As an archaeologist who works on climate, a question I often get is: "But why should we be worried about global warming, the earth has moved through hot and cold periods right?" Here's why. 1.) We live in a fundamentally different world from that of how humans or rather hominids lived the last time we had similar concentrations of atmospheric CO2 to today (2 million years- 800,000 years) source :IPCC 2021.

#Archaeology Why the @SAAorg needs to move to a hybrid or online conference format for 2022 (a thread) 1.) We cannot say #BlackLivesMatter and simultaneously fly over 10,000 people to Chicago and pack them into dense meeting rooms. We will be directly responsible for more death 2.) As archaeologists we should be terrified of the impacts of the climate crisis, especially after reading the IPCC report. We know that the increases in temperature are far beyond that which humanity has known since they first started to domesticate plants and animals.

I'm an archaeologist, and in this thread, I’m going to tell you why our current climate crisis is so terrifying to me. 1.) In this paper, Xu et al demonstrate that humans have concentrated in a really narrow subset of earth's climate.
pnas.org/content/117/21… 2.) The production of our current crops and livestock is really limited to this "niche" and has been so for millennia (at least the past 6000 years) when farming and foddering of animals really took off.