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At about the time our great-grandchildren have children, we humans will probably have had an unprecedented climatic record for 56 million years.
New research has shown that humans release almost 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than what was emitted during the Earth's last major warming event, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). .
If carbon emissions continue to increase in the future, mathematical models predict that over the next 100 years we may be faced with another PETM event.
In other words, in the near future, the Earth may resemble its distant past: at a time when the Arctic was ice-free, inhabited by crocodiles and dotted with palm trees.
"You and I will not be here in 2159, but there are only four generations left," warns Philip Gingerich, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Michigan.
"When you start thinking about your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren, you're about to do it."
PETM is often used as a reference for current global warming. During this period, rapid climate change transformed landscapes, acidified the oceans and triggered widespread extinctions.
The world has taken more than 150,000 years to recover, but what happened at that time has nothing to do with what is happening now.
Global temperatures during the PETM peaked at about 7 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above the current average, and we are quickly reaching those highs.
The new study suggests that if nothing changes, within 140 years, humans could evacuate the same amount of greenhouse gases emitted throughout the PETM.
"The fact that we can achieve equivalent PETM warming very quickly, in the next few hundred years, is terrifying," says Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the new study. .
It's terrifying because we're coming out of the road map. Today, climate scientists use PETM as a case study of what global warming could do on our planet and when these changes are predictable.
But as useful as it has been, we live in a different world today. While it is thought that the PETM comes from a comet or a volcano, our current climate catastrophe is mostly fueled by humans, at a rate never seen in Earth's climate records.
This is also happening in the middle of what should be a downward trend, at a time when the world is overflowing with different species and ecosystems.
With all these variable factors, new research suggests that the use of PETM as an indicator of current warming may not be as useful in the future.
"Given the following hypothesis for the future, current carbon emission rates are unprecedented, even in the context of an event like PETM," says Gabriel Bowen, a geophysicist at University of Utah, who was not connected to the new study.
"We do not have many geological examples from which we can understand how the world reacts to this type of disturbance."
It looks like our descendants are alone.
This study was published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.
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