Alun Hubbard on the End of the Holocene

January 27, 2019

We’ve had 10,000 years of relative climate stability.

That may be ending.

Glaciologist Alun Hubbard, interviewed at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, August 2018.

8 Responses to “Alun Hubbard on the End of the Holocene”

  1. John Says:

    Reblogged this on jpratt27.

  2. rabiddoomsayer Says:

    No may about it. The stability will end and when the sytem is restabilised it will be a different world. There will be chaos and the way we are behaving we are making the coming chaos so much worse and so much sooner.

    Billions of starving people on the move WILL be a geopolitical disaster. There is no may about it.

    It is not just civilization that is threatened. Our very existence as a species is under threat. It is almost as though we want to become extinct.

    To get the will to act, we need to understand climate change is an existential threat to our species. There is no “ten to twelve years” to think about it and then start turning the ship around. There is no time to slowly turn the ship around.

    If we act decisively now, we may have a chance at survival.

  3. Sir Charles Says:

    Welcome to the Anthropocene

    • dumboldguy Says:

      Chucky posts the same half-assed graph he has posted too many times here, again not understanding the science.

      Where on this graph did the Anthropocene begin, Chucky?—-20,000 years ago?

      Nope, although those who know science disagree—-some say when agriculture began, others when use of fossil fuels and the industrial revolution arrived, yet others say not until man realized what damage he was doing and then DELIBERATELY chose to continue to do it, all the time lying and denying—=a la Exxon Knew and Merchants of Doubt

      • Gingerbaker Says:

        Yeah, but the interesting question, to me at least, is whether agriculture to sustain 7 to 9 billion people is safely within the natural carbon cycle as of 2100.

        I think it is, although I am not sure. I find it interesting that emissions go down after a peak after agriculture begins and I wonder why? ….. So, I like his graph. 🙂

  4. redskylite Says:

    Good interview with plainly spoken Alan, who doesn’t mince words or blind us with specialized terms, What really is staggering to me is that the Holocene has endured around 11,700 years (after the last ice age). Whatever we label the epoch we are entering now, it has happened in an astounding short span of time (the big changes happening in the current century) and we have probably ruled out the next ice age. We know what we need to do, and roughly the timescale we need to do it within.

    For our sake – lets do it. . .

    “Ancient climate change triggered warming that lasted thousands of years.’

    They estimated the climate feedback could have released enough carbon dioxide to explain the roughly 200,000-year duration of the PETM, something that has not been well understood.

    The researchers said the findings offer a warning about modern climate change. If warming reaches certain tipping points, feedbacks can be triggered that have the potential to cause even more temperature change.

    “One lesson we can learn from this research is that carbon is not stored very well on land when the climate gets wet and hot,” Freeman said. “Today, we’re pushing the system out of equilibrium and it’s not going to snap back, even when we start reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”

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