Finding Ancient Civilizations Is Hard - Agw Edition

[JMJones0424]

Note: I couldn't come up with a good title for this thread that conveys the subject covered and the implications in a short blurb.  If you can think of anything better, please feel free to make your recommendation.

 

The study covered by this Ars Technica article started from an interesting premise.  We can measure the geological evidence of the atmospheric composition of CO2 in the past.  We can also derive how these changing levels affected the climate.  What we can't necessarily do is show exactly why rapid CO2 increases in the Earth's past occurred.  The paper reported on in this article addresses the difficulty in doing such a thing and brings into question why an intelligence millions of years from now would be able to describe our current epoch as the Anthropocene.  Studying how fossil fuel burning raptors would have affected the geological record is informative as, even though it is likely ludicrous, it sharpens our ability to explain the history of the Earth and better equips us to explain the history of planets that we visit.

 

The article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/are-we-sure-there-wasnt-a-coal-burning-species-55-million-years-ago/

 

The accompanying short fiction that was written by the researcher that inspired the question being investigated: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kj4y8/gavin-schmidt-fiction-under-the-sun