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Thought of the month ...

April 2013: Coal mining is digging humanity's grave: The recent Science paper by Marcott et al. (see e.g. this blog or the Eureka Alert) makes it clear (again!): within a hundred years, we have pushed the global temperature from a long-time minimum to a long-time maximum, where long-time means 11,000 years. The temperature curve for the last 11,000 years shows that the last 100 years are indicative of a run-away planet, comparable to a truck running downhill with no working brakes. The key climate parameter equivalent to the increasing speed of this truck, or the run-away planet, is atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is already outside its range of natural variability during the last 1 Million years, and expected to leave this range by a factor of three before the end of the century. Like the run-away truck reaching a speed outside its normal range, until it crashes violently, our planet will reach states outside the range experienced during the last 1 Million years. It is not unlikely that humanity will not be able to exist in these states. If so, we can safely assume that coal mining, one of the main contributors to atmospheric carbon dioxide, were one of the most energetic gravedigger of humanity.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.