The UK is 40 degrees, the Arctic wears short sleeves, the Mediterranean sea is hot into a hot pot, this is the earth of 2022, and the entire northern hemisphere is as if it has been cooked.
Why is it so hot, and is global warming already so severe?
Even more desperate, scientists say that the heat now is just the starting point, and it will be hotter later. So where will humanity go?
Global warming has had a serious impact on the survival of animals
Hot 2022
How hot 2022 is, look at Greenland in the Northern Hemisphere, the largest island in the world, with almost the entire island located within the Arctic Circle.
Generally speaking, there are summers in the Arctic, and this summer will not be particularly hot, but this year's Greenland directly created 32.5 ° C.
This is not the highest temperature in the entire Arctic Circle, as early as 2020, the Siberian region created a summer temperature of 38 ° C in the Arctic Circle.
Neither Greenland nor the Arctic Circle has escaped the invasion of high temperatures
What is the concept that such high temperatures make the melting glaciers near Greenland weigh more than 6 billion tons per day?
The melting water of these glaciers is enough to flood the mainland's Ningxia.
If all of Greenland's ice melts this summer, the world's sea level will rise by 6 to 7 meters, which will be a disaster for coastal cities.
The polar greenland has become hot like this, and other places have become directly into the furnace.
The United Kingdom has exceeded 40 °C in many places, and the Mediterranean region has exceeded the high temperature of 42.5 °C. The entire Northern Hemisphere can hardly find a cool place, what is wrong with the earth?
The global high temperature problem is significant
Some people speculate whether this will be related to the volcanic eruption of Tonga in early 2022, after all, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the volcano is very high, enough to plunge the world into a greenhouse effect.
However, scientific research suggests that this heat wave on Earth may not be directly related to the Tonga volcano.
In 2020, the volcano has not yet erupted, but there is already a heat wave in the Arctic, and this time the heat wave is not the result but the beginning.
Global warming has led to increased melting of glaciers
In less than 300 years from the first industrial revolution to the present, the average temperature of the Earth has risen by about 1 °C.
Among them, the average temperature in the Mediterranean region has risen by about 1.5 °C.
From this point of view, it seems that the heating of the earth is caused by human beings, so is human being really the direct culprit of this warming?
The planet is warming
About 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, a huge flood occurred in most parts of the earth, and this disaster became the legend of some peoples in later generations, such as Nuwa Patching Heaven, Noah's Ark, and so on.
Geologists have found that the flood occurred at the time of the end of the fourth season of glaciers.
Traces of that flood have been found in the Alps of Europe and the Qinling Mountains of China – the melting of ice and snow during the Quaternary glaciation period.
Quaternary ice age theme drawing
Strictly speaking, the end of this ice age has not completely stopped, and we still belong to this end period today.
Transitioning from the Great Ice Age to the next requires going through climate ups and downs, but Earth's climate as a whole is moving in a warmer direction.
You know, The Earth of 2022 is not the hottest Earth in history.
Greenland in 2022 is scientifically referred to as the hottest period in the last 1,000 years, as Greenland was also hot about 1100 years ago.
The hottest time in Earth's history dates back 55 million years, to the paleocene and Eocene transitions.
Schematic of climate change over a period of 65 million years
It is estimated that the earth's greenhouse effect at that time was equivalent to the carbon dioxide released by igniting all of our fossil fuels today.
This global warming has left almost no ice on the planet, not even the North and South Poles at the time.
Therefore, compared to 55 million years ago, our current heat wave can only be called a small witch.
Another proof is that the existing reptiles on Earth are not as large as during the Paleocene and Eocene periods.
During that period, there was the largest snake Titan python in history, and its food was the huge Styx crocodile and the giant turtle weighing more than 1 ton.
A model of the Titan Python
Reptiles are what we often call cold-blooded animals, and are also called warm animals in biology.
Their metabolism is closely related to temperature, and the higher the temperature, the easier it is to grow bigger.
The fact that no such large individual has ever been born among the extant reptiles suggests that our current temperature is not the highest in Earth's history.
But our temperatures are moving in the highest direction, and perhaps the 2022 heatwave is just the beginning.
Global warming themed image
Just the beginning
Is global warming caused by humans? Not exactly, humans do affect warming, the most direct impact is to shorten the time it takes to get hot.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not set in stone, and the fossil fuels that humans burn are only part of the earth's carbon element.
Looking back at Earth's atmosphere, the amount of carbon dioxide in itself is constantly changing.
When the content is small, it will fall into the Ice Age, and when the content is too much, there will be global warming from the Paleocene to the Eocene.
You must know that before us, the earth has been cold for 2.5 million years, and even the evolution of human beings is related to this cooling.
Earth had previously been in a cold state for 2.5 million years
After 2.5 million years of cold, according to the previous practice of the earth, it is to enter a warm and humid period, and then enter a relatively hot era.
For example, from the Devonian to the Carboniferous period to the Permian in the Paleozoic period, it experienced cooling, heating, cooling again and then entering drought.
It lasted about 100 million years.
For the Earth after the Quaternary Ice Age, the Earth is bound to enter an era of heating, but later.
The future of the planet may become hotter and hotter
Unfortunately, humans have sped up this speed.
Humans burn fossil fuels, releasing carbon from the Earth's crust into the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect.
Earth has also experienced the Great Ice Age in its history, but it took a long time for the Earth to enter the next warm period, at least millions of years.
We rely on burning energy to shorten this time and enter the next thermal era ahead of schedule, and the earth's heating after the ice age is an irreversible trend, so the heating of the weather has just begun.
The heating of the weather seems to have just begun
The famous physicist Hawking once predicted that in another 200 years, the earth will become uninhabitable, because the temperature of the earth will become extremely hot at that time, and human beings will not be able to continue to survive.
The only solution is to leave Earth.
So is the earth of the future really unfit for human survival?
The future of humanity
In fact, human beings are not as fragile as we think, as a relatively adaptable biological species on the earth, we are one of the few vertebrates that can survive in any corner of the earth.
From the arid Sahara Desert to the icy Arctic and Antarctica. Even we have a space station in space.
Human footprints are all over the world
If the earth were just warming according to the original changes, then humans could adapt well at this stage.
Unfortunately, humanity itself has sped up this speed.
Temperatures are rising at an accelerated pace, and if humans can't adapt to such drastic changes, the number of humans will decrease in the next wave of heat.
The last ones left are heat-tolerant individuals. As temperatures rise, human demand for energy increases, and humans may run out of limited fossil energy sooner.
Energy emergencies are also a problem currently encountered by mankind
Do you think that warming really only happens to the hotter weather?
No, there are also a variety of extreme weather changes, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters will be doubled than today.
This is a huge loss for human agriculture, although human beings invented soilless cultivation, but agriculture has not escaped the point of completely relying on the sky to eat.
The heated earth is no longer suitable for the growth of most crops, and human beings may face a food crisis.
A hotter planet could expose humanity to a food crisis
So, is the sixth mass extinction really going on here?
According to the earth's past extinction events, global warming may cause extinction, but it is not enough to cause mass extinction.
Because in the history of the earth, there have only been five times that can be called mass extinction, and each of them is a proper tragedy.
In particular, at the end of the Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago, 97% of marine life was extinct, and ancient single-celled organisms were reborn in many areas of the Earth's oceans, and the evolution of organisms was almost interrupted.
Picture of the mass extinction at the end of the Permian
If according to Professor Hawking's prediction, the human beings at that time no longer lived on the earth, even if extinction came, human beings could escape the disaster.
But for human beings, it is still not possible to take it lightly, in case at that time, they cannot leave the earth?