It's not the earth, it's you
Before we began burning fossil fuels, there was an "eons-long" balance between carbon dioxide (CO2) emission and the earth's ability to absorb them, but now the planet can't keep up, according to a report in Nature Geoscience. The study looked at ancient Antarctic ice bubbles going back 610,000 years.Climate scientists have suggested that a type of natural mechanism, known as feedback, regulates the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This feedback has been thrown out of whack by the steep rise in CO2 emissions from the burning of coal and oil, said Richard Zeebe, a co-author. In the way past, excess CO2 came from volcanoes, which gave off very little compared to what we are doing now. The excess CO2 would be taken in by mountains, washed into oceans and buried in the deep sea.
According to Zeebe, human activities are putting CO2 into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes, but the natural feedback mechanism will eventually absorb the carbon dioxide. Doesn't sound so bad. But here's the bad news, it's going to take hundreds of thousands of years to absorb it all.
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