Diverse species of living things are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Carbon dioxide and methane (and some other similar gases) are accumulating rapidly in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The temperature on the Earth’s surface is rising rather steeply compared to before the Industrial Revolution.

The glaciers and polar ice caps are melting rapidly.

Sea level is rising because of the melting ice and because the sea water is swelling as it gets hotter.

Weather patterns are showing greater variations and the intensity of the weather is known to be greater, all this causing hot zones and droughts as well as wind storms and flooding.

The IPCC Report of 2021 is a comprehensive study of all these issues and much more …..

>> Duane G. Nichols, PhD Chemical Engineer, Morgantown, WV

From Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine, Nov. 28, 2022

During the past billion years, the Earth’s temperature has fluctuated wildly. Around seven hundred million years ago, in the period known as the Cryogenian, the entire planet was covered with ice. “Snowball Earth” thawed, only to be plunged into another global glaciation.

About ninety million years ago, during what’s known as the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, breadfruit trees grew in northern Greenland and the tropical oceans were as toasty as a hot bath.

In our own period, the Quaternary, the swings have been spectacular; at least twenty times in the last two and a half million years, glaciers have pushed south from the Arctic and then retreated again. The ice ages themselves were marked by dramatic temperature oscillations. The last one, which ended about twelve thousand years ago, went out, in the words of one glaciologist, in a “drunken stagger.”

You can’t prepare for a future you can’t imagine. The trouble is, it’s hard to picture the future we are creating. As the climate swings of the past suggest, even subtle and gradual forces — tiny variations in the Earth’s orbit, for example — can have world-altering consequences. And what we’re doing now is neither subtle nor gradual. In little more than a century, humans have burned through coal and oil deposits that took tens of millions of years to create.

Climate change is characterized not just by uncertainty but by something risk analysts call “deep uncertainty.” There are known unknowns to worry about, and unknown unknowns.