Warming’s orders of magnitude more prevalent.
McSweeney ’16 [Robert; January 13; senior science editor at CarbonBrief, ME in mechanical engineering from the University of Warwick, MSc in climate change from the University of East Anglia, “Human emissions will delay next ice age by 50,000 years, study says,” CarbonBrief, https://www.carbonbrief.org/human-emissions-will-delay-next-ice-age-by-50000-years-study-says/]
This may sound like good news – nobody wants another ice age anytime soon – but it isn’t a reason to thank fossil fuels, says lead author Dr Andrey Ganopolski from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He tells Carbon Brief:
“We do not believe that the fact that anthropogenic CO2 emission can additionally postpone the next ice age…has any practical importance – this is rather an illustration of not so well-known fact that anthropogenic climate change will last not hundreds, but hundreds of thousand years.”
This is a point that Prof Michel Crucifix from the Université catholique de Louvain picks up in an accompanying News & Views article. Even though the industrial revolution is only a few centuries old, human-caused emissions will keep atmospheric CO2 levels elevated for many thousands of years, he says:
“[A]nthropogenic CO2 will still be in the atmosphere in 50,000 years’ time, and even 100,000 years, which is enough to prevent any glaciation.”
As for holding off the next ice age, the damaging impacts of climate change will be felt long before then, says Prof Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, who wasn’t involved in the study:
“[The next ice age is] not worth worrying about compared to immediate concerns about damaging human-caused climate change expected over the coming decades if no action is taken to mitigate this likelihood.”