I learned some new stuff about climate change today that I think is interesting.


If we released *all* the carbon trapped in *all* the fossil fuels and put it into the air, well... That's technically where the Carbon came from in the first place. I.e. this isn't "new," geologically speaking.

The rise and fall of average temperatures on Earth is a well-catalogued "cycle". Cycle in quotes 'cause it's pretty random looking, but does go up and down quite a lot. Global temperatures have been much warmer than our projections in the past - while there was life on Earth doing dinosaur things and other things.

The troubling thing about the current trend of warming isn't that global temperatures haven't been that warm before (even in the worst case projections). It's that in the past, the temperature changes happened over centuries or millennia, not over decades. The rapid pace of change puts pressure on every economy, not just human economies, but ecological economies.


Sea levels could rise up to 230 ft if all the ice trapped in glaciers melts. Different coast lines wont matter all that much. The rapid changes don't allow biological evolution the time to catch up, though. This will lead to a large reduction in biodiversity.

The effects on the food chains will be unpredictable, but humans have pretty well secured our food chains by now. We may have to adapt what we grow where, but we do have all that figured out well enough to sustain huge populations, even on a warmer planet.