Humans Experimenting with Climate's 'Playing Nice'

How long will the remarkably, but inexplicably, 11,000 years of global climatic stability last?   Uncertainty abounds, but in meantime the risky experiment continues.

Like “rats inside the experiment,” Neils Bohr Institute glaciology professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen says of us humans when he considers the risks of a sudden reconfiguration of global circulation which could, among other things, cause long-term drying across America’s breadbasket states.

“That’s going to impact the entire world,” Steffensen cautions in recognizing that the 11,000 years of the interglacial period since the last ice age “has been unreasonably stable.  And we don’t know why” or how long that stability may persist.

Steffensen, in exceptionally eloquent and straightforward language, acknowledges that models consistently point to a gradual global increase in temperatures as a result of the continue widespread combustion of fossil fuels and increased emissions of carbon dioxide.   “But that’s assuming the climate plays nice,” he says.

“And we actually know from the ice cores that the climate does not play nice all the time.”

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