Carbon has n’t entered our atm this quickly in at least 66 million years — since an asteroid thrash into our planet and wiped out the dinosaur , or perhaps even earlier . Our addiction to fossil fuel has pushed the planet into a “ no - analogue ” state that ’s “ likely to result in widespread future extinction , ” an exceedingly humorless cogitation publish today inNature Geoscienceconcludes .
It ’s no enigma that industrial society is racking up a serious atomic number 6 account , nor that our CO2 emanation — roughly2,000 billion tonssince the scratch of the industrial rotation — arewarming and changing the planet . But to understand just how exceptional this moment in Earth ’s account is , we need to depend at the geological record .
That ’s what Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his co-worker did , and what they found is really terrifying . modernistic carbon emissions outpace anything our satellite has take in over the integral Cenozoic — the period that begin after the K - T experimental extinction — by at least a factor of ten .
For a long time , geologist have study thePalaeocene – Eocene Thermal Maximum(PETM ) a close analogue to New orbicular heating . Fifty - six million year ago as the supercontinent Pangea was breaking aside , world temperature rose at least 5 degrees Celsius ( 9 degrees Fahrenheit ) , peradventure due to a massive liberation of methane from the seafloor . But the timescale of mellow C emissions during the PETM is n’t well known : did all that methane gush skywards over the course of decades , or did it leak tardily for thousands of twelvemonth ? answer that question can help us check whether the PETM really was comparable to the nowadays .
In their study , Zeebe and his colleagues re - judge the carbon-13 and oxygen-18 isotope records — which cover atmospheric carbon paper concentrations and globose temperature , respectively — from deposit cores collected on the New Jersey coast . They learned that atomic number 6 discharge and worldwide warming come about intimately at the same time during the PETM , suggesting a slow sack of glasshouse gases . ( If billions of tons of methane had pour out of the ground in a sudden fusillade , Earth ’s mood would have taken some clock time to take in up . )
Using climate and carbon copy cycle models , the researchers calculated that somewhere between 2,000 and 4,500 billion tons of carbon were released over a period of at least 4,000 years . The annual emissions rate was somewhere between 0.6 and 1.1 billion ton per year .
Today , humanity is unload 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year — and that rate isstill go up , despite ourrecent resolution to cease fossil fuel consumptionthis century . We ’re emit carbon paper way , agency faster than the major planet was during the PETM .
And if the most abrupt global thaw episode of the Cenozoic does n’t measure up to the nowadays ?
Well , we have to look even deeper into the geologic past . At the KB - T boundary 66 million years ago , a six - mile wide asteroid slammed into the planet with the military group of a billion Hiroshima bombs , recoil off a period of acute volcanic activitythat lasted roughly a half million years . It ’s possible that this dramatic chapter in Earth ’s story saw a comparable carbon press release . But we ca n’t be sure . “ It ’s not well known if or how much carbon paper was released [ at the K - T boundary ] , ” Zeebe secernate Gizmodo in an email , adding that “ geologic platter are receive increasingly bad for old events . ”
Still , it ’s unsettling to think that we ca n’t find any comparison to the present since the dinosaurs kicked the bucket . The author mark that life during the PETM would have had some time to accommodate to globular climate change and sea acidification , break the wearisome rise in atmospheric C concentrations . life history during the nowadays ? possibly not so much .
“ If anthropogenic emission rate have no analog in Earth ’s recent history , then unforeseeable future responses of the climate system are potential , ” the researchers drop a line .
If I had to make a prediction ? We ’re going the way of the dinosaur .
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