Bruce Scofield: Must not ignore rapid warming, transfer of carbon

Published: 05-05-2017 7:48 PM

Must not ignore rapid warming, carbon transfer

In his guest column, Dennis Burke points out correctly that long-term climate cycles, based on orbital variations, exist and that climates have changed slowly over time. We can indeed use the past as a model for the future.

What he doesn’t get right is that if we refer to past periods in this model that correspond to the present interglacial we live in, the Northern Hemisphere should now be very slowly getting cooler. But there is overwhelming evidence that a pronounced and rapid warming trend that includes sea-level rise, Arctic sea-ice melt and numerous biosphere disruptions began at about the same time humans began to move massive amounts of buried carbon (coal, oil, gas) to the atmosphere (by burning fossil fuels).

To put this in perspective, humans are injecting perhaps as much as a million years worth of ancient buried carbon (from plants and algae) into the atmosphere every year. This is not a natural cycle, it is a potentially dangerous experiment.

To ignore just these two facts alone — recent well-documented rapid warming and a massive transfer of carbon to the atmosphere — and to not connect them, is reckless and irresponsible.

Bruce Scofield

Amherst

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