David Grinspoon Quote
Since, as I’ve indicated, we don’t fully understand the mechanism by which the orbital Milanković forcing causes large climate swings, there is a lot of uncertainty here. The last warm interglacial before the one we’re in now, the Eemian, about one hundred twenty-five thousand years ago, lasted for about ten thousand years. This length is typical. Most of these warm periods persist for roughly the length that ours has already lasted. Yet the one we’re in now seems to be weird, and not just because of us. Some models predict that, without human interference, the ice would return within fifteen thousand or twenty thousand years. Others suggest that, due to Earth’s orbit currently being in a phase of low eccentricity—meaning
Since, as I’ve indicated, we don’t fully understand the mechanism by which the orbital Milanković forcing causes large climate swings, there is a lot of uncertainty here. The last warm interglacial before the one we’re in now, the Eemian, about one hundred twenty-five thousand years ago, lasted for about ten thousand years. This length is typical. Most of these warm periods persist for roughly the length that ours has already lasted. Yet the one we’re in now seems to be weird, and not just because of us. Some models predict that, without human interference, the ice would return within fifteen thousand or twenty thousand years. Others suggest that, due to Earth’s orbit currently being in a phase of low eccentricity—meaning