Just yesterday we learned that glaciers are melting in Greenland (and around the world) at an unprecedented rate, faster than even climate scientists had predicted as a worst case scenario. Well today’s news, at least for those of us not praying for the Rapture, is even worse:

ST. LOUIS — Humans are burning fossil fuels so rapidly that Earth is headed toward its warmest period in 55 million years, a panel of scientists warned yesterday.

If that sounds bad, James Zachos, a researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, would agree.

“It’s a threat to life as we know it,” said Zachos, who joined a panel of researchers discussing global climate change at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.

For more details, follow me below the fold . . .

Burning coal, oil and naturalgas reserves at the current rate is expected to release 5,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide — a gigaton is 1 billion tons — into the atmosphere and push carbon dioxide levels to more than five times current levels.

The last time the atmosphere was laced with that much carbon dioxide the world’s oceans stagnated with dead vegetation and life in the sea and on land was fundamentally altered, the researchers say.

“That’s exactly the amount we will add to the atmosphere if all fossil fuels are combusted,” Zachos said.

While it might take a century or more to release that much carbon into the air, Mother Nature might require 100,000 years or more to regain the balance, the panel said.

Just for fun, I decided to convert 5,000 gigatons into the equivalent number of pounds of CO2. I came up with this number:

10,000,000,000,000,000 lbs. of of CO2

(or about 5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide
poured into our atmosphere as a result of our burning of fossil fuels, if you prefer to avoid all those zeros)

No matter how you look at it, that’s a pretty big number. And the effects of such a massive forcing of CO2 into the air we breathe would be catastrophic to life on this planet. Severe weather, dying oceans, the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals and quite possibly a planet made uninhabitable for human beings. Which means billions of people killed by the effects of our apparently uncontrollable and insatiable desire to burn every last bit of the hydrocarbon fuels that are still left on Earth.

Let me return to what the scientists are telling us:

Even scarier, according to Matt Chandler, a climate modeler from Columbia University, is that we might be underestimating the effects. Humans already could be approaching a threshold that would trigger changes no matter what is done to limit carbon-dioxide releases. […]

Scott Wing, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, called global warming the biggest threat to humanity.

We, you and I, may not live to experience such dire consequences arsing from our profligate expenditure of fossil fuels, but our grandchildren and their children almost certainly will, unless action is taken now to start ending our consumption of these addictive “sources of energy.”

Democrats, please, I beg you. Make this your issue. Al Gore has, and I salute him for that, but he shouldn’t be a lone voice in the wilderness. This catastrophe in waiting should be on the lips of every Democratic candidate this Fall. Not because it’s a winning issue for them, or will cause discomfort to Republicans who are so firmly embedded in the clutches of Big Oil. Nor because it is a matter of our national security that we wean ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil.

No, Democrats running for Congress should raise this in every campaign speech this Fall because it is a matter of the survival of the human race.

Period.

End of story.