Of all the creatures on Earth, humans manipulate their environments the most. But, how far can we push it before something drastic happens?

Scientists are calling for a better understanding of past extreme climate change events in an attempt to anticipate future changes.

Enter geoarchaeologist and anthropologist C. Michael Barton at Arizona State University. The School of Human Evolution and Social Change researcher, along with Foundation Professor Sander van der Leeuw and an international and interdisciplinary team, published their analysis this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper describes past abrupt climate changes, what led up to the “tipping points” for those events and what followed.

“We've been putting a lot of chemicals into the atmosphere and changing the heat of the atmosphere for a long time, and really intensively for 150 years,” Barton said. “And, things are still chugging along. Temperatures are slowly going up globally, but we haven’t seen a huge, dramatic shift. However, complex systems are potentially vulnerable if you push too much.”

Read the full article about learning from the past to mitigate future climate change from Arizona State University at Environmental News Network.