12 ms·

174 years, out of a 4 billion+ year history.

sevg 3y ago
So you're implying that since records only go back 174 years that they can't be indicative of anything? Let's try to put a bit more effort into our debates on HN :)
gameoverhumans 3y ago
Aren't you sick of this tired old argument? Humans have not existed on this planet for the 4 billion years. More like 4 million. Sure, an accurately recorded history of 174 is still a pretty small fraction of 4 million. So if you're going to try to downplay the increasingly obvious Great Filter our idiotic species is hurtling towards at breakneck speed, at least be dignified about it and use the right numbers. Thanks!
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  In what scenario is climate change removing humans from the planet? If we cannot handle/manage/remove a mere 2-3 degree increase (which is about the current trajectory), sooner or later natural variation will doom us. The great filter might very well be the unwillingness to consider more than mono-thematic solutions mixed with doomsterism, though.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    > sooner or later natural variation will doom us. Correct, but we have managed to convert "later" to "significantly sooner". The fact that eventually the climate would have changed unfavorably anyway at some unknown point in the future is no reason to be comfortable with humans inducing an unfavorable change right now. That's like saying there's no point in getting an oil change because the car engine is going to wear out eventually anyway. or like saying you might as well smoke and drink as much as you want because everyone dies at some point.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I am saying we already on a path not in the catastrophic collapse space and we need and will be able to handle things, because we need to for far more problematic things in the future anyway.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    Human race handled the Blacl Death, but was it fun? It can probably survive a global nuclear war, but is it a great idea?
  - esarbe 3y ago
    You might be underestimating the social upheaval that will result from wast regions of the earth becoming uninhabitable and the effect of the population movements from desperate people trying to get away starvation. You might also be underestimating the consequences of ecosystem collapse. Since 1970 we've already lost about 60% of biomass of insects, birds and mammals. The impact of rapid climate change will put additional pressure on already vulnerable species. I have little doubt that widespread ecosystem collapse will be the death nail for our global human civilization.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts? Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.
      - gameoverhumans 3y ago
        > So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts I don't see how the grandparent comment implied a lack of trust in other experts, nor did they imply themselves to be experts. > Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path. Actually, the IPCC, which tends to be rather optimistic on how bad things could be (or already are), predicts pretty significant socioeconomic problems arising from 2-3 degrees warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways It doesn't take much imagination to come up with ways that "Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common" leads to "nation states with nukes and experiencing extreme scarcity and high social unrest declare war on each other"...
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Your imagination might not be a good guide to take you from degrading social cohesion to something like nuclear war. Even in general, socio-economic models are not of the same quality as the physics models (and no-one is making that claim anyway). The SSPs are more like share narratives rather than forecasts.
  - solumunus 3y ago
    “Sooner or later” could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of years though, so I don’t think your point holds much weight.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Sooner or later I’ll die of cancer so I might as well go BASE jumping without a parachute.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    For it to be a Great Filter, it needs not to wipe out humanity completely, it's sufficient to end technological civilization. A nuclear war over resources can easily do that. As Covid has shown, even minuscule disruptions can lead to widespread scarcity, so a nuclear war might not even be necessary.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I could also say: covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all. Anyone can imagine any kind of doom scenario, but then I could justify inaction all the time: if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother?
      - gameoverhumans 3y ago
        > covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all. What I hear: "hey look, I pulled a piece out of the Jenga tower and it didn't collapse! Clearly from this I can infer that more pieces can be pulled without any consequences!" > if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother? Uh, because we don't have control over foreign sentient beings, nor the path of celestial bodies? Do you really not see the difference between those things and anthropogenic warming as a result of rapid industrialization?
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense? Anyway, I didn't say we should do nothing about climate change (and we are doing a lot), but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway - then, yes, totally happy not to work in that field anymore.
        gameoverhumans 3y ago
        > You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense? Mate the dino-nuking asteroid that hit Earth was 10km in diameter. Even if we launched every nuke we had at such an object, it wouldn't do much to deter such an object. And that's assuming it's moving at a low enough fraction of c that we could actually detect such an object in time to mobilize all said nukes. So, no, I don't think we would be able to defend ourselves today (nor by 2100, let's say) against such an adversary. Same deal with any species that is sophisticated enough to do interstellar travel. For them it's even easier, they can just pick up a few rocks from Kuiper belt, stick some mass drivers on them and it's bye-bye Earth within a few weeks/months. > (and we are doing a lot) The point is we're not. We haven't even reached peak fossil fuel yet. Even if we stopped everything tomorrow, things would still keep getting worse for at least another few decades. But as it is we're reading today about how bad we made things for ourselves in the 80s. Since then our consumption has only continued to accelerate, which can only mean things will be even worse tomorrow. > but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway No. That's not what I or anyone else in this thread has been saying. It's like this. We are on the Titanic. Some very clever people have charted our course and done ocean sonographs and determined there's a big-ass iceberg ahead. Many folks like you are insisting either a) there's no iceberg or b) icebergs are good for ship hulls or c) we'll out-technology the iceberg somehow and thus we don't need to worry about the iceberg. So right now all we've done is ACCELERATE towards the iceberg. If there was sensible suggestions like "let's alter our course slightly" I wouldn't be saying "well that still puts us on course for the iceberg so there's no point". I would be saying "great! that's a start!".
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    This is a problem in how warming is reported in my opinion. Saying it's just 2 or 3 degrees doesn't sound like a lot. But that is warming the whole planet on average by that amount. This is a lot of energy being injected into the climate, and regional variations and extreme weather will be much more severe.
    - esarbe 3y ago
      Just try to imagine the ludicrous amount of energy required to heat up the whole surface - and probably a good part of the ocean - by 2°C. I think it is in the order of 10^17 joules or so.
      - mr_mitm 3y ago
        But that is distributed over a ludicrous amount of volume. These numbers are so large that I can visualize neither. How is this information supposed to help me?
        esarbe 3y ago
        First I would check the number that I gave you and make sure it is correct. Then you put it into perspective; e.g. how many millennia would it take for a couple of hundred nuclear reactors to produce that much of energy. Play with the numbers and see what you can learn about them. Not sure you need to consider that much of a volume; we're talking about surface temperature, so you can just take an approximation of heat capacity of the surface of Earth.
    - gameoverhumans 3y ago
      Meh I dunno, there's that website that reports how many hiroshimas of energy we're releasing into our planet per second, the skeptics/denialists don't seem to care much for that metric, either. I don't think the problem is how it's being reported, I think it's just that this is the kind of news some people will do anything but hear.
      - 3y ago
  - Delomo 3y ago
    With 3-6 degrees we will see sea level rise of a few meters. This already affects a lot of coastal regions. And there is still a big question mark if we don't break something fundamental on the road ahead. It might not eradicate us but millions and millions / billions will suffer.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      We are not on a 3-6C trajectory, why discuss the implications there?
      - bonzini 3y ago
        Do we even know what's the trajectory?
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Yeah, we have a reasonable good idea because we can not only see the past but also investments and plans etc.
      - Delomo 3y ago
        We are.on a 2-3 by 2100 projection. That's not far away
- FFP999 3y ago
  > Aren't you sick of this tired old argument? Per Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thealienthing 3y ago
This article discusses how hot the earth has been over the last 500 million years using permafrost as a means of determining the global temperature across the millennia https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been#:~:text=Even%20after%20those%20first%20scorching,and%20250%20million%20years%20ago https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte....
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
What happenes 65 million million year ago? Cretaceois mass extinction What happened 200 million years ago? Triassic mass extinction What 250 million years ago? Mass extinction 99% of anything that ever lived is extict. You are eager to join a big club.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  I don't see humanity building defenses against what likely caused those mass extinctions...
  - gameoverhumans 3y ago
    Agreed, humanity is unlikely to survive an asteroid of the likes that wiped out the dinosaurs, considering it increased global atmospheric temperatures to several hundred degrees celsius for a few minutes (or several thousand for a few seconds) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA). It doesn't look like we need the help of celestial bodies intersecting ours, though. We're ushering in our own demise just fine on our own, thank you very much!
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      When and where are we currently ushering in our demise? None of climate models have us on trajectories close to global extinction - we are roughly on a 2-3 degree warming path at present. This kind of doomsterism is just not useful.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        I don't think you understand what that number means at all. 24K years ago New York was under 4 miles of ice, during summer. If that happened today, do you think the government of Canada and United States would survive such a schenario?How many people would be left alive in North America, 30% of the current population? How big do you think the change in global temperature was during the last ice age? 30 degrees or 20 degrees? It was only 6 degrees. That's all it takes. Average yearly temperature for Hong Kong is 23 degrees, for Dubai it's 26 degrees. 3 degrees is the difference between lush tripics and a desert where you will starve because nothing grows. A global change of 3 degrees means 12 degree change on land because 70% of the planet is an ocean and it's tempersture doesn't change
Zambyte 3y ago
174 years out of 174 year history you mean. History is defined by what we have written records of. Within the context of the article, those billions of years you mention are all prehistory, besides the most recent 174 years.
gmuslera 3y ago
Civilization existed for around 10-15k years, around the time climate got stable enough to get agriculture in a scale to support big cities. The changes that had been since then in global climate weren't sudden enough to put that in danger. Eventually plants and animals adapt to hotter climate if given time and don't surpass some critical thresholds. But we are changing climate at a speed which precedents were around mass extinctions. Adaptation will be hard, adaptation of what we need at the scale we need to support a civilization will be harder, and we don't know yet if we will cross some threshold that may be lethal for us, at least at the time scale we live. And that is just about averages. In recent years we had big heatwaves covering most of US and Europe, reaching near 50ºC even at high latitudes. You may be able to survive averages, but what about peaks for 55ºC or more? Check your cooling devices and electrical grids safe margins if you think AC will save from that.
Delomo 3y ago
Look at how much we humans changed the world in just 100 years. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-... You can't be that ignorant that you don't see how crazy much we have an impact on the planet

sevg 3y ago

So you're implying that since records only go back 174 years that they can't be indicative of anything? Let's try to put a bit more effort into our debates on HN :)

gameoverhumans 3y ago

Aren't you sick of this tired old argument? Humans have not existed on this planet for the 4 billion years. More like 4 million. Sure, an accurately recorded history of 174 is still a pretty small fraction of 4 million. So if you're going to try to downplay the increasingly obvious Great Filter our idiotic species is hurtling towards at breakneck speed, at least be dignified about it and use the right numbers. Thanks!

RandomLensman 3y ago
In what scenario is climate change removing humans from the planet? If we cannot handle/manage/remove a mere 2-3 degree increase (which is about the current trajectory), sooner or later natural variation will doom us. The great filter might very well be the unwillingness to consider more than mono-thematic solutions mixed with doomsterism, though.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  > sooner or later natural variation will doom us. Correct, but we have managed to convert "later" to "significantly sooner". The fact that eventually the climate would have changed unfavorably anyway at some unknown point in the future is no reason to be comfortable with humans inducing an unfavorable change right now. That's like saying there's no point in getting an oil change because the car engine is going to wear out eventually anyway. or like saying you might as well smoke and drink as much as you want because everyone dies at some point.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I am saying we already on a path not in the catastrophic collapse space and we need and will be able to handle things, because we need to for far more problematic things in the future anyway.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Human race handled the Blacl Death, but was it fun? It can probably survive a global nuclear war, but is it a great idea?
- esarbe 3y ago
  You might be underestimating the social upheaval that will result from wast regions of the earth becoming uninhabitable and the effect of the population movements from desperate people trying to get away starvation. You might also be underestimating the consequences of ecosystem collapse. Since 1970 we've already lost about 60% of biomass of insects, birds and mammals. The impact of rapid climate change will put additional pressure on already vulnerable species. I have little doubt that widespread ecosystem collapse will be the death nail for our global human civilization.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts? Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.
    - gameoverhumans 3y ago
      > So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts I don't see how the grandparent comment implied a lack of trust in other experts, nor did they imply themselves to be experts. > Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path. Actually, the IPCC, which tends to be rather optimistic on how bad things could be (or already are), predicts pretty significant socioeconomic problems arising from 2-3 degrees warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways It doesn't take much imagination to come up with ways that "Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common" leads to "nation states with nukes and experiencing extreme scarcity and high social unrest declare war on each other"...
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Your imagination might not be a good guide to take you from degrading social cohesion to something like nuclear war. Even in general, socio-economic models are not of the same quality as the physics models (and no-one is making that claim anyway). The SSPs are more like share narratives rather than forecasts.
- solumunus 3y ago
  “Sooner or later” could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of years though, so I don’t think your point holds much weight.
- brookst 3y ago
  Sooner or later I’ll die of cancer so I might as well go BASE jumping without a parachute.
- adrianN 3y ago
  For it to be a Great Filter, it needs not to wipe out humanity completely, it's sufficient to end technological civilization. A nuclear war over resources can easily do that. As Covid has shown, even minuscule disruptions can lead to widespread scarcity, so a nuclear war might not even be necessary.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I could also say: covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all. Anyone can imagine any kind of doom scenario, but then I could justify inaction all the time: if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother?
    - gameoverhumans 3y ago
      > covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all. What I hear: "hey look, I pulled a piece out of the Jenga tower and it didn't collapse! Clearly from this I can infer that more pieces can be pulled without any consequences!" > if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother? Uh, because we don't have control over foreign sentient beings, nor the path of celestial bodies? Do you really not see the difference between those things and anthropogenic warming as a result of rapid industrialization?
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense? Anyway, I didn't say we should do nothing about climate change (and we are doing a lot), but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway - then, yes, totally happy not to work in that field anymore.
        gameoverhumans 3y ago
        > You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense? Mate the dino-nuking asteroid that hit Earth was 10km in diameter. Even if we launched every nuke we had at such an object, it wouldn't do much to deter such an object. And that's assuming it's moving at a low enough fraction of c that we could actually detect such an object in time to mobilize all said nukes. So, no, I don't think we would be able to defend ourselves today (nor by 2100, let's say) against such an adversary. Same deal with any species that is sophisticated enough to do interstellar travel. For them it's even easier, they can just pick up a few rocks from Kuiper belt, stick some mass drivers on them and it's bye-bye Earth within a few weeks/months. > (and we are doing a lot) The point is we're not. We haven't even reached peak fossil fuel yet. Even if we stopped everything tomorrow, things would still keep getting worse for at least another few decades. But as it is we're reading today about how bad we made things for ourselves in the 80s. Since then our consumption has only continued to accelerate, which can only mean things will be even worse tomorrow. > but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway No. That's not what I or anyone else in this thread has been saying. It's like this. We are on the Titanic. Some very clever people have charted our course and done ocean sonographs and determined there's a big-ass iceberg ahead. Many folks like you are insisting either a) there's no iceberg or b) icebergs are good for ship hulls or c) we'll out-technology the iceberg somehow and thus we don't need to worry about the iceberg. So right now all we've done is ACCELERATE towards the iceberg. If there was sensible suggestions like "let's alter our course slightly" I wouldn't be saying "well that still puts us on course for the iceberg so there's no point". I would be saying "great! that's a start!".
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  This is a problem in how warming is reported in my opinion. Saying it's just 2 or 3 degrees doesn't sound like a lot. But that is warming the whole planet on average by that amount. This is a lot of energy being injected into the climate, and regional variations and extreme weather will be much more severe.
  - esarbe 3y ago
    Just try to imagine the ludicrous amount of energy required to heat up the whole surface - and probably a good part of the ocean - by 2°C. I think it is in the order of 10^17 joules or so.
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      But that is distributed over a ludicrous amount of volume. These numbers are so large that I can visualize neither. How is this information supposed to help me?
      - esarbe 3y ago
        First I would check the number that I gave you and make sure it is correct. Then you put it into perspective; e.g. how many millennia would it take for a couple of hundred nuclear reactors to produce that much of energy. Play with the numbers and see what you can learn about them. Not sure you need to consider that much of a volume; we're talking about surface temperature, so you can just take an approximation of heat capacity of the surface of Earth.
  - gameoverhumans 3y ago
    Meh I dunno, there's that website that reports how many hiroshimas of energy we're releasing into our planet per second, the skeptics/denialists don't seem to care much for that metric, either. I don't think the problem is how it's being reported, I think it's just that this is the kind of news some people will do anything but hear.
    - 3y ago
- Delomo 3y ago
  With 3-6 degrees we will see sea level rise of a few meters. This already affects a lot of coastal regions. And there is still a big question mark if we don't break something fundamental on the road ahead. It might not eradicate us but millions and millions / billions will suffer.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    We are not on a 3-6C trajectory, why discuss the implications there?
    - bonzini 3y ago
      Do we even know what's the trajectory?
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Yeah, we have a reasonable good idea because we can not only see the past but also investments and plans etc.
    - Delomo 3y ago
      We are.on a 2-3 by 2100 projection. That's not far away
FFP999 3y ago
> Aren't you sick of this tired old argument? Per Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thealienthing 3y ago

This article discusses how hot the earth has been over the last 500 million years using permafrost as a means of determining the global temperature across the millennia https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been#:~:text=Even%20after%20those%20first%20scorching,and%20250%20million%20years%20ago https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte....

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

What happenes 65 million million year ago? Cretaceois mass extinction What happened 200 million years ago? Triassic mass extinction What 250 million years ago? Mass extinction 99% of anything that ever lived is extict. You are eager to join a big club.

RandomLensman 3y ago
I don't see humanity building defenses against what likely caused those mass extinctions...
- gameoverhumans 3y ago
  Agreed, humanity is unlikely to survive an asteroid of the likes that wiped out the dinosaurs, considering it increased global atmospheric temperatures to several hundred degrees celsius for a few minutes (or several thousand for a few seconds) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA). It doesn't look like we need the help of celestial bodies intersecting ours, though. We're ushering in our own demise just fine on our own, thank you very much!
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    When and where are we currently ushering in our demise? None of climate models have us on trajectories close to global extinction - we are roughly on a 2-3 degree warming path at present. This kind of doomsterism is just not useful.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      I don't think you understand what that number means at all. 24K years ago New York was under 4 miles of ice, during summer. If that happened today, do you think the government of Canada and United States would survive such a schenario?How many people would be left alive in North America, 30% of the current population? How big do you think the change in global temperature was during the last ice age? 30 degrees or 20 degrees? It was only 6 degrees. That's all it takes. Average yearly temperature for Hong Kong is 23 degrees, for Dubai it's 26 degrees. 3 degrees is the difference between lush tripics and a desert where you will starve because nothing grows. A global change of 3 degrees means 12 degree change on land because 70% of the planet is an ocean and it's tempersture doesn't change

Zambyte 3y ago

174 years out of 174 year history you mean. History is defined by what we have written records of. Within the context of the article, those billions of years you mention are all prehistory, besides the most recent 174 years.

gmuslera 3y ago

Civilization existed for around 10-15k years, around the time climate got stable enough to get agriculture in a scale to support big cities. The changes that had been since then in global climate weren't sudden enough to put that in danger. Eventually plants and animals adapt to hotter climate if given time and don't surpass some critical thresholds. But we are changing climate at a speed which precedents were around mass extinctions. Adaptation will be hard, adaptation of what we need at the scale we need to support a civilization will be harder, and we don't know yet if we will cross some threshold that may be lethal for us, at least at the time scale we live. And that is just about averages. In recent years we had big heatwaves covering most of US and Europe, reaching near 50ºC even at high latitudes. You may be able to survive averages, but what about peaks for 55ºC or more? Check your cooling devices and electrical grids safe margins if you think AC will save from that.

Delomo 3y ago

Look at how much we humans changed the world in just 100 years. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-... You can't be that ignorant that you don't see how crazy much we have an impact on the planet