The ongoing phenomenon of climate change is a big problem for environmental scientists and world leaders alike, and more and more studies are coming out, claiming that the problem is worse than it’s ever been before.
The ongoing phenomenon of climate change is a big problem for environmental scientists and world leaders alike, and more and more studies are coming out, claiming that the problem is worse than it’s ever been before. One new study goes as far as saying that the climate change we’re encountering now is much worse than it was about 66 million years ago, right after the time dinosaurs became extinct.
According to scientists, carbon emissions into the atmosphere are being released ten times faster than back in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which some researchers have pegged as the era closest to present times in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Back in that era, the highest rate of carbon dioxide emissions was at about 4.4 billion tons during a peak year. But recent figures show that about 40.8 billion tons of CO2 were released in 2014.
“As far as we know, the PETM has the largest carbon release during the past 66 million years,” said lead author Richard Zeebe of the Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii. “Because our carbon release rate is unprecedented over such a long time period in Earth’s history, it also means that we have effectively entered a ‘no-analogue’ state. This represents a big challenge for projecting future climate changes because we have no good comparison from the past.”
Although man-made carbon emissions in present times completely trump those during the PETM, there are still many parallels as far as the impact of carbon pollution is concerned. And these include a great extinction event from 56 million years ago, where mostly sea creatures were dying off, and what researchers call the “sixth great extinction,” one that is currently ongoing in both sea and land.
“Of all the changes we have seen in 66 million years, this event is the one that most looks like anthropogenic, or man-made, warming,” said study co-author Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol in England. He added that more research needs to be done on how quickly the emissions occurred, and when exactly the PETM extinction event took place.
Speaking to The Christian Science Monitor , Columbia University researcher Bärbel Hönisch, who was not involved in the study, also warned that climate change could lead to a more dramatic extinction event than what happened during the PETM.
“We don’t have an analogue but we do have a comparison that tells us that we can create extreme changes on the planet,” she said, adding that what modern people are doing is “much more extreme” than what had previously happened. “The implication of that is, first of all, we don’t know where this is going to take us, we can’t make really good projections, but they’re probably going to be larger than what we’ve seen at the PETM.”