With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is
little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and
social scientists and policymakers." Or, Alley might have added, among the
citizens of this threatened planet.
We have already had one lucky break. It happened twenty years ago, when a
hole suddenly opened in the ozone layer over Antarctica, stripping away the
continent's protective shield against ultraviolet radiation. We were lucky
that it happened over Antarctica, and lucky that we spotted it before it
spread too far.
Many of the scientists who worked to unravel the cause of the ozone
hole—including Crutzen, who won his Nobel Prize in this endeavor—are
among the most vehement in issuing the new warnings. They know how
close we came to disaster. Glaciologists like Alley are another group who
take the perils of the Anthropocene most seriously. In the past decade, they
have analyzed ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica to map the
patterns of past natural climate change. The results have been chilling.
It has emerged, for instance, that around 12,000 years ago, as the last ice
age waned and ice sheets were in full retreat across Europe and North
America, the warming abruptly went into reverse. For a thousand years the
world returned to the depths of the ice age, only to emerge again with such
speed that, as Alley puts it, "roughly half of the entire warming between the
ice ages and the postglacial world took place in only a decade." The world
warmed by at least 9 degrees—the IPCC's prediction for the next century or
so—within ten years. This beggars belief. But Alley and his coresearchers are
adamant that the ice cores show this happened.