 in the air, compared to our current 380 ppm. So, even with our own troubling warming-feedback issues (let's pull something off the internet: here), we're obviously not doing the same thing yet. (This, in turn, is not to say that our own smaller-scale Global Warming problem won't cause us unpredictable and potentially huge problems, especially given population pressure.)
I think it's pretty awe-inspiring to think about these kinds of natural upheavals. The idea of tropical trees spreading up through North America over 10,000 years is pretty wild.
Also, when you're talking about timeframes beyond the reasonable expected lifetime of human civilization as we know it, you're more apt to get a "Life Goes On" vibe from the thought of the same thing happening again, even if we do manage to touch off something of this eventual scale and duration.
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