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I'm still not sure to what extent climate change is man-made vs other factors, etc... the earth has had warmer periods than today in the past. I'm not saying w

• sanex 3y ago
  Or how the earth may just adapt on its own to counter it. Increased CO2 -> more plankton -> more fish?
  • chomp 3y ago
    Increased CO2 over extended time periods would lead to fewer large fish due to the process of ocean acidification (my understanding is that smaller fish cope better than larger fish in acid environments, that's not to say they will be prolific in an acidic ocean, however). Phytoplankton would do very well though, assuming it can adapt to the acidification and warming. Most Earth-based counters historically have involved megaflora sequestering CO2 as they die, however this is over the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, and requires large expanses of land to host plants to do the sequestering. We've doled out most of this land already, so this isn't likely to happen. If you're looking for a deus ex machina, you might wanna hold out for a supervolcano to eject a bunch of material into the atmosphere.
  • toshgoodson 3y ago
    Climate change models seem to indicate amplifying feedback loops would be the likely scenario rather than "countering" forces. And for your specific example "increased CO2 -> more plankton -> more fish", this tends to not be the case in reality. Large algae blooms result in mass fish die offs. And now combine that with the the presently-occurring Increased CO2 -> warmer temperatures -> warmer water -> less dissolved O2 -> dead fish
  • breakyerself 3y ago
    Typically you should figure out if it's safe to drastically alter the thermal and chemical properties of the climate and biosphere before you do it. Not assume it's safe based on conjecture so you can carry on with a reckless experiment.
• goda90 3y ago
  Whether humans have a significant impact on the climate is only a small part of the overall subject. Is it happening? How fast? What negative impacts will it have on civilization and the biosphere? Can we do anything to slow it down/stop it and should we? Whether humans are a significant cause is really only relevant to that last question.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    True... I guess I just don't respond well to the general alarmism. Not that this article was written that way, but did make the use of "We" as a general sense of the cause.
• _fs 3y ago
  How do you think ecosystems are able to adapt when the time scale of current climate change (measurable changes over 10s of years) versus previous instancing of natural climate change, which occurred over 10000s of years.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure an average of 1-2C difference in under a century has happened before, without influence of humans.
    • 9dev 3y ago
      And you’re pretty sure of that thanks to your expertise as a climate scientist?
      • tracker1 3y ago
        From reading I've done regarding previous cooling and warming cycles. But thanks for trolling.
        • Nevermark 3y ago
          That’s not trolling. It was a request for the level of expertise behind your personal opinions that you are suggesting are relevant to people on this site by posting here. And your response is useful. “From reading”. Relative to tens of thousands of scientists of diverse fields, educational backgrounds, affiliated institutions, geographical regions, areas of study, environments of study, experimental approaches, data sources, mathematical analysis, and lots of reading, etc. basing a contrarian view on some reading is inadequate as a credible rebuttal. For the most part, people on this site are looking for greater insight, not greater expression of personal opinions.
          • eindiran 3y ago
            It may not be "trolling", but it definitely violates the spirit of the HN guidelines[0] (somehow hitting 3 out of 4 of the first comment guidelines -- failing the kindness test, snarkiness test, and editing out swipes test). The comment OP called trolling would be much stronger and more interesting if it posted a "credible rebuttal" instead of being snarky and rude. If that hits an issue with the bullshit asymmetry principle[1] for you, downvote and move on with your life. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
• Natuerich 3y ago
  Just read the Wikipedia article about it... Srsly we have 2023 :-( And obviously other faces were calculated in like sun phase etc.... Even in hn people are not able to just research this properly :(
  • tracker1 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • _fs 3y ago
      Appeal to authority fallacy occurs when someone asserts a claim solely based on the authority or expertise of an individual or group, without considering the evidence supporting the claim. However, in the case of climate change, the scientific consensus is derived from a robust body of evidence and research conducted by thousands of scientists worldwide
      • tracker1 3y ago
        That said, the level of proof is mostly conjecture, contrast and comparison. There are a lot of other mitigating factors at play when we're talking about a solar system. It's not significantly different than what was pushed as the heart-health cholesterol hypothesis as fact for half a century, and was in fact wrong, dramatically wrong. The level of alarmism doesn't help. According to 2001, Florida should be underwater right now. And that is as we, as a global population haven't dramatically changed much of anything. I'll believe the alarmism, when treaty proposals don't draft out massive exclusions for India, China and African nations.
    • ianburrell 3y ago
      Do you have an example? Because all of the variations in recorded history, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, were less than 0.5C. Also, both were regional and came on over centuries. Also, the difference between the Ice Age and current interglacial was only 4C. The transition took 6000 years. We are approaching 1.5C and should hit 3C. That is the opposite of Ice Age in a century.
    • 3y ago
• raffraffraff 3y ago
  Do you think that greenhouse gases are in any way related to this temperature increase, which coincidentally happened over the same 100-ish years during which humans were extracting and burning millions of years worth of carbon sink? Because that's the smoking gun as far as I'm concerned, and ignoring that makes no sense.
  • upsidesinclude 3y ago
    Eee, throw up a human population graph next to that temp graph, because have I got a surprise for you! The new claim is that population die off caused the Little Ice Age, thanks to disease and 'genocide'... 55 million out of roughly 500M. If you buy that, you can't really deny the impact of the population increasing to 7.5B. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=900..latest https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=900..late...
• automatoney 3y ago
  Atmospheric carbon dioxide is higher today than it has been in millennia, and carbon dioxide causes heating through the greenhouse effect. What scientific evidence do you have that supports your skepticism? https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
  • tut-urut-utut 3y ago
    Millennia is not even a blink of an eye in Earth history. What do you want to prove using such a small time period? It’s like trying to understand how stock market works by using only last minute as a reference.
    • breakyerself 3y ago
      We have millions of years of data. It's been 100,000 years since temps were this high, but millions of years since CO2 was this high. It's not safe to drastically alter the thermal properties of the atmosphere of the only planet we have to live on. Just common sense.
    • clydethefrog 3y ago
      By this maxim you can label any research concerning the creation of the universe as moot.
• breakyerself 3y ago
  The problem isn't that we are shifting the climate into some mode that has never existed on this planet. It's that we're shifting it into a very different mode from the one that ecosystems and society is adapted to and the changes are happening much more rapidly than under normal making it harder for ecosystems and society to adapt. Scientists have been studying this in depth for a long time now. They know what things push on the climate naturally and how much they're pushing now. They know how much raising CO2 pushes on the climate. The best estimate is that humans have caused 100% of the warming in the last 50 years. I think if you look at the long term trends before the industrial revolution it's pretty clear that we've caused more than 100% of the warming because there was a clear cooling trend before we stepped in. We have caused a 50% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. The basic physics of that is the co2 we released is trapping 4 Hiroshima bombs per second worth of extra heat energy in the climate system. The planet is hotter than it's been in 100,000 years. CO2 the most important greenhouse gas is higher than it's been in millions of years. The oceans have absorbed half our co2 emissions and become 25% more acidic as a result. This is a massive, reckless, unplanned experiment with the thermal and chemical properties of the only planet we have. There's no backup. Nobody who isn't insane would have knowingly decided to do this this way.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    So we've cause "more than 100% of the warming". How is that even mathematically possible? As far as CO2, it isn't even the biggest greenhouse gas.
    • KolenCh 3y ago
      It's poor wording, but I think it is suppose to mean "if x is the amount of warming seen, we are causing more than x amount of them." Ie without human cause it would have negative warming.
    • breakyerself 3y ago
      The earth would have probably cooled slightly in the absence of human influences.
• travisporter 3y ago
  Why do you think that? Physical phenomenon are not necessarily intuitive