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| Mon, 17th Aug 2020 15:14:00 |
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What Would Happen if We Burned All the Fossil Fuels? |
Picture bogs swarming with plant-life, oceans teeming with life, dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Picture those plants and animals dying, and over the course of 300 million years, becoming coal, oil, and gas through a complex series of processes beneath the soil. Fast forward to the present and now see the vast, Earth-wrecking machinery extracting those dead plants and animals to power our economy.
How much longer can we keep this up for? Did enough plants and animals die in the ancient past to sustain our current levels of fossil fuel consumption forever? What happens if we blow through all the fossil fuels available this century, unleashing a glug of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the likes of which the planet has never seen?
It would be somewhere between super bad and sublimely screwed if we did that. The world hasn’t exactly shown much appetite to curb fossil fuel use. That’s not say the world will keep going down that path, of course. But this is Giz Asks, and we’re here to ask the weird questions and get down to the nitty gritty. So we posed the question to a number of experts in engineering, physics, climate modeling, and paleoclimate of what would happen to the climate—and society—if we kept our fossil fuel bender going down to the last drop .
Read original full article
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