PALEOCLIMATIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE ANTHROPOCENE

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us…" Coleridge, 1831.

When INQUA was founded in 1928 there were ~2.2 billion people on earth; today there are 6.3 billion and world population is likely to reach 9 billion within the lifetime of today’s graduate students. With this rise in humankind, our impact on the planet has risen to the global scale and we have entered uncharted waters in terms of how climate and the environments that sustain life on earth will respond to the changes being imposed on them. While there are no analogs for the future that we face, the earth has undergone dramatic changes in the past that may at least place our current parlous state in perspective and give us pause as we consider what actions we must take to plot a safe course ahead. Paleoclimatology provides our “lantern on the stern” and we need to consider how that light can help illuminate the way forward.