What we’re doing to the Earth has no parallel in 66M yrs, scientists say

> ... and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.

This is the part that I'm worried about. Regardless of what happens to global temperature or climate, the damage we've done to the oceans is insane. As Alex Cannara explained[1],

    In 150 years we have brought the chemistry of oceans to
    a point not seen in 300 million years.

He is referring to the large shift in ocean pH caused by our release of over 30x the amount of carbon than the ocean can sequester. This is particularly bad problem because the process that sequesters atmospheric CO2 is based on marine life shells/skeletons being sinking and ending up as limestone.

We have already disrupted that process, with some areas (such as the north Atlantic) are already seeing species starting to fail from the acidity. At some point in the next few decades, the pH will be sufficiently acidic that CaCO2 becomes soluble and any species with a shell goes extinct. Never mind the massive food change disruption, this stops the main CO2 sequestration process.

I don't think we can stop this; it's already too late. While there are ideas about how this could be fixed, we aren't going to accomplish any of them. So maybe we should start getting ready for another event like the Permian–Triassic (P-Tr) extinction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtQxF_3BSxQ

James Hansen is somewhat controversial, but this paper has been reviewed and accepted for publication in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and it's very serious: https://app.box.com/s/i4u002tbpcvkamj9wq4n8t1u8wxsjhis

I'd summarize but anyone interested in the near-term (this century) effects of climate change and already on HN should be willing to read the actual paper.

If you take the title completely at face value, it seems like an absolutely obvious statement. At no point have there been this many humans on the planet, so of course there is no parallel to what we're doing.

I suspect this is why there is such a push for space travel these days. Those with the means will journey off to some habitable place or one they can make habitable, and leave everybody else behind in the toxic wasteland. All those sci-fi movies might be predicting the future of planet earth; they have before.

This is great news but somehow presented in a negative tone. The slow (4000 year duration) PETM release had no lag before temperature increased. Our release is much faster and according to the article, the faster the release, the greater the lag. So we should expect to see a lag. I wonder how long - hopefully on the order of magnitude of the duration of the last release - 1000s of years or perhaps the current release - 100s of years.

The problem with climate change isn't what it might change into, but how fast it happens. It's quite already to have a change slow enough for societies, farmers, migration of species and geoengineering technology to adapt. We don't need enough time for evolutionary adaptation because we've actually got considerable control over our environment, unlike all species before us.

This sounds really scary!

I think it's a safe bet we'll use up all the fossil fuels we can find, and release the carbon into the atmosphere, regardless of the carbon taxes and cap and trade. And even after that, we'll continue to boil water with nuclear rods to generate electricity with tons of heat waste. Where does all that go?

The best we might hope to do is somehow capture the carbon in the air and put it back underground... trees and seaweeds seem to do that. And then we mighy try to capture all the plastic we dumped in the pacific ocean...

Seriously doesn't think make you think twice about the future for our grandchildren?

Maybe we'll get lucky and the fossil fuels will run out before we make the planet completely uninhabitable.

If I and others succeed in getting ourselves cryogenically frozen in a couple tens of years, then we'll be able to come back (unfrozen) in a couple hundred years and say "wow, they were right".

Don't say "we", say "a few very wealthy and powerful individuals who do not represent anyone other than themselves"

What we need is some effective marketing against the causes of climate change. People don't watch documentaries, people don't read studies, truth is to to really make an impact you have to use the same shady tactics politicians and media outlets use, it's sad but that's the way it is. For example we need to start calling all companies associated with coal extraction climate-terrorists, we need to commercials of averages Joe's grandchildren being slowly roasted alive (movie-like not any gore. As a fear inducing warning about climate change over the next decades). All the hate people have for Mexicans and Muslims should be redirected to oil companies, to coal mining companies, to stop government subsidies for those, for their employees. To do anything that increases the price of dirty energy sources and related practices, then after the price is higher than the alternative capitalism should take care of the rest.