The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme-climate-change-history/617793/

Source:  By Peter Brannen, The Atlantic. 

Excerpt: Our climate models could be missing something big. ...Taking in the whole sweep of Earth’s history, now we see how unnatural, nightmarish, and profound our current experiment on the planet really is. A small population of our particular species of primate has, in only a few decades, unlocked a massive reservoir of old carbon slumbering in the Earth, gathering since the dawn of life, and set off on a global immolation of Earth’s history to power the modern world. As a result, up to half of the tropical coral reefs on Earth have died, 10 trillion tons of ice have melted, the ocean has grown 30 percent more acidic, and global temperatures have spiked. ...The next few fleeting moments are ours, but they will echo for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. This is one of the most important times to be alive in the history of life.... 

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