David Morrill Schlitt is a Legislative Assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He is a graduate of Columbia University in New York City.

On June 1, the New York Times featured an article about three new studies on Arctic climate patterns. We’ve been hearing a lot about Arctic weather lately, from reports of polar bears drowning as sea ice disappears, to the earlier arrival of spring displacing Inuit populations. But this article was different: it didn’t report on the rapidly warming Arctic of today. Instead, New York Times correspondent Andrew Revkin was reporting on the Arctic of yesteryear. And by yesteryear, I mean fifty-five million yesteryears ago, eons before human civilization, the mastery of the atom, and cable. But despite the fact that the studies deal with an era in which it was nearly impossible to find anything good on television, its results are still worth taking seriously.

The studies reported that, 55 million years ago, the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists had previously suspected. According to the Times, temperatures of Arctic waters hovered around “a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.” Moreover, scientists determined that this warmer weather was a result of “an enormous outburst of heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gases like methane and carbon dioxide,” not variations in Earth’s orbit, as some have attributed climate shifts to in the past.

“While [these findings] show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the arctic … ‘The new research provides additional important evidence that greenhouse-gas changes controlled much of climate history, which strengthens the argument that greenhouse-gas changes are likely to control much of the climate future,” said one such expert, Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University.”

Even as scientists have not found a clear cause for this ancient gas discharge [insert adolescent wisecrack here], the study shows the radical extent to which greenhouse gases can alter our climate. This has significant implications for our world today: Antarctic ice cores, which keep a record of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels going back hundreds of thousands of years, show that today’s CO2 levels are the highest they have been during the last 650,000 years. Unlike the basis for the mysterious discharge [please see previous remark] of 55 million years ago, today’s greenhouse gas build-up is no mystery. It is a result of human activities, primarily “emissions from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests.”

And while marlin fishing off the coast of Greenland in one’s underwear does not sound altogether unappealing, the damage caused by unchecked climate change will have disastrous effects for those of us without shorefront property in Godthab. The ice in the arctic is already melting at an unprecedented rate. If Greenland’s ice disappears, sea levels worldwide will increase by between 18 and 20 feet. Flooding would inundate some of our favorite coastal cities, tragically cutting short the rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox at a lopsided total of twenty-six World Series victories to six. Perhaps it is time for the President, and all the rest of us concerned about the most storied rivalry in professional sports, to take real action to stop climate change. The Natural Resource Defense Council shows how the U.S. can halve its carbon dioxide emission, in four manageable steps. And the RAC has more ways for you to take action on our Climate Change Resource Page.

Next Week: Meet the Skeptics