POPULAR MECHANICS - Like all of us, the Earth goes through phases. Over the course of its existence, the planet’s climactic processes have relied on certain mechanisms to regulate its temperature—mechanisms that can have profound impacts on the surface of the planet and, in turn, the life that inhabits that surface. During the Jurassic period, for example, the Earth was so warm that Antarctica was home to temperate rainforests. Rewind the evolutionary clock a couple hundred million years to the Cryogenian (720 to 635 million years ago), and Earth was essentially a giant snowball—an example of when Earth’s natural regulatory systems went a bit haywire.
Today, the Earth is experiencing a warming period unlike any other. The Jurassic, which was warm due to high levels of atmospheric carbon, reached its sweltering temperatures gradually, whereas anthropogenic climate change has caused much more rapid shifts—so rapid, in fact, that certain climactic changes have been discernible even within the average human lifespan.
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“At the end of the day, does it really matter much if the start of the next ice age is 50, 100, or 200 thousand years into the future?” Andy Ridgwell, Professor of Geology at UC Riverside, said in a press statement. “We need to focus now on limiting ongoing warming. That the Earth will naturally cool back down is not going to happen fast enough to help us out.”