In an excerpt from his new book ‘Our Fragile Moment’ renowned climate scientist Michael Mann explains the dangers of our rapidly warming future by looking into the lesson of our planet&…
A billboard displays a temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit during a record heat wave in Phoenix, Arizona on July 18, 2023. It was the 17th straight day above 109 degrees Fahrenheit.the warmest summer on record, many are understandably wondering just how hot it could get? Perhaps there are some clues in Earth’s past.
Over a large part of the planet, it would have been both very hot and very humid. That’s a bad combination. The old cliché is that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” but as anyone who has been to Las Vegas in August will tell you, that’s not true. It’s both. In fact, the best measure of susceptibility to heat stress combines temperature and humidity into a single variable. It is called the wet bulb temperature.
Some of my own research involves looking at climate model projections to assess the potential for severe heat exposure in the United States. My collaborators and I recently examined simulations used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to project future changes in heat stress accounting for both heat and humidity.
We see some dramatic examples during the PETM. Horses, which had only recently appeared on the scene, shrunk by thirty percent in size . It would be tempting to conclude that the warming therefore wasn’t a big deal. They just adapted, after all. Much as some critics of climate action insist that we will just “adapt” to the impacts of climate change.
The program featured a family who found themselves trapped in a bizarre subterranean land inhabited by dinosaurs, Ewok-like ape people called Pakuni, and malevolent lizard people called Sleestak. The Sleestak descended from a once peaceful and advanced race of reptilian bipedal humanoids , but degenerated over time into the primitive, barbaric individuals who inhabited the ruins of their once great civilization.
Perhaps there is something archetypal about the notion of an intelligent civilization gone extinct under enigmatic circumstances. Maybe tales of this sort trigger something deep down in our own primitive lizard brains, some instinctual sense of our tenuousness on this pale blue dot we call home.
In 2017, Adam Frank paid a visit to Schmidt, a climate modeler. He was interested in the related astrobiological question of whether prospective industrial civilizations that arise on other planets might extinguish themselves through fossil fuel–driven warming. As I’ve learned from numerous conversations and collaborations over the years, Gavin Schmidt is an outside-the-box thinker. He’s also a devil’s advocate.
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