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Is there no way for scientists to estimate these levels over the past ~500 million years in order to get a broader context?
by osigurdson 3y ago
Is there no way for scientists to estimate these levels over the past ~500 million years in order to get a broader context?
- bequanna 3y agoI think this is the most useful kind of data so we can put this into context, but I’m curious how they would estimate something like this. Use sea floor core samples to estimate sea ice coverage over a specific location over time?
- osigurdson 3y agoI don’t know the specifics, but often scientists are able to infer a great many things from limited data. We of course have to accept that the uncertainty will be far greater that an actual year-over-year measurement as we do now.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWhat would be the point of saying the ice today is similar to the ice 500 million years ago?
- osigurdson 3y agoBecause 100 years is nothing in geological time obviously. The only reason not to do it is to choose to not understand the problem as completely as possible.
- reverius42 3y agoIf 100 years is nothing, then the Antarctic ice levels shouldn’t change at all since we’ve been monitoring them. Which makes this even more alarming!
- osigurdson 3y agoWhat if we knew this rate of change is commonplace in a historical context or has literally never occurred in the past. I think would be useful information.
- jncfhnb 3y agoSuppose the rate of change 350 million years ago was similar under a vastly different climate and context. Is that useful?
- osigurdson 3y agoSuppose a similar rate of change in similar conditions happened 10,000 times in the past. Is that useful? Alternately what if we've never seen a rate of change like this in the history of the earth. Is that useful?
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt’s not really useful. Anything taking place in a fundamentally different climate and context is basically irrelevant. If you want to suppose that our understanding of sea ice and it’s relationship to temperature is fundamentally wrong to the extent that we are missing a rapid drop in sea ice in the past thousand or so years… sure. But that seems unlikely. And suppose it were normal. Does that actually help? No not really.
- osigurdson 3y agoIf it were normal, you would have to reject the “alarming” / “mind blowing” statements in the article. If it were abnormal, on the other hand, it would support such claims. This is what the article is about.
- jncfhnb 3y agoNo. That’s my whole point. “Normal” on a geological time scale is completely irrelevant to humans, whose society is built on a tiny stable slice of that timeframe. Geological time scale “normal” includes many states that are not survivable for our societies. What we care about is normal relative to our cozy state that we have now.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWhat would change if you found out there was 100x 350 million years ago and 0 ice 500 million years ago?