ABSTRACT
I recall the first time I met a “deep time” scientist, someone who speaks in million-year increments. It was in May, 2012, in Aarhus, Denmark, where I taught in the Journalism School over several springs. Between classes I sought out Mads Faurschou Knudsen, a professor of geo-sciences, who tracks the changing balance of gases in the atmosphere over time and how they impact conditions on Earth. I still recall being struck at how easily he spoke about the multi-million-year spans in the history of our planet as if they’d just happened last month. Tick-tick-tick, strung together like a multi-million-year datebook: The Paleocene, the Eocene, the Oligocene, the Pliocene, and of course the Holocene, our current epoch, when the balance of gases in the atmosphere, and thus the climate, made life possible for we humans and other organisms. “We burn off old carbon all the time on Earth,” Knudsen said. “But now, carbon that might take millions of years to migrate into the atmosphere, we’re doing that over hundreds of years.” There it was, the backstory to the story of our time—a story ordained to us from the middle of the 1780s, when fossil fuels emerged as an energy source and the un-natural accumulation of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere commenced.
