Abstract
The climate of the Earth has been changing ever since the Earth has had an atmosphere. Sometimes the changes are dramatic over relatively short time intervals, and other times the changes have been minor with long periods of relative stability. These global climate changes continue today. It is warmer today than it has been in the recent past, and the Earth is expected to get even warmer. The cause of the recent rise in temperature is the elevated level of CO2 in the atmosphere (Mackenzie 2003). The expected increased warming of the Earth is not a new phenomena, it has happened before. An example occurred approximately 56 million years ago, at the end of the Paleocene and the beginning of the Eocene. The Earth was much warmer compared to today, and it was about to get warmer during this Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (Kunzig and Block 2011). The warming event was triggered by a massive release of carbon, probably CO2 or methane. The duration of high atmospheric carbon levels and high temperatures at that time is thought to be about 150,000 years, the time it took to reabsorb the carbon that had been released into the atmosphere. The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere at that time is estimated to be about as much as could be released in the near future if all of the stored fossil fuel was burned by man.
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Van Auken, O.W., Bush, J.K. (2013). Global Climate Change. In: Invasion of Woody Legumes. SpringerBriefs in Ecology, vol 4. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7199-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7199-8_7
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