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Your support of that claim only describes 0.00055% of Earth's geological history.
by AuthorizedCust 8y ago
Your 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?