By: Nicole Heller / Contributing Writer
Students joined Zoom for a conversation about the past and future of our climate with FIU Architecture Professor Gray Read, author of the virtual book Climate: History & Future by Powers of 10.
She encouraged students to think about what each of us does with our skills and talents to address the crisis of climate change.
“At what timescale does the climate change?”, asked Dr. Read during the virtual book launch.
Dr. Read described the changes as occurring “outrageously fast”. We cannot see what is going on as “carbon dioxide is an invisible, tasteless, and colorless natural gas”.
She also mentioned that we are not able to see the production of energy either, which makes it harder to see the damage that is being done.
Dr. Read talked about the population and the worrying increase in CO2 concentration. She also mentioned that the global temperature is 14.9 degrees celsius and rising about 0.1 degrees per year.
Another worrying measure that she stated is the sea level, which is about 0.21 meters above where it was in the 1900s. Dr. Read mentioned these real measures to explain where we are right now during the virtual conference.
The host highlighted that we should be careful in not increasing those numbers as we will lose land, including part of India and the Persian Gulf, due to high temperatures which humans simply cannot survive.
Dr. Read explained that Climate: History & Future by Powers of 10 is a visual overview of the current situation from the perspective of time which allows readers to travel to different eras with maps and graphs. Each time scale offers a view towards the present with a snapshot of how we got “into this mess”.
Students had the opportunity to learn about how our atmosphere was made and how that connects to the present.
One billion years ago, our planet had “…seas full of algae which absorbed the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then released oxygen into the atmosphere, changing it”, Dr. Read said. She also explained that “as algae died, they drifted down forming the carbon deposit which we are now bringing up and releasing back into the atmosphere”.
“CO2 could go up to levels which have not been seen since the Triassic, sea levels could go up three meters by the end of the century, and temperatures could rise several degrees”, said Dr. Read.
“That’s where the effort comes in to bring those numbers down to keep us in a world which is more or less familiar”, Dr. Read said. She urges students to ponder about how our actions impact our planet and what we can do to reduce these numbers.
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