Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
How hot can Earth get? Our planet's climate history holds clues [View all]
By Elise Cutts
JULY 17, 2025 AT 9:00 AM
Our species likes it cold.
Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths but by ice caps at the poles. For most of its 4.5-billion-year history, our planet was too warm for polar ice. Tyrannosaurus rex’s steamy Cretaceous kingdom 66 million years ago was in many ways a more representative slice of history than our own. Back then, reefs blanketed the beds of shallow seas as warm as bathwater, and jungle creatures watched the southern lights dance behind gaps in the thick canopies of Antarctic rainforests.
--more--
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-history-earth-warming
JULY 17, 2025 AT 9:00 AM
Our species likes it cold.
Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths but by ice caps at the poles. For most of its 4.5-billion-year history, our planet was too warm for polar ice. Tyrannosaurus rex’s steamy Cretaceous kingdom 66 million years ago was in many ways a more representative slice of history than our own. Back then, reefs blanketed the beds of shallow seas as warm as bathwater, and jungle creatures watched the southern lights dance behind gaps in the thick canopies of Antarctic rainforests.
--more--
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-history-earth-warming
This is an excellent deep dive into geologic time and what the past might tell us about the future.
What folly it was to trash the unique environment we humans evolved in, but no worries, our fossil fueled civilization is unsustainable and will be gone, from the perspective of geological time, in a blink of an eye.
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read