In our rush for a better life, for more things, for higher profits, we are creating a changed planet. One that may never be able to sustain human beings again.

In the past, Earth's climate changed due to natural causes. Humanity did not have the numbers or the tools to have anything more than a minor effect on one small part of the globe. No one was able to change the global climate.

That all changed with the discovery of fossil fuels. Now, we are on track to create global temperatures last seen millions of years ago.

Over the past 1,000 years, temperature changes fluctuated. They rose, they fell, they rose again and they fell again. Coinciding with the discovery of oil and natural gas, and the use of coal to fire steam engines, CO₂ emissions began to climb. Shortly after, temperatures began to climb as well. And when they fell, the coolest temperatures were still higher than those of much of the previous millennium.

Scientists have collected ice cores dating back 800,000 years. Our species, Home sapiens, has been around for about 250,000 years. Agriculture became a part of humanity about 10,000 years ago.

During those million years, temperatures rarely climbed more than 2° C. At this point in time, scientists agree that, with our current technology, and with our political lack of will, it is too late to keep the planet from warming by at least 2.0° C.

In just over 150 years, or .015% of the past million years, humanity will have raised global temperatures higher than at any other time during those million years.

Only if we go back over 40 million years ago do we find global temperatures consistently hotter than those we will have by the end of this century. Since that time, the trend has been to global cooling, until today.

What will prehistoric heat levels bring us? Mass extinctions. Continental droughts. Raised sea levels. Lower lake and aquifer levels.

Can humanity beat the odds and survive when most other species won't? Not likely, unless we start now to reverse our course. To begin taking more atmospheric carbon out than we put in.

All of the green buttons on the left provide information about what we can do to avoid a changed planet. It all begins with a Zero Carbon economy.