The Earth has reached temperatures comparable to today’s several times in the past few millions of years. However, the forces that changed climate in the past were completely different than today. We, mankind, have focused a huge amount of our time and energy extracting reduced carbon from the ground and rapidly oxidizing that carbon in order to fuel all sorts of engines that make modern civilization possible. And we, as respiring organisms, carry-out the same basic feat when we eat and breath (our machines were really built in our own image). The product of burning all that carbon from coal/oil/natural gas/and even food is carbon dioxide, a very simple compound that represents the stablest form of carbon. That extra carbon dioxide, CO2, pumped from the ground into the air will remain in our environment for a very long time and contribute to the phenomenon known as the Greenhouse Gas Effect – which in extremes (like today) will result in global warming.
Graphs taken from NASA’s website show temperatures over millions of years, but mankind’s large impact has taken place in too short a time to see. The Paris Agreement on climate action (which has become hopelessly out of reach with a Trump Administration looming) set the very modest goal of limiting climate change to +2C which would still exceed temperatures in the above time frame.
The Greenhouse Gas Effect is just as it sounds; certain gases in the atmosphere act like the glass of a greenhouse ceiling to maintain temperatures. With higher concentrations (partial pressures) of greenhouse gases, 
the temperature will be maintained at a new, higher temperature. During the day, Earth’s surface is blanketed with sunlight from mainly the visible spectrum. A large fraction of this is absorbed by the Earth’s surface which is then slowly radiated off as lower energy ultraviolet light. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere like CO2 absorb and re-emit the ultraviolet light, and the fraction that shines back down to Earth acts to conserve heat at night (CO2 illustration taken from here). Without any greenhouse gases, the Earth’s surface temperature would drop below freezing every night. So what would happen if CO2 levels were to raise very high very fast? Well, we’re in the process of finding out.
In this slide taken once again from NASA, the speed at which CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing is painfully obvious. While this increase is already resulting in an increase in temperature (see next figure), there are compounding effects that will take literally centuries for the full temperature effect to play out from today’s CO2.
Another graph from NASA, this shows the difference in temperature from the average temperature between 1951-1980. These surface temperatures of the Earth show we’ve just about hit the 1 degree Celsius mark already – nearly half of this change has occurred since Al Gore’s Nobel noted documentary came out.
One of the often noted consequences of climate change is the melting of polar ice and the resulting increase in sea levels. In a few of the instances where temperature reached levels of today or slightly higher in the last few million years, the sea level increased by 13 to 80 feet.
The incredible rate at which CO2 has been and is still being released into the atmosphere makes the question of how quickly these historic sea level raises occurred and from which ice mass the water came from important today. 
Scientists have measured drastic reductions in ice levels in the Antarctic and in Greenland, and that melting is accelerating (graphs from NASA again).
Now for the immediate topic of this blog post, two research groups independently published work in the prestigious journal, Nature, today that concerns the likelihood of the entire ice-mass on Greenland melting into the ocean picture from here. If we knew that previous sea level raises in the past few million years began with a thawing of Greenland, it would impact greatly the how we perceived the current levels of ice already lost from Greenland and how quickly we expect sea level raise to occur. Beirman et al. came to the conclusion that Greenland has maintained a sheet of ice for the past 2.6 million years with only fluctuations in amount with the ice ages. Schaefer et al. came to the conclusion that Greenland has completely thawed sometime in the last 1.1 million years. Both research groups relied on measurements of iosotopes of metals produced when sunlight hits the ground, but the two differed in the samples they analyzed. Berman et al. analyzed underwater sediment just off the coast of Greenland. However, the work by Schaefer et al. relied on bedrock samples from far inland that hasn’t moved, so I’m hypothesizing from their perspective for now that a complete thawing of Greenland can occur with temperature changes of around +1 degree Celsius from current temperatures. This source of ice alone would cause sea levels to raise by roughly 10 feet! This would put 12.3 million current US residents’ homes underwater!
Congress is threatening to withdraw all funding from NASA’s efforts to study climate change. The Republicans in congress and soon to be in the White House also A) don’t believe global warming is worth worrying about and B) are actively trying to undermine the few efforts the US and the world at large have made to at least halt the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. I am a scientist, but my training had absolutely nothing to do with climate science. I have, as a concerned resident of this planet, made myself aware of the eminent risks we face, and the information on NASA’s website, far from radicalizing me to a radical hypotheses about the effects of greenhouse gases on climate change, have served to temper fear and ignorance with real data and widely accepted analysis from experts.
The congressional Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has repeated chosen to promote fake news stories (on Twitter?!) to spread fear and doubt instead of relying on the publicly funded results of research from agencies such as NASA and numerous labs across the country. Those actions of Congressmen strike this citizen/scientist/Earth resident as not only possibly ignorant but also probably duplicitous and definitely hurtful to our society. Congress is suppose to represent us, and 64% of the US believes global warming is a serious concern.
https://twitter.com/HouseScience/status/804402881982066688
Breitbart is notorious for publishing fake news stories, and the above referenced Breitbart article was a sham reinterpretation from the Weather Channel’s website. The Weather Channel quickly attacked/mocked Breitbart for their lies.
https://twitter.com/HouseScience/status/806532974984462336
The above story from the Wall Street Journal was pinned by a Political Scientist from Colorado that made a name for himself trying to poke holes in data from scientists studying climate change. The article describes the unfair treatment he received from the scientific community. However, the author isn’t actually a scientist and didn’t publish research in scientific journals, so his complaints are seemingly hollow. In any case, his story is a complete red haring coming from this committee, as their tweet is an obvious attempt to confuse the public on the issue of climate change.
The effects of these policy makers’ inaction (and especially their furthering fossil fuel industries interests) will be felt first by the poor around the world who will have extreme difficulty finding a home and a living as sea levels raise, but the ones who will face the worst of climate change will be our great grandchildren.
PolitiSci 
