8 ms·

If 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 ago
What 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 ago
  Suppose the rate of change 350 million years ago was similar under a vastly different climate and context. Is that useful?
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    Suppose 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 ago
      It’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 ago
        If 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 ago
        No. 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.
        osigurdson 3y ago
        So then it is just a regional cosiness thing. If your region benefits from climate change, you should be in support of it and wish to accelerate it.
osigurdson 3y ago
I said that 100 years of data is nothing in the context of billions of years - which is obviously true. You are conflating this with rate of change which is not the same thing.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  How you can say that while also saying > Because 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. Which is it? Are you concerned with geologic time scale changes? Or are you just saying it would be nice to have more datapoints in which case the reference to geologic time is irrelevant. The ice levels “billions of years” ago are utterly irrelevant.
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    If we had daily, high fidelity data from billions of years ago until today, would this be useful in your estimation or not?

osigurdson 3y ago

What 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 ago
Suppose the rate of change 350 million years ago was similar under a vastly different climate and context. Is that useful?
- osigurdson 3y ago
  Suppose 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 ago
    It’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 ago
      If 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 ago
        No. 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.
        osigurdson 3y ago
        So then it is just a regional cosiness thing. If your region benefits from climate change, you should be in support of it and wish to accelerate it.

osigurdson 3y ago

I said that 100 years of data is nothing in the context of billions of years - which is obviously true. You are conflating this with rate of change which is not the same thing.

jncfhnb 3y ago
How you can say that while also saying > Because 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. Which is it? Are you concerned with geologic time scale changes? Or are you just saying it would be nice to have more datapoints in which case the reference to geologic time is irrelevant. The ice levels “billions of years” ago are utterly irrelevant.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  If we had daily, high fidelity data from billions of years ago until today, would this be useful in your estimation or not?