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Earth is just a ball of rock hurtling through space. Earth is going to be okay at any temperature because it doesn't even make sense for a ball of rock hurtling

Earth is just a ball of rock hurtling through space. Earth is going to be okay at any temperature because it doesn't even make sense for a ball of rock hurtling through space to not be okay. It's not Earth we have to worry about, it's humans. 1. We know is that there's a range of temperatures where humans have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years, and life has thrived for millions of years. 2. We also know that there's a range of temperatures where it will be too hot for humans to survive. 3. We also know that global temperature is changing from the former to the latter. Given these three facts I don't think we need to know what the ideal temperature of the earth is to be concerned.

tucaz 7y ago
I’m just trying to learn here. If we need to fix something I have learned we need to know what “broken” looks like as well as “fixed”. What are these numbers?
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I'm saying that we don't need to know what those numbers are to know there's a problem. You're asking leading questions which contain a lot of presuppositions, and you're ignoring my post in which I specifically reject those presuppositions, which makes it hard for me to believe that you're just trying to learn.
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  We have very little understanding of the range of temperatures that are "fixed". We know for sure that at pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and at that temperature, the complex ecological systems of the world were more or less sustainably living.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Here's an opinion on it. Haven't gone out and done my own validation, or checked other sources, but it'll give you somewhere to start https://youtu.be/oG19fCFSamQ https://youtu.be/oG19fCFSamQ
- tucaz 7y ago
  Let me see if I got it right. Even though we have no objective measurement of what’s wrong and what’s right you are asking me to believe you and trust you that there is a problem?
  - supermatt 7y ago
    It seems that you have a number of threads going on here that are deliberately argumentative. Clearly you haven't even had the time to read any of the references that you were specifically given that answer many (if not all) of your questions - yet here you are, continuing the climate-denial fight. Do the honorable thing and stop phrasing your statements as questions - it is a waste of peoples time answering them.
    - tucaz 7y ago
      Every time I try to argue around the subject and ask questions about it I get downvoted to oblivion or get answers like yours. I keep doing it because every time that happens more and more people realize how ridiculous the climate fighters demands are. It doesn’t matter how loud you scream, it won’t convince anyone other than the already converted. If these people were actually worried about climate and all related subjects they would be working on providing actual things reasonable people could do to help as oppose to calling other names and demanding they stop using plastic straws by showing pictures of turtles.
      - supermatt 7y ago
        then instead of asking questions you are not interested in the answers to, give evidence of your own position. I'm not here to argue with you. I am just pointing out that people are linking you to references, and you clearly aren't even reading them before you post your follow-up "questions". If you want to argue, argue with evidence - don't dress it up as a question.
      - mcguire 7y ago
        "...demanding they stop using plastic straws by showing pictures of turtles." You do realize the plastic waste issue is separate from climate change? I'm afraid that, since you seem to be reasonably intelligent and informed, I have to assume your replies are not made in good faith.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  In terms of global average temperature, we consider "average temperature in the decades before industrialization" as "healthy/fixed" and the previous temperature plus 4-6 degrees Celsius as "broken beyond repair". In reality it's of course a bit more complicated since earth is complicated. Another good proxy for "fixed" would be "glaciers and permafrost exist and are not decreasing" while broken would be "large areas in the third world have become uninhabitable to humans"
- wolfram74 7y ago
  One metric which indicates "definitely super broken" is if the wet bulb temperature[1] get's to the mid to high 30's. Any regions where that happens for sustained periods is uninhabitable for mammals (which we are a subset of) Before a region get's there consistently, it'll be that way intermittently and many people who can leave probably will because even in the high 20's and low 30's it'll significantly impact humans ability to do things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
  - tucaz 7y ago
    Awesome! Thanks! Let’s assume that’s the number. What I, as an individual, can do to help? This serves for all the other commenters complaining about my responses. If you can’t provide something that I can do as an individual I can’t help you. It doesn’t matter how much we complain about how governments are not doing what they are supposed to if we can’t start with the smallest organizational unit of our planet which is the individual.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      1. Involve yourself in pro-environmental politics, vote for pro-environmental leaders and policies. Most personal environmental decisions are dwarfed by the poor decisions made by large, corporations. 2. Consume less. 3. When you must consume, buy used (much of the carbon footprint of many products comes from producing the item). 4. Buy more local goods (much of the carbon footprint of many products comes from transporting them long distances). 5. Travel less, and more carbon-efficiently. Live closer to where you work. Walk > bike > public transit > cars. 6. Stop arguing that climate change doesn't exist. 7. Spend a few minutes researching the answers to your own questions before going on the internet and arguing that environmentalists don't have any answers. There's a wealth of information out there, and lots of people who are trying very hard to educate people, who would be happy to educate you if you asked questions in good faith, or typed your questions into a search engine.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      You can do what you can to reduce your own carbon footprint and you can join organizations like the Citizen's Climate Lobby (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/) to convince politicians to finally start acting. These people here (https://www.drawdown.org/ https://www.drawdown.org/) put together a list of actions, some of which require you to change your behavior, some which you can influence by getting involved in local politics, and some which require global action.
minblaster 7y ago
“All humans are going to die because the temperature gets too hot for our biology” is fallacious. Do you think we’ll gain 30C and Siberia will become unlivable? Does everyone die when the summer temperature is 30C higher than winter? We are literally planning Martian colonies, do you think we can’t figure out how to survive on Earth? The issue is the effects of moderate temperature increases, rising sea levels, changing farming, etc. so it’s a mass disruption to our civilization (migration, resource wars, etc.) Not that we’ll literally be too hot and can’t somehow survive that as a species. Humans live in Australian Outback and Alaska. We are adaptable, but the growing pains are not pleasant, hence the problem to civilization.
- jbay808 7y ago
  There are a lot of periods in Earth's own geological history that humans would not have survived. There are also a lot of other rocks in our solar system that humans would not survive on. Whether or not we can survive climate change depends on the bounds of how much change happens and how quickly, especially in terms of feedback mechanisms (clathrate gun, H2S from an anaerobic sea, etc).
  - minblaster 7y ago
    There was a temperature in recent times (hundreds of millions of years) where humans would not have survived, anywhere on Earth? Yet giant dinosaurs with the wrong ratio of mass to surface area did? Really, when? How much hotter was it in the past? I’m not saying we shouldn’t fix the issue. I’m saying the argument that the average temperature will be unlivable is bad. It’s like saying bullets kill people because of the lead content, not the process of getting injected. The process of climate change will impact us most, not the impact of the temperature on our biology.
    - jbay808 7y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext... We do have to be careful playing with the chemistry of the atmosphere of the only habitable planet we have.

tucaz 7y ago

I’m just trying to learn here. If we need to fix something I have learned we need to know what “broken” looks like as well as “fixed”. What are these numbers?

kerkeslager 7y ago
I'm saying that we don't need to know what those numbers are to know there's a problem. You're asking leading questions which contain a lot of presuppositions, and you're ignoring my post in which I specifically reject those presuppositions, which makes it hard for me to believe that you're just trying to learn.
abdullahkhalids 7y ago
We have very little understanding of the range of temperatures that are "fixed". We know for sure that at pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and at that temperature, the complex ecological systems of the world were more or less sustainably living.
huffmsa 7y ago
Here's an opinion on it. Haven't gone out and done my own validation, or checked other sources, but it'll give you somewhere to start https://youtu.be/oG19fCFSamQ https://youtu.be/oG19fCFSamQ
tucaz 7y ago
Let me see if I got it right. Even though we have no objective measurement of what’s wrong and what’s right you are asking me to believe you and trust you that there is a problem?
- supermatt 7y ago
  It seems that you have a number of threads going on here that are deliberately argumentative. Clearly you haven't even had the time to read any of the references that you were specifically given that answer many (if not all) of your questions - yet here you are, continuing the climate-denial fight. Do the honorable thing and stop phrasing your statements as questions - it is a waste of peoples time answering them.
  - tucaz 7y ago
    Every time I try to argue around the subject and ask questions about it I get downvoted to oblivion or get answers like yours. I keep doing it because every time that happens more and more people realize how ridiculous the climate fighters demands are. It doesn’t matter how loud you scream, it won’t convince anyone other than the already converted. If these people were actually worried about climate and all related subjects they would be working on providing actual things reasonable people could do to help as oppose to calling other names and demanding they stop using plastic straws by showing pictures of turtles.
    - supermatt 7y ago
      then instead of asking questions you are not interested in the answers to, give evidence of your own position. I'm not here to argue with you. I am just pointing out that people are linking you to references, and you clearly aren't even reading them before you post your follow-up "questions". If you want to argue, argue with evidence - don't dress it up as a question.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      "...demanding they stop using plastic straws by showing pictures of turtles." You do realize the plastic waste issue is separate from climate change? I'm afraid that, since you seem to be reasonably intelligent and informed, I have to assume your replies are not made in good faith.
wongarsu 7y ago
In terms of global average temperature, we consider "average temperature in the decades before industrialization" as "healthy/fixed" and the previous temperature plus 4-6 degrees Celsius as "broken beyond repair". In reality it's of course a bit more complicated since earth is complicated. Another good proxy for "fixed" would be "glaciers and permafrost exist and are not decreasing" while broken would be "large areas in the third world have become uninhabitable to humans"
wolfram74 7y ago
One metric which indicates "definitely super broken" is if the wet bulb temperature[1] get's to the mid to high 30's. Any regions where that happens for sustained periods is uninhabitable for mammals (which we are a subset of) Before a region get's there consistently, it'll be that way intermittently and many people who can leave probably will because even in the high 20's and low 30's it'll significantly impact humans ability to do things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
- tucaz 7y ago
  Awesome! Thanks! Let’s assume that’s the number. What I, as an individual, can do to help? This serves for all the other commenters complaining about my responses. If you can’t provide something that I can do as an individual I can’t help you. It doesn’t matter how much we complain about how governments are not doing what they are supposed to if we can’t start with the smallest organizational unit of our planet which is the individual.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    1. Involve yourself in pro-environmental politics, vote for pro-environmental leaders and policies. Most personal environmental decisions are dwarfed by the poor decisions made by large, corporations. 2. Consume less. 3. When you must consume, buy used (much of the carbon footprint of many products comes from producing the item). 4. Buy more local goods (much of the carbon footprint of many products comes from transporting them long distances). 5. Travel less, and more carbon-efficiently. Live closer to where you work. Walk > bike > public transit > cars. 6. Stop arguing that climate change doesn't exist. 7. Spend a few minutes researching the answers to your own questions before going on the internet and arguing that environmentalists don't have any answers. There's a wealth of information out there, and lots of people who are trying very hard to educate people, who would be happy to educate you if you asked questions in good faith, or typed your questions into a search engine.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    You can do what you can to reduce your own carbon footprint and you can join organizations like the Citizen's Climate Lobby (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/) to convince politicians to finally start acting. These people here (https://www.drawdown.org/ https://www.drawdown.org/) put together a list of actions, some of which require you to change your behavior, some which you can influence by getting involved in local politics, and some which require global action.

minblaster 7y ago

“All humans are going to die because the temperature gets too hot for our biology” is fallacious. Do you think we’ll gain 30C and Siberia will become unlivable? Does everyone die when the summer temperature is 30C higher than winter? We are literally planning Martian colonies, do you think we can’t figure out how to survive on Earth? The issue is the effects of moderate temperature increases, rising sea levels, changing farming, etc. so it’s a mass disruption to our civilization (migration, resource wars, etc.) Not that we’ll literally be too hot and can’t somehow survive that as a species. Humans live in Australian Outback and Alaska. We are adaptable, but the growing pains are not pleasant, hence the problem to civilization.

jbay808 7y ago
There are a lot of periods in Earth's own geological history that humans would not have survived. There are also a lot of other rocks in our solar system that humans would not survive on. Whether or not we can survive climate change depends on the bounds of how much change happens and how quickly, especially in terms of feedback mechanisms (clathrate gun, H2S from an anaerobic sea, etc).
- minblaster 7y ago
  There was a temperature in recent times (hundreds of millions of years) where humans would not have survived, anywhere on Earth? Yet giant dinosaurs with the wrong ratio of mass to surface area did? Really, when? How much hotter was it in the past? I’m not saying we shouldn’t fix the issue. I’m saying the argument that the average temperature will be unlivable is bad. It’s like saying bullets kill people because of the lead content, not the process of getting injected. The process of climate change will impact us most, not the impact of the temperature on our biology.
  - jbay808 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext... We do have to be careful playing with the chemistry of the atmosphere of the only habitable planet we have.