Source: The Crucial Years
by Bill Mckibben
“This is ‘Climate week’ in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment. This new study (a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt ‘biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time’) offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years.” (10/23/24)