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I worry a lot about global warming, but I've never found that argument massively persuasive. The core worry you're getting at is that there might exist turning

by scarmig 12y ago

I worry a lot about global warming, but I've never found that argument massively persuasive. The core worry you're getting at is that there might exist turning points, where a marginal unit of carbon will cause greater feedbacks and runaway global warming, at least until we stumble on another stable equilibrium. If that were the case, though, we likely would have hit that turning point in the past. The Earth's temperature has been significantly warmer in recent memory, and if it were, we'd have already fallen past that turning point. This isn't to say that there aren't currently positive feedback mechanism, nor that they're not big positive feedbacks, nor even that we won't stumble upon new positive feedbacks as we hit temperatures outside our historical memory. However, it's unlikely we'll ever hit a point where a unit of carbon causes a discontinuous change in average global temperatures.

mikeash 12y ago
It's an odd juxtaposition to see your comment about how this won't happen because it never happened before, right next to a comment about how it has happened before.
- 001sky 12y ago
  Not really. This article is pretty poor. TLDR: "Something melted, therefore global warming is the cause and mass extinction is the inevitable result" is such absurd logic its not worth wasting time debating it. Have you ever seen fossilized sea creatures buried in rocks thousands of feet above and thousands of miles away from the sea? The planet has undergone massive climate and geological upheavals, and mass extinction events. Human life is not really so important. Wether or not even we survive as a species is like a drop in the bucket of nothingness. Remenber there were fire-making, tool-making, upright walking species besides us that survived long enough to leave traces of their civilization. No body owed them anything, survival least of all, and as a result they perished.
- scarmig 12y ago
  "Recent" is the key word, here. The PT event was 250 million years ago, and the Earth was a very different place then, including being significantly warmer. The Holocene climatic optimum, on the other hand, was something like ten thousand years ago, and it explored temperatures that we're not close to (yet). If there were a life-ending loaded clathrate gun out there, the Earth would have hit it and triggered it then, not when we're experiencing relatively cooler temperatures now or in the near future. Unless it somehow got loaded in the ten thousand years since then, but no one thinks that. ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that climate change is fake, or that it's harmless because temperatures have been higher in the past. Those are orthogonal arguments to this (and they're bad arguments). This is just a statement about whether we're going to accidentally shock the globe into a radically different climate by triggering a methane clathrate gun.

by scarmig 12y ago

mikeash 12y ago

It's an odd juxtaposition to see your comment about how this won't happen because it never happened before, right next to a comment about how it has happened before.

001sky 12y ago
Not really. This article is pretty poor. TLDR: "Something melted, therefore global warming is the cause and mass extinction is the inevitable result" is such absurd logic its not worth wasting time debating it. Have you ever seen fossilized sea creatures buried in rocks thousands of feet above and thousands of miles away from the sea? The planet has undergone massive climate and geological upheavals, and mass extinction events. Human life is not really so important. Wether or not even we survive as a species is like a drop in the bucket of nothingness. Remenber there were fire-making, tool-making, upright walking species besides us that survived long enough to leave traces of their civilization. No body owed them anything, survival least of all, and as a result they perished.
scarmig 12y ago
"Recent" is the key word, here. The PT event was 250 million years ago, and the Earth was a very different place then, including being significantly warmer. The Holocene climatic optimum, on the other hand, was something like ten thousand years ago, and it explored temperatures that we're not close to (yet). If there were a life-ending loaded clathrate gun out there, the Earth would have hit it and triggered it then, not when we're experiencing relatively cooler temperatures now or in the near future. Unless it somehow got loaded in the ten thousand years since then, but no one thinks that. ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that climate change is fake, or that it's harmless because temperatures have been higher in the past. Those are orthogonal arguments to this (and they're bad arguments). This is just a statement about whether we're going to accidentally shock the globe into a radically different climate by triggering a methane clathrate gun.