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The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before
- tambourine_man 8y agoFor some definition of sudden. What we're seeing now regarding geological speed is unprecedented. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- AuthorizedCust 8y agoYour support of that claim only describes 0.00055% of Earth's geological history.
- tambourine_man 8y agoThat's a good point. Is there record of such sudden change before?
- AuthorizedCust 8y agoDon't mean to be that guy, but he who makes the argument gets to provide the facts.
- namirez 8y agoNo! The natural warmings happened over thousands of years. In comparison to the Paleocene–Eocene warming, we are dumping 50 times more CO2 into atmosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
- contravariant 8y agoI'm not sure we have records that are precise enough to tell at that scale.
- rhcom2 8y agoScientists use ice cores to recreate temperatures
- eloff 8y agoAnd we don't have ice cores going back that far.
- rhcom2 8y ago"The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica." https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-and-climate-change/ https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-an... It's not a scale of millions of years but that's pretty good.
- yters 8y agoI thought there was a comet that hit the earth causing catastrophic climate change within days or weeks, and wiped out all the dinosaurs.
- maxxxxx 8y agoA big asteroid impact may do the job. Or a supervolcano.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoIt's difficult to get the precision needed to answer this question, but we have certainly had numerous extremely rapid heating events it the past. These [1] are the ice core data for the past 450k years and there were at least two major heating/cooling events that dwarf even where we're at today both hitting upwards of 10 degrees net change (from coldest to hottest) over extremely short periods of time. Interspersed in between are countless little peaks and valleys of temperatures as well, all over extremely significant temperature differences. [1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_Temperature.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_...
- ozborn 8y agoYou really think adding in a few hundred million years of extra data about the Precambrian period (assuming we have any) is going to add value to his chart or this conversation? No humans were even alive during this period. We don't know if human life or modern civilization is compatible with this very different environment. Pointing out that the earth used to be warmer (which we know it has been before in the very distant past) may make people feel better about global warming, but that's the only benefit I can think of. The downside is that it makes it easier for people to postpone the needed action to fix the climate and fails to address the anticipated economic and human lethal consequences of climate change.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoYou don't have to go anywhere near that far back. Humanity (as in the species of modern humans) has already lived through quite extreme changes in temperatures. These [1] are data from ice core collections over the past 450k years. Something that surprises me is that people don't seem to understand that the planet constantly goes in and out of heating and cooling phases for reasons that are still not all that well understood on a clear causal level. This in no way means that we are not contributing, potentially substantially, to the current heating phase. But it does mean that sometime right about now, even if humans did not exist, we'd expect to still see temperatures rapidly rising. That little comic starts at ~20k years ago is at the exact end of the last ice age and the beginning of the current heating phase so it paints a very misleading picture if you were not aware of the trends before it -- which rather resemble a sin wave of temperatures. For instance humans already lived through the heating phase about 140k years ago where temperatures from bottom to top increased on the order of about 10 degrees celsius. And that was at a time when we had extremely minimal technological capacity to adapt and migrations were something that could take on the order of centuries. [1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_Temperature.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_... -------- And out of curiosity can anybody explain why they're downvoting this as fast they can? So far as I can tell I've said literally nothing that is not factually correct (unlike the post I was responding to). In many ways these conversations feel like people want to freak themselves out, and interspersing facts is met with hostility. I'd really like any sort of rational explanation.
- CyberDildonics 8y agoHow much of that geological history has supported primates?
- tbirrell 8y agoOkay, so if the planet has done it on its own before, who are we to think we can stop it? Are we gods to command the sea and tides? On a slightly less melodramatic note, it takes a massive amount of hubris to think that we can do anything to the rock we live on that will affect it in any meaningful way. The worst thing we can do is set our civilization back a couple hundred years. Earth has been through several mass extinction events and life keeps coming back, we are only the current stage. There is nothing we can do to change the course nature has set.
- namirez 8y ago>it takes a massive amount of hubris to think that we can do anything to the rock we live on that will affect it in any meaningful way. I think the scientific consensus is that we already have, sadly for the worse.
- yters 8y agoAre we doing more than a massive comet hitting the earth?
- thereisnospork 8y agoIs smoking a cigarette worse for you than getting shot in the head? If you want a discussion you have to ask a real question.
- yters 8y agoThe context is people in this thread claim current climate change is happening at a historically unprecedented rate. However, supposedly a comet struck our planet and wiped out most large animals. That would presumably be a global climate change that happened really quickly, probably more quickly than anything we can do. If so, it is false to say current climate change is historically unprecedented.
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- jellicle 8y agoThe most sudden warmings Earth has ever seen happened at 1/100th or 1/1000th the speed of the current warming, and wiped out most life on Earth.
- chipperyman573 8y agoThat is true, however one argument that can be made is that most of life on earth was nowhere near as smart as humans are and didn't have, for example HVAC. You could make the argument that humans' intelligence will outweigh nature's attempts to wipe us out. Of course, that doesn't mean that global warming isn't a massive problem, and HVAC won't save us. It's just important to consider all sides of an argument. Edit: To be clear I disagree with this argument, it's just the most common one I've heard.
- DennisP 8y agoI would sure hate to live in a world in which most of nature has been destroyed, and the remaining humans huddle in air-conditioned buildings.
- jellicle 8y ago"Humans will try hard to survive", while undoubtedly true, isn't really a counter-argument. As a counter to your "humans are smart" theory, I would point out that we've known about climate change for half a century now and have done absolutely nothing about it: each year we are putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than the year before. We are accelerating into the apocalypse. If humans were smart as you suppose, wouldn't we have done something other than jam our feet on the accelerator?
- jacquesm 8y agoIt is a complete bogus argument. We need a functioning eco-system to survive.
- tabtab 8y agoSome big space rocks possibly made Earth cool rather quickly. In other words, more things trigger instant cooling than instant warming.
- CalRobert 8y agoA few months ago it was speculated that if Earth had seen industrial civilizations before, we would be none the wiser. While this isn't saying that would be the cause, it does give one pause. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...
- amvalo 8y ago> When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. What a nonsense argument, unless they managed to build an industrial civilization without iron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation). It would be glaringly obvious if these ores had already been mined.
- Jarb 8y agoMaybe, but stuff tends to erode and shift a lot over millions of years, possibly smoothing over evidence to a degree where we wouldn't be able to recognize it today... on Earth. However, AFAIK the moon is fairly stable, so if there were prior civilizations, they would have to have been far less advanced than we are. Otherwise they would have surely left evidence of their existence on the moon.
- throwaway5752 8y ago... Do you know about the iron catastrophe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_catastrophe), banded iron formations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation), and the oxygen catastrophe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event) and how they are related? Would it really be possible for us to not notice prior large-scale industrial mining of iron? Your point about lunar exploration is great, but it's also very likely there has never been industrialized life like us in Earth's history.
- amaccuish 8y agoI'm no scientist, but it amazes me that people can still think with all the industry, all the forests cut down, all the cars on the road, that our planet is magical and can handle it all.
- aphextron 8y ago>I'm no scientist, but it amazes me that people can still think with all the industry, all the forests cut down, all the cars on the road, that our planet is magical and can handle it all. No one really does. They just have enough accumulated conflicts of interest to accepting that fact that life is easier for them to not do so.
- ergothus 8y agoI think you underestimate the various causes for willful ignorance. It is very easy for a tiny human to assume the planet is huge and little the human can do will be significant. Ask a human to imagine 100,000 people and they are already outside our capacity. To ask them to realistically imagine millions or billions over decades and, well, the behavior is undefined. I certainly think there are a LOT of people choosing to take the easiest (short-term) belief, but I also think there are plenty of people who just can't imagine people-scale impacting world-scale. I had a friend who made the argument that he thinks it is arrogance to assume humans can harm the global environment on the scale of climate change. I see it as arrogance to assume we CAN'T. But I don't think he's being disingenuous - he just handles the overflow error differently.
- laxd 8y agoOne thing that has made an impression on me is using google maps in satellite view and appropriate zoom level. Start at northern europe and go south, or western us and go east, or any similar journey. Short of the mountain ranges, it's pretty much agriculture everywhere. Entire continents. It used to be forest.
- jhanschoo 8y agoSame here; I'm awed that just about every bit of green is parceled into pixellated rectangles, punctuated by a webwork of roads and small towns at certain junctions.
- moultano 8y agoIt's starting to feel like a waste of time to work on anything other than this, and whatever we need to stay functional while working on this. Anyone out there working on climate/energy/carbon-removal and hiring?
- sradu 8y agoI don't know if you've seen this: http://carbon.ycombinator.com http://carbon.ycombinator.com. Want to drop me an email with what you'd be interested in helping out with?
- 08-15 8y agoDon't know if they are hiring, but they are certainly working on energy: http://flibe-energy.com/ http://flibe-energy.com/ http://moltexenergy.com/ http://moltexenergy.com/ http://www.elysiumindustries.com/ http://www.elysiumindustries.com/
- lisper 8y agoThe slogan "The planet has seen sudden warming before" misses a crucial point: yes, the planet has seen sudden warming before (for some value of "sudden"). But human civilization never has. Climate change is not an existential threat to the planet, nor to life, nor probably even to homo sapiens. But it is very much an existential threat to civilization. Personally, that worries me. I'm a big fan of civilization, and I don't want to see it die. But right now it's not looking good. [UPDATE:] As anyone who has read the story will be able to tell, I wrote the above comment before reading the story. Because the full headline is "The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything."
- moultano 8y agoThe purpose of the article is to point out that the last time the Earth saw sudden warming, almost all complex life went extinct.
- lisper 8y agoYes, I just updated my comment to reflect that. But I think many people will, as I did, interpolate the truncated headline as, "The earth has seen sudden warming before [and therefore there's nothing to worry about because it all worked out the last time]."
- craftyguy 8y agoThat's why it is usually helpful to read more than just the headline.
- lisper 8y agoWell, yeah, but the fact of the matter is that many people don't, and this is not entirely indefensible. One must be selective about what one reads. There just aren't enough hours in the day. You can re-interpret my original comment as being about how misleading it is to truncate the original headline if you like. The untruncated version is <80 characters so there's no excuse.
- lisper 8y agoThe original headline is "The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything." The truncated version is very misleading because many people will naturally interpolate it as, "The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before [and so there is nothing to worry about because everything worked out OK the last time]." The full version is only 74 characters so there's really no excuse.
- dogma1138 8y agoIt’s not about the planet, it never was the planet will be here until the sun inflates and even that might not be enough to “kill it”. This is about humans and our ability to survive as a civilization yet alone as a species. Climate change poses no risk to the planet or even life as we know it in general (as while there will be an extinction event, life will persist), however it poses an existential risk to our civilization.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoThe best hypothesis at the moment is that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event was caused by the enormous, million-year long eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, combined with their ignition of carbonate rocks (which were in the process of forming large coal beds). The rise in CO2 levels and global temperature was not the fundamental problem for life on Earth -- it was the complete disruption of photosynthesis both on land and in the oceans. If you consider the scale, mechanisms, duration, and size of the Siberian Traps eruptions [1] there is no reasonable comparison with the current effects and future consequences of just the industrial rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps
- thomasahle 8y agoWhat's your point? That maybe this time 95% of all life won't die?
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoWell, would you assert that the industrial rise in CO2 levels, as such, will have consequences comparable to one of the worst mass-extinction events, caused by gigantic volcanic eruptions lasting millions of years? I hold that unlike causes have unlike effects. The Permian-Triassic extinction started with and involved many more destructive elements than merely increased CO2 and global warming. Unlike what we are experiencing today.
- ivoras 8y agoAnd the sad thing is, if it takes hundreds of millions of years to evolve an intelligent species, as far as we know there is absolutely no way we can leave a message to the ones who could presumably come after us. Even choosing a location on Earth for the message is impossible because even optimal places for life to flourish become deserts or buried under ice or rocks on those time scales. Makes you think how small we are. The best bet would probably be to draw a giant smiley face on the light side of the Moon - but that's assuming that a new species will have faces like ours. Maybe the "Moon rabbit" is a perfectly obvious drawing by some ancient species' standards.
- topmonk 8y agoA mathematical concept would work best. A series of prime numbers represented as dots, for example.