Hothouse Earth

All the conversation focuses on the next 50 years, because we don't care about people other than ourselves and our generation. I understand. I'm not going to turn the AC off because of something 300 years from now. Having no grandchildren, I don't even have a genetic imperative. Tough luck, folks. The problem is that CO2 is rising to extinction-level event heights, and doing it faster than ever before.Note: The middle road is not going to happen. We will continue burning fuels, perhaps at a slower rate, until they are gone. In 10 million years, natural processes will sequester the CO2 and something unpredictable will follow. Of course, that may happen anyway. We're just urging it along; something that might have happened in 100,000 years or 10,000,000 years will happen in a few centuries. We're not good at waiting. Temperature is going to do the same thing. That means "hothouse" temperatures that, on their own, are nearly unsurvivable. More to the point, ocean temperatures rise,…