The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been essentially constant for the last 2000 years. In fact it has not gone above 300 ppm (parts per million) for at least the last 800.000 years.
But in the industrial revolution our ancestors started to burn fossil fuels. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been doubling every 30 years since the year 1800.
The graph of the human contribution of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is now shooting up almost vertically.
(Picture of Concentration of Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere from new-universe.org)
The last thousands of years humans had almost no impact on the global scale, but we now starting to have an enormous impact. If we continue at the present rate, the amount of carbon-dioxide will increaee by a factor of 8 in this century. The consequences for climate will be catastrophic. We have to stop these exponential increases in our impact in the environment very quickly.
The reason why the societies around the world seem to be unable to deal with these long-term problems may be, that they can't grasp the immense lenght of time that our present actions will affect.
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