Six Degrees Could Change The World (36 of 36)

Six Degrees Could Change The World

Billions of tons of carbon infused with the power of the sun were buried throughout the Earth's history.
Those fossils sunk deep underground, producing enormous reserves of coal and crude oil.
That's where the CO2 nightmare ended for the Cretaceous Period and ours began.
It's the final irony of global warming.
The very same carbon that was scrubbed out of the atmosphere so long ago is now being pumped back into the air every time we burn those fossil fuels.
And it's warming the planet all over again.
Humans come along, we dig the stuff up, we find it's an incredibly valuable energy resource, and without thinking about it, we burn it and return this carbon back to the atmosphere in less than a century.

[Narrator] In effect, we're reproducing the extreme conditions of the cretaceous era.
Only this time, at breakneck speeds, so quickly that most species won't have a chance to adapt and survive.
The world's appetite for energy remains voracious.
Our carbon footprint is staggering.
As globai warming escalates, it also accelerates.
At some point, ciimate change could take on a life of its own, and global warming would become a runaway train.
The only question is, now that we know about it, what are we going to do? Even the worst-case scenarios of six degrees won't mean the end of all life on Earth.
But the planet after extreme global warming would be radically different from the life we know today.
How bad could it get?
At that point, the best minds on Earth agree on two things: They just don't know, and they hope we'll never find out.