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"This comic is a timeline on how the temperature has changed from 20,000 BCE (Before Common Era) to the present day (2016), with three predictions for the rest of the 21st century depending on what actions are taken (or not taken) to stop CO₂ emission. This comic is a direct, but much more thorough, follow up on the previous global warming comic: 1379: 4.5 Degrees. By having readers scroll through millennia of slow-paced natural changes, Randall uses the comic to confront the the rapid temperature rise in the recent years. Over the past 100 years, human action has produced a large amount of CO₂ emissions, which have caused a rise in average global temperature through the greenhouse effect. This is called global warming and is part of a climate change, a subject that has become a recurrent subject on xkcd. There are still many people who claim that this is not happening, or at least that it is not caused by any human actions, called climate change deniers. One argument of theirs is that global warming is happening for natural causes, summarized with the phrase "temperature has changed before". "

"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century. On a 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet's past that could spell disaster for the future. Lower in the sediment core, fossils abounded from 60 plankton species. But in that thin cross-section from about 56 million years ago, the number of species dropped to 17. And the planktons' oxygen and carbon isotope compositions had dramatically changed. Kennett and his student Lowell Stott deduced from the anomalous isotopes that carbon dioxide had flooded the air, causing the ocean to rapidly acidify and heat up, in a process similar to what we are seeing today."

"Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas essential for life- animals exhale it, plants sequester it. It exists in Earth's atmosphere in comparably small concentrations, but is vital for sustaining life. CO2 is termed a greenhouse gas (GHG) - a gas which absorbs and emits thermal radiation creating the 'greenhouse effect'. Along with other greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide and methane, CO2 is important in sustaining a habitable temperature for the planet: if there were absolutely no GHGs, our planet would be simply too cold. It has been estimated that without these gases, the average surface temperature of the Earth would be about -18 degrees celcius.1 Since the Industrial Revolution, however, energy-driven consumption of fossil fuels has led to a rapid increase in emissions of CO2, disrupting the global carbon cycle and leading to a planetary warming impact. As an international community, UN member parties have set a target of limiting average warming to 2 degrees celcius above pre-Industrial temperatures."

"Drained fertile peatlands around the globe are hotspots for the atmospheric emission of laughing-gas -- a powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide, which is partly responsible for global warming and destruction of the ozone layer, a new study shows. Research into natural peatlands such as fens, swamps and bogs, as well as drained peatlands, found that either draining wet soils or irrigating well drained soils boosts the emission of nitrous oxide significantly. Led by researchers at the University of Birmingham and the University of Tartu, Estonia, the study took in 58 peatland sites around the world. These included locations in the United States, Australia, Brazil, South America, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, Southeast Asia, Siberia and Europe."

"Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth's long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail."

"... Soil is the bedrock of civilization (Perlin 1991, Ponting 1993). Biofuels are not sustainable or renewable. Why would we destroy our topsoil, increase global warming, deplete and pollute groundwater, destroy fisheries, and use more energy than what's gained to make ethanol? Why would we do this to our children and grandchildren? Perhaps it's a combination of pork barrel politics, an uninformed public, short-sighted greedy agribusiness corporations, jobs for the Midwest, politicians getting too large a percent of their campaign money from agribusiness (Lavelle 2007), elected leaders without science degrees, and desperation to provide liquid transportation fuels (Bucknell 1981, Hirsch 2005). ..."

"Hardly anyone seems to have noticed that the newest climate science suggests we are about to pass the point of no return, to unstoppable, catastrophic global warming. This short animation explains the positive feedback mechanisms that mean the Earth's climate system has a tipping point, followed by a brief glimpse into the crystal ball of horrors that will almost certainly come to pass if we cross it. Finally, the film explores how we got into the mess we're in, and the possibilities still open to us to prevent the worst natural and humanitarian disaster in human history, and the very real possibility of the end of civilization, and of life as we know it."

En 2018 pasaron dos cosas que me cambiaron la vida: me convertí en padre y el IPCC publicó ese demoledor informe en el que advertía que solo teníamos 12 años para evitar una catástrofe climática irreversible. La ansiedad climática es mala compañera, pero a mí me sirvió para abrir una página de Facebook y empezar a hacer vídeos alertando de la crisis climática y ecológica en la que estamos sumidos. Fue una necesidad, una vía de escape, necesitaba hacer algo. Necesitaba un nombre. Hope. Esperanza. Me niego a dar por sentado que vamos a cargarnos la absolutamente maravillosa biosfera que hemos heredado. Jamás hubiera esperado que pasara lo que pasó: en los primeros doce meses los vídeos superaron los 200 millones de reproducciones, y el número de seguidores superó el medio millón. Gente de todo el mundo. Menuda responsabilidad, necesitamos más medios, más gente, más conocimientos. Y ahí aparecieron Fernando Prieto, Fernando Valladares, miembros de Ecologistas en Acción, de Extinction Rebellion, de Fridays for Future, de Climate Reality, de Greenpeace, de WWF… para ir apoyando y acompañando el trabajo que estaba teniendo un impacto viral en las redes sociales. Esto cristalizó en un Consejo Editorial formado por grandísimos científicos, velando por que los vídeos fuesen completamente rigurosos y asegurando que el mensaje que está trasladando la ciencia en las publicaciones especializadas se trasladase correctamente a un terreno completamente opuesto: las redes sociales. Vídeos cortos y dinámicos que se comparten cientos de miles de veces y que ya han superado los 400 millones de reproducciones. Y aquí es donde nos encontramos ahora, gracias al apoyo de decenas de personas que contribuyen con una pequeña cantidad mensual a través de Patreon, somos capaces de mantener este trabajo editorial y de divulgación científica en el momento en el que más importante es que entendamos profundamente la magnitud de la emergencia a la que nos e