“It will be the least evil,” added the researcher, a specialist in geological oceanography and paleoceanography, author of scientific articles and one of the professionals at the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA).
Fátima Abrantes spoke to Lusa as part of a seminar that the IPMA organized in Lisbon on “Climate Change and marine resources: past, present and future”.
Debating on “extreme phenomena in the past”, Fátima Abrantes helped during the intervention at the scientific data seminar to explain that climate change has already happened and that the oceans have undergone major transformations, with areas of a lot of fish becoming depopulated and vice versa .
But, the expert explained that she was not denying or devaluing the current climate change process, which, she said, is happening more intensely and faster than at other times, due to the action of Man on the planet.
“What has been stable for 15 million years in Antarctica and 2.6 million in the Arctic is becoming very unstable very quickly. The point is not that it never happened, it has happened, the question is that the quantity and the speed with which it is increasing is much higher “, he exemplified to Lusa.
Optimistic about the planet, Fátima Abrantes is less so about human beings. He says that the climate changes that have existed since the beginning of Earth’s life show that the climate system changes “but that everything is rearranged and that the planet continues”, even though the conditions may “not be very favorable for humans”.
“There are changes in biodiversity, certainly organisms will be extinct and others will appear, but I don’t know if we will be able to resist”, he warns.
Three to five million years ago there was also a large amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, and 65 million years ago the concentrations were still higher. Supposedly, due to the release of large amounts of methane, a process that may now be repeating itself, said the scientist.
In the last thousand years, recalled Fátima Abrantes, there was an increase in temperature in Europe in the medieval period, followed by a cooling. The temperature difference was about one degree, enough for the Vikings to expand and occupy the region of northern Europe, in the medieval period, and almost disappear in the cold period because they “were unable to adapt to the new conditions”. The Inuit (Canada) however managed to adapt.
Fátima Abrantes cited a study to say that the Vikings had a more complex society and that therefore they did not adapt as well as the Inuit, and concluded: “I believe that the more complex the organization, the more difficult it is to get the population, as a whole, accept the possibility of having to change the way of life “.
The researcher recalls the complexity of today’s societies and also that many influential politicians are now skeptical of climate change.
It is true that climate change has always existed “except that cycles in the past were associated with orbital variations, which have to do with the Earth’s position in relation to the Sun”. There were very long cycles and the increase in CO2 was minimal compared to what happens today, in the change caused by man, he said.
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