A Hot Wet Thousand Years and 10 Green Energy Stories to Avert it

The bad news is that I’ve been reading David Archer’s The Long Thaw on climate change projections, and he thinks that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been way too conservative. As I understand him, his research shows that because of massive carbon emissions produced by human beings, by 2100 the average temperature of the earth’s surface will likely increase by 3 degrees C. But, he thinks that thereafter it will go on up another 2 degrees, for a total of 5 over the next few generations. The last time you had a climate 5 degree C. warmer than our prehistoric climate was the Eocene, 40 million years ago. All surface ice melted and the climate was tropical all the way to the poles.

We don’t actually know if there has ever been such a rapid increase in carbon in the atmosphere (there have been occasional periods in geological time when the earth warmed up similarly, as with the Eocene, but it is impossible to know at the moment over what time period that occurred). Human beings nowadays are carbon-spewers on steroids.