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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Curt Stager of Paul Smith's College reveals how the climate change we feel today will shape the Earth for the next 100,000 years.
Since 1997, Curt Stager has been a professor at Paul Smith's College where his research interests include lake ecology, climate change, biology, geology, evolution, paleoecology, and science journalism. His latest book, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life On Earth, was published in March of 2011. Stager also holds a research associate post at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute.
Dr. Curt Stager - Climate Change and the Deep Future
Most discussions of global warming look only as far ahead as 2100 AD, but what happens after that? A new generation of climate models shows that our fossil fuel emissions will disrupt climates for much longer than most of us yet realize. Even in the most moderate scenario, the world won't fully recover for tens of thousands of years.
What will life in that deep future be like? As with any change of this magnitude, some will lose and some will win. As ringed seals and polar bears lose out, harbor seals and brown bears will move in to replace them. Although coastlines will sink under rising seas, we've also prevented the next continent-crushing ice age, and Greenlanders may benefit from the de-icing of their nation. But this is only part of the story: as the Earth finally starts to cool down again, "climate whiplash" will force people, animals, and plants to reverse their adaptive strategies. Losers may then become winners and vice versa - but exactly how the future plays out is up to us as we search for a sane, sustainable path forward.
In this new, long-term view, we live at a critical time in history, when our choices will determine the Earth's climatic future for millennia to come. If we switch soon to non-fossil fuels, we'll prevent the most severe changes; but what if we don't do it in time and trigger a super-greenhouse? It's not just fantasy - it has happened before, long before humans came into the picture. Imagine a planet 20 degrees warmer than now with lush polar forests, sea levels 200 feet higher than today, and acidic oceans. These are just some of the choices we'll make on behalf of our descendants in this new geologic epoch, what some are now calling the Anthropocene, or the "Age of Humans."