Would you opt to see the future or decipher the past?
Wouldn’t it be brilliant if every scientist had a crystal ball? It’s a question that came to me while reading Alexandra Witze’s story “What the Pliocene epoch can teach us about future warming on Earth.” Witze discusses how scientists are studying a warming period some 3 million years ago to try to understand how Earth will handle rising temperatures. The geologic epoch, known as the Pliocene, isn’t a perfect crystal ball, she notes. But paleoceanographer Heather Ford says, “It’s our closest analog for future climate change.”
A true crystal ball could answer many climate change questions: Which cities might be underwater in the future? Which regions will be suitable for farming, and which will become desert? Which diseases should we watch for? More generally, we could all find out just how bad extreme heat and weather might be. Perhaps such insights would give us the kick we need to change our current behavior and appropriately plan for a dramatically different world.