Earlier today, DKos member Pakalolo, with this diary, brought our attention to new research that suggests we have less time to reverse the effects of carbon combustion than we had previously estimated.
Actually, it appears we’re essentially out of time-- we need to zero out carbon combustion immediately. And on cue, the Trump/GOP cabal is undercutting renewables.
And now it seems even the climate models that offer the least optimistic estimates of how much the earth is warming, may still be too optimistic:
A new international analysis of marine fossils shows that warming of the polar oceans during the Eocene, a greenhouse period that provides a glimpse of Earth’s potential future climate, was greater than previously thought…
Importantly, when modern climate models – the same as those used in the United Nations’ recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports – were run under Eocene conditions, many could not replicate these findings. Instead, the models consistently underestimated polar ocean warming in the Eocene…
“Yes, the tropics are warming but nowhere near to the same degree as the polar regions,” Evans said. “That’s something we really need to be able to understand and replicate in climate models. The fact that many models are unable to do that at the moment is worrying.” (emphasis added)
Perhaps we should start brushing up on some scientific terminology:
An extinction event (also extinction-level event, ELE) occurs when a large number of species die out in a relatively short period of time.