"The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert

"Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. If current trends continue, CO₂ concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degree Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story."

- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Quoted, at length, for truth. What else is there to say? We done goofed.

Currently Reading: "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright

Change is not in our interest. Our only rational policy is not to risk provoking it. Yet we face abundant evidence that civilization itself, through fossil-fuel emissions and other disturbances, is upsetting the long calm in which it grew. Ice sheets at both poles are breaking up. Glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas are thawing; some have disappeared in only twenty-five years. Droughts and unusually hot weather have already caused world grain output to fall or stagnate for eight years in a row. During the same eight years, the number of mouths to feed went up by 600 million.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (2004)

Nice civilization you got there. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

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