PBS Terra's Weathered asks 'Earth's Temperature Has Changed WILDLY, So What's the Big Deal About a Few Degrees?'

I'm working on the posts about Emmy Awards winners I promised twice. In the meantime, I'm sharing PBS Terra's Weathered asking Earth's Temperature Has Changed WILDLY, So What's the Big Deal About a Few Degrees?

If you take a look at global temperature graphs that span millions or billions of years, you can see that our planet’s temperature has made wild swings. In fact, the Earth used to be completely covered in snow and ice! So, what’s the big deal about a few degrees of warming today? In this episode of Weathered, we take a deep dive into Earth’s climate history in order to better understand our current moment.

This video connects to what I wrote in PBS Digital's Be Smart debunks 'The Biggest Myth About Climate Change'.

I have mentioned several times that I'm a paleontologist who studies Pleistocene fossils, particularly snails. What I don't mention is that I used data from the snails, clams, and plants of Rancho La Brea to reconstruct the late Pleistocene climate of southern California, so I'm quite familiar with natural climate change.

I'm also familiar with the story that Michael Mann tells. I haven't mentioned "Snowball Earth" here before, although PBS Eons has a video about it, but I have blogged about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), calling it "the end of an epoch — literally, as it ended the Paleocene with the Eocene beginning when it abated" and "an event that, as rapid as it was, happened much more slowly than modern climate change."* I also mentioned the high levels of carbon dioxide and its effect on life, writing that "[I]f there is an endless supply of oil, then we'll be content to burn us [it--my Freudian slip was showing] until we reach Jurassic level[s] of carbon dioxide and global warm temperatures. As I also tell my students, that was a great world for dinosaurs, but there weren't any people in it." It's also why I also tell them about uncontrolled climate change, "Life will persist, but humanity would be clobbered." This goes double for our current civilization.

The correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature from ice-core data is another story I tell my students. I asked them about it in my worksheets about An Inconvenient Truth and still ask them about it in my worksheet for Chasing Ice. I also ask them about it on my exams, but for test security reasons, I don't post those here. Maybe after I retire.

The video ends with a peek at solutions. PBS Terra has another video about how "there is no free lunch" when it comes to those. Stay tuned for that among all the awards show coverage.

*Maybe I should compose an entry featuring the "Snowball Earth" video — when I get a break from awards season and presidential primaries. That could be as early as Thursday, or not until the end of the month.