3 ms·
Genuinely, this was helpful to my gut understanding of this issue: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
by macrael 6y ago
Genuinely, this was helpful to my gut understanding of this issue: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- yters 6y agoaccording to that graph the world was as warm if not warmer relatively recently
- Arnavion 6y agoIt shows literally the exact opposite of that. 2016 is the highest temperature and at no previous point does the graph reach that value.
- yters 6y agoit looks like the line marked gold metalworking is the same, although hard to tell for sure. But long periods of history were at least pretty close to today's remperature according to that graph
- krastanov 6y agoThis is kinda missing the point. Look at the slope. And think how a system responds to a gentle slow perturbation and how it responds to a fast drastic change.
- sergeykish 6y agoThe alarming part is rate. Earth warmth comes from CO2 blanket, we can't suck it from atmosphere, we hardly can reduce CO2 production worldwide. Also his "best case scenario" is humanity wiped from Earth ten years ago, not base case for me. "Optimistic scenario" is if world acted on current policies. And "current path" is denial (4°C–5°C raise). https://ourworldindata.org/future-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/future-emissions
- peterashford 6y ago1. No, the gold metalworking part is lower on the graph. 2. It's the slope of the change - systems that evolve over millennia aren't set up to adjust over decades
- macrael 6y agoOnce more and for the last time in good faith, it's the trend line that matters. The earth hasn't experienced even remotely close to this rapid a change in temperature in the 20,000 years captured by that chart. To take your example from the gold smithing era. The earth warmed from -.5 -> +.6 degrees over the course of about 4000 years. We've warmed that much in the last 100 years.