Blurs

We tend to think of Earth's climate as something relatively stable. There are warm places. Cold places. Wet places. Dry places. Ice at the poles. Deserts near the tropics. Forests covering parts of the continents. It feels permanent because human civilisation has existed for such a tiny fraction of Earth's history. But zoom out. Earth is not climatically stable at all. Over billions of years, our planet has moved between conditions that would be almost unrecognisable to us. There have been periods when ice reached surprisingly low latitudes. There have been times when Antarctica supported forests. There have been enormous changes in atmospheric composition. There have been episodes of extreme greenhouse warming. And there have been periods when much of the planet may have been covered in ice. The Earth we know today is only one possible climate state. So how different can our planet actually become? The Earth has never had just one climate Climate isn't determined by temper...