HOW TO DRILL AND BURN OUR WAY BACK TO THE TRIASSIC

I know that not many of us--and certainly not the President or our representatives in Congress--are thinking past the next vote or at most the next election.

Still, for those who care about the next few generations, here's a heads-up from a trio of earth scientists in the U.S. and the U.K., writing in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

They warn that if we burn all available fossil fuel reserves within the next few hundred years, the combination of high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and more intense radiation from the sun will turn up the heat to levels not seen on Earth since the Triassic period, 220 million years ago, or perhaps ever.

In case you don't remember the details, the Triassic featured one giant continent called Pangea. The poles were ice-free. It was hot and steamy near the coasts, baking desert inland, and Earth was dominated by the reptilian ancestors of dinosaurs, birds, mammals, and, way in the distance future, us. An interesting place for a quick visit, but not where most of us would want to live.

Postosuchus, a Triassic archosaur

Credit: Dallas Krentzel, Museum of Texas Tech University

Steamy as it was with atmospheric CO2 around 2000 parts per million, it wasn't as hot as it will be by 2250 AD if we've boosted CO2 to that same level. The reason is that the sun is gradually getting hotter. The increase in solar radiation over the course of the past 220 million years means that the combined impact--a dense greenhouse atmosphere and a hotter sun--would push Earth--and anyone still around then--into an unprecedented and unpredictable climate zone.

"Such a scenario," the authors write, "risks subjecting the Earth to a climate forcing that has no apparent geological precedent, for at least the last 420 Myrs [million years]."

So, if the first line of our business-as-usual mantra continues to be "drill, baby, drill," the next line is even more likely to be "burn, baby, burn."

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