Summary: I just finished reading a very complex book about a very disturbing event in Earth’s deep past that may foretell our not-too-distant future. It is called the Paleocene‒Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and it occurred about 56-Million years ago.
In order to understand what the comparison is to our current situation; I need to provide a brief summary of what happened to cause the PETM. First there was a triggering-event (or events) that injected a small to medium pulse of greenhouse gas into Earth’s atmosphere. This started triggering additional releases of greenhouse gasses from various GHG-reservoirs that avalanched into a major greenhouse gas release that resulted in major global warming, and attendant secondary effects (like a major increase in sea level).
