7 ms·

If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817 https://www.climate.gov/media/16817

by billfor 5mo ago

b112 5mo ago
I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.
- t0bia_s 5mo ago
  It's about trust anyway.
- b112 5mo ago
  Weird that there are any downvotes. The current administration in the US, spent its first few months literally pulling down and replacing data on US government websites. These included many categories of scientific data, including most especially climate data. HN was literally in an uproar, some users were trying to back up data. And yet now we see people posing such questionable data from US government websites? Please. No output from the US should be trusted at this point. It's all ideologically tainted.
  - IIsi50MHz 5mo ago
    Perhaps they take issue with "_any_ other source". I agree that U.S. govt data is now suspect, but there are far sources. Maybe an s/any other/more reputable/ would be accepted?
    - b112 5mo ago
      Mayhap
altcognito 5mo ago
Longer periods can be called paleoclimate. As you may have noticed, most types of humans did not exist in previous climates, and we are unfamiliar with the conditions of those time periods, much less if we were to bring them upon ourselves in a period of time that isn't even capable of being shown on the chart you've chosen to use.
- billfor 5mo ago
  I'm just clarifying parent comment that "1200 years of data is climate" by saying that longer periods also are climate data. I could have posted a graph of the holocene as well (I don't know that it would materially change my point). I made two points. The other was that we are in an ice age.
  - Retric 5mo ago
    No, climate is based on consistent weather data over a long period. Across long enough periods the underlying assumptions that make climate a meaningful thing to talk about fail due to orbital mechanics etc. Plate tectonics for example shows you can’t even assume an area’s latitude is consistent, just look at the fossil history of Antarctica. Humans have dumped so much carbon and methane in the atmosphere even 100 years ago was quite different.
  - kurthr 5mo ago
    Normally, discussions of climate refer to the last 12k year interglacial period as having come out of an "ice age". You're using the broader geologic term referring to any presence of any polar ice cap as an "ice age", which would cover the last 3 Million years. So what you're saying is that in the 300k years homo sapiens have never existed outside of an "ice age" and that the our speciation (eg in savannahs of Africa) was driven by the many glaciations of this current Ice Age? Even homo habilis hasn't been around that long. That's saying that since the continents and earth's currents haven't changed, we're in the same age, AMOC is a minor technicality, and the oceans would need to rise to the straight of Panama to be significant.
  - wk_end 5mo ago
    It very much reads like you feel like you need to offer those particular points here to try to diminish concerns about global warming informed by the 1200 year Kyoto cherry blossom record. Is that not the case?
    - billfor 5mo ago
      Yes I am diminishing the case of global warming about the tree. The tree they kept records of 1200 years ago is not the cultivated one seen in many parks now. That tree is about a million years old. Article just says "Kyoto’s cherry trees", which would include the old and new ones. Importantly, the new cultivated ones bloom earlier. This could be a case of trying to make a climate argument, when the underlying data is more nuanced. Maybe we should just say it's nice the trees are blooming earlier.
shiandow 5mo ago
Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.
biophysboy 5mo ago
A better time range would be the average species lifespan of the plants and animals we eat. Too short a range highlights noise; too long a range highlights unrelated data.
crowbahr 5mo ago
And human civilization entirely sprung up during it, all of our nations, our cities, our pastures, our lives are built on the ice age. We need to start cooling the world down and we're doing the opposite
- stinkbeetle 5mo ago
  The population explosion of the 20th century, and our modern way of life in general, has been powered almost entirely with fossil fuels. The lives of everybody living today and all our societies including 3rd world ones is built on coal and petroleum. Except the North Sentinel Island people. It will not be possible to keep things going they are, no matter what actions or inactions we need or should take.
  - ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
    We can make cheap modular energy capture devices in robotic factories now. Things will not stay the same anymore than they could when people found oil.
    - stinkbeetle 5mo ago
      People have been claiming for at least a quarter of a century that coal was dead, killed by much cheaper renewables. Today, we will consider ourselves very lucky if we have only just (i.e., in 2024-25) passed global peak coal. All those people and "experts", wrong. Repeatedly and totally wrong. Why? There must have been terribly bad data, bad models, bad economics, or bad assumptions they had been using. I have heard very little in the way of acknowledgement about that or any effort to find and fix the root causes of such failures. Are today's claims still coming from these same flawed approaches? And it's not just coal of course. Coal was the proverbial canary in the proverbial coal mine because it was supposed to have been killed off long ago. But there's gas and petroleum and we are a decade from global peak carbon even by presumably the same kind of wildly optimistic / flawed projections. And just passing peak carbon is not the goal. 1990 level carbon emissions were considered catastrophic and we're nearly double that now. Getting it down to well below those levels is just so uncertain and such a long way out that nobody really knows what that will take or how long it will be. Making solar panels in Chinese coal powered factories doesn't just magically fix everything. Just like it didn't 25 years ago when they said it had killed coal.
tardedmeme 5mo ago
Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.
- tbrownaw 5mo ago
  Have we ever actually tried?
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    Yes. You can try right now, in the Sahara desert
    - tbrownaw 5mo ago
      I don't think the local plants and animals there match what used to be typical around the world prior to our current ice age.
    - rationalist 5mo ago
      A steamy, stuffy jungle without airconditiong might be a more appropriate example.
    - red369 5mo ago
      Central Europe looks like it would have been lovely! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:European_last_interglacial_landscape.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:... The linked picture is just an artist's interpretation, not a photo, and I assume you were mostly joking too. I think we agree that it's not a good idea to hurry in warming the planet.
  - guizadillas 5mo ago
    I actually live in a city that usually gets over 50 degrees Celsius for weeks and we pay a LOT on energy just to keep the A/C on. I don't think it is sustainable for the whole world and I'm afraid of what will happen here once we reach higher temps.
rafram 5mo ago
As a human, I do tend to mostly care about the period of the Earth's history that has allowed humans to exist. I'm sure the Mesozoic was nice, but I wouldn't want to live there!
adrian_b 5mo ago
The argument that tries to belittle the current warming by pointing that in the past there have been times when it was warmer, does not have any value. Besides the fact that a much lower temperature than in the past can do a lot of damage to the present-day beings that are not adapted to such temperatures, those higher temperatures from the past had been stable for long periods. Now, when such a higher temperature from the past will be reached, there is no guarantee that the warming will stop there. The greatest danger of the current warming is that, if we do not do anything about it, nobody can currently predict with any certainty that it would stop at a still acceptable temperature, matching a temperature from the distant past, instead of continuing towards even higher temperatures.

If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817 https://www.climate.gov/media/16817

by billfor 5mo ago

If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817 https://www.climate.gov/media/16817

b112 5mo ago

I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.

t0bia_s 5mo ago
It's about trust anyway.
b112 5mo ago
Weird that there are any downvotes. The current administration in the US, spent its first few months literally pulling down and replacing data on US government websites. These included many categories of scientific data, including most especially climate data. HN was literally in an uproar, some users were trying to back up data. And yet now we see people posing such questionable data from US government websites? Please. No output from the US should be trusted at this point. It's all ideologically tainted.
- IIsi50MHz 5mo ago
  Perhaps they take issue with "_any_ other source". I agree that U.S. govt data is now suspect, but there are far sources. Maybe an s/any other/more reputable/ would be accepted?
  - b112 5mo ago
    Mayhap

altcognito 5mo ago

Longer periods can be called paleoclimate. As you may have noticed, most types of humans did not exist in previous climates, and we are unfamiliar with the conditions of those time periods, much less if we were to bring them upon ourselves in a period of time that isn't even capable of being shown on the chart you've chosen to use.

billfor 5mo ago
I'm just clarifying parent comment that "1200 years of data is climate" by saying that longer periods also are climate data. I could have posted a graph of the holocene as well (I don't know that it would materially change my point). I made two points. The other was that we are in an ice age.
- Retric 5mo ago
  No, climate is based on consistent weather data over a long period. Across long enough periods the underlying assumptions that make climate a meaningful thing to talk about fail due to orbital mechanics etc. Plate tectonics for example shows you can’t even assume an area’s latitude is consistent, just look at the fossil history of Antarctica. Humans have dumped so much carbon and methane in the atmosphere even 100 years ago was quite different.
- kurthr 5mo ago
  Normally, discussions of climate refer to the last 12k year interglacial period as having come out of an "ice age". You're using the broader geologic term referring to any presence of any polar ice cap as an "ice age", which would cover the last 3 Million years. So what you're saying is that in the 300k years homo sapiens have never existed outside of an "ice age" and that the our speciation (eg in savannahs of Africa) was driven by the many glaciations of this current Ice Age? Even homo habilis hasn't been around that long. That's saying that since the continents and earth's currents haven't changed, we're in the same age, AMOC is a minor technicality, and the oceans would need to rise to the straight of Panama to be significant.
- wk_end 5mo ago
  It very much reads like you feel like you need to offer those particular points here to try to diminish concerns about global warming informed by the 1200 year Kyoto cherry blossom record. Is that not the case?
  - billfor 5mo ago
    Yes I am diminishing the case of global warming about the tree. The tree they kept records of 1200 years ago is not the cultivated one seen in many parks now. That tree is about a million years old. Article just says "Kyoto’s cherry trees", which would include the old and new ones. Importantly, the new cultivated ones bloom earlier. This could be a case of trying to make a climate argument, when the underlying data is more nuanced. Maybe we should just say it's nice the trees are blooming earlier.

shiandow 5mo ago

Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.

biophysboy 5mo ago

A better time range would be the average species lifespan of the plants and animals we eat. Too short a range highlights noise; too long a range highlights unrelated data.

crowbahr 5mo ago

And human civilization entirely sprung up during it, all of our nations, our cities, our pastures, our lives are built on the ice age. We need to start cooling the world down and we're doing the opposite

stinkbeetle 5mo ago
The population explosion of the 20th century, and our modern way of life in general, has been powered almost entirely with fossil fuels. The lives of everybody living today and all our societies including 3rd world ones is built on coal and petroleum. Except the North Sentinel Island people. It will not be possible to keep things going they are, no matter what actions or inactions we need or should take.
- ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
  We can make cheap modular energy capture devices in robotic factories now. Things will not stay the same anymore than they could when people found oil.
  - stinkbeetle 5mo ago
    People have been claiming for at least a quarter of a century that coal was dead, killed by much cheaper renewables. Today, we will consider ourselves very lucky if we have only just (i.e., in 2024-25) passed global peak coal. All those people and "experts", wrong. Repeatedly and totally wrong. Why? There must have been terribly bad data, bad models, bad economics, or bad assumptions they had been using. I have heard very little in the way of acknowledgement about that or any effort to find and fix the root causes of such failures. Are today's claims still coming from these same flawed approaches? And it's not just coal of course. Coal was the proverbial canary in the proverbial coal mine because it was supposed to have been killed off long ago. But there's gas and petroleum and we are a decade from global peak carbon even by presumably the same kind of wildly optimistic / flawed projections. And just passing peak carbon is not the goal. 1990 level carbon emissions were considered catastrophic and we're nearly double that now. Getting it down to well below those levels is just so uncertain and such a long way out that nobody really knows what that will take or how long it will be. Making solar panels in Chinese coal powered factories doesn't just magically fix everything. Just like it didn't 25 years ago when they said it had killed coal.

tardedmeme 5mo ago

Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.

tbrownaw 5mo ago
Have we ever actually tried?
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Yes. You can try right now, in the Sahara desert
  - tbrownaw 5mo ago
    I don't think the local plants and animals there match what used to be typical around the world prior to our current ice age.
  - rationalist 5mo ago
    A steamy, stuffy jungle without airconditiong might be a more appropriate example.
  - red369 5mo ago
    Central Europe looks like it would have been lovely! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:European_last_interglacial_landscape.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:... The linked picture is just an artist's interpretation, not a photo, and I assume you were mostly joking too. I think we agree that it's not a good idea to hurry in warming the planet.
- guizadillas 5mo ago
  I actually live in a city that usually gets over 50 degrees Celsius for weeks and we pay a LOT on energy just to keep the A/C on. I don't think it is sustainable for the whole world and I'm afraid of what will happen here once we reach higher temps.

rafram 5mo ago

As a human, I do tend to mostly care about the period of the Earth's history that has allowed humans to exist. I'm sure the Mesozoic was nice, but I wouldn't want to live there!

adrian_b 5mo ago

The argument that tries to belittle the current warming by pointing that in the past there have been times when it was warmer, does not have any value. Besides the fact that a much lower temperature than in the past can do a lot of damage to the present-day beings that are not adapted to such temperatures, those higher temperatures from the past had been stable for long periods. Now, when such a higher temperature from the past will be reached, there is no guarantee that the warming will stop there. The greatest danger of the current warming is that, if we do not do anything about it, nobody can currently predict with any certainty that it would stop at a still acceptable temperature, matching a temperature from the distant past, instead of continuing towards even higher temperatures.