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6 Chi. J. Int'l L. 573 (2005-2006)
Climate Change: A Catastrophe in Slow Motion

handle is hein.journals/cjil6 and id is 581 raw text is: Climate Change: A Catastrophe in Slow Motion R.T. Pierrehumbert* I. INTRODUCTION The word catastrophe usually brings to mind phenomena like tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, or asteroid impacts--disasters that are over in an instant and have immediately evident dire consequences. The changes in Earth's climate wrought by industrial carbon dioxide emissions do not at first glance seem to fit this mold since they take a century or more for their consequences to fully manifest. However, viewed from the perspective of geological time, human- induced climate change, known more familiarly as global warming, is a catastrophe equal to nearly any other in our planet's history. Seen by a geologist a million years from now, the era of global warming will probably not seem as consequential as the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. It will, however, appear in the geological record as an event comparable to such major events as the onset or termination of an ice age or the transition to the hot, relatively ice- free climates that prevailed seventy million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It will be all the more cataclysmic for having taken place in the span of one or a few centuries, rather than millennia or millions of years. Humans have become a major geological force with the power to commit future millennia to practically irreversible changes in global conditions. This is what Bill McKibben refers to as The End of Nature.' As an example of the impact life has on global climate, the imminent global warming caused by humans does not stand out as unique or even unusually impressive. When oxygen-generating photosynthetic algae evolved between one and two-and-one- The author has been Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago since 1989, having earlier served on the faculties of MIT and Princeton, and has been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. He was a lead author of chapter 7 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scentific Basis Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (cited in note 4) and a co-author of the National Research Council study on abrupt climate change. See R.B. Alley, et al, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (Nail Acad 2002). I See William McKibben, The End of Nature (Random House 1989).

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