Tuesday, February 9, 2016

The World Tomorrow




Despite (or perhaps because of) how adaptable humans are, we tend to have a hard time planing for the future.  This hinders our ability to grapple with issues that have no or few immediate impacts, but that potentially have big long term ones.  Climate change is one of these issues.  Even climate scientists and policy makers who are thinking about the long term impacts of climate change tend to have a short frame of reference relative to the history of life on the planet.  A paper that just came out in Nature Climate Change, tries to broaden our time horizon a bit.  It summarizes some of the predictions for what a warmer world (caused by us now) will look like 10,000 years from now.  You can read the actual article here: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2923.html

and a news summary from the Washington Post here:

http://wpo.st/JBGA1

That story has a cool video from NASA showing actual data on the more recent sea level changes that have already happened over the last 23 years.