Now, I do believe in climate change. I just believe that the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do. The earth used to be 150F in the area currently known as Alaska in the time of the dinosaurs. Then we had 2 ice ages. The area currently known as Florida was at one time -200F.
And a lot of that ice still stuck around. It's melting, as thats what ice does. We may have sped up the ice melting, and the ice may have been what was keeping the planet artificially cold, but I think earths natural tempature was ALWAYS hotter than anything humans experienced.
I think even without humans melting the ice caps, the ice caps would have still melted. It would have just taken longer.
But, if I'm wrong, than India, the most densely populated country on the planet by far, reaching record high tempatures would be pretty good proof that humans ARE behind climate change.
Earth warms up and cools down naturally that's a known fact. But over thousands of years, not 200. What we're witnessing right now is not natural and we have the data to support it.
Millions even, we haven't been this warm in millions of years! And same for our co2 concentrations. All done in the blink of an eye geologically speaking. We've reversed a natural Co2 trend in only 0.004% of the time!
The commenter above you and anyone in doubt desperately needs to see these graphs:
If we follow projections and do nothing to change our behavior we'll get to levels and temperatures not seen in hundreds of millions of years, all bascially instantly when compared to the the ability of life to evolve and adapt. Earth will survive, it's been through worse. Gonna be rough on the humans though. We were 10c temperature above where we were then, but it would be even worse now of we got back to those co2 levels, becaue of differences in orbit and solar activity.
Furthermore: we shouldn't care too much about the speed at which Earth heats or cools down on its own. If we know we're a significant factor alongside its natural processes, we should still contribute to the NET temperature being one that's appropriate for human life. If the Earth was heating up this fast naturally, we should still try to cool it down by artificial means, if possible.
You could say that. The earth in general changes temperature one degrees in a few millennium if it's in a hurry. Humanity is causing changes of a degree in a decade. It's unnaturally fast.
I think that math is way off. We didn't have all these polluting machines in the 1800s, yet the 1800s were warmer than the 1700s. We didn't start using cars until the early 1900s. Same with planes, and it wouldn't be until the 1930s that we got jet engines that pollute in the way you think of today.
Just watch that xkcd graphic my dude. Somebody else already linked it. It makes the issue very clear and is quite scientifically based.
Yes, everything you said is factually true.
That doesn't mean your interpreting it all correctly. We not just accelerated it, we where strolling along the path of planetary heating and then decided to step aboard the Starship Enterprise and screamed: "MR SULU WARP FACTOR NINE, STAT!"
We're fucking with systems (planetary weather patterns) we can't comprehend. And to solve it we again fuck with that system but now not by adding energy (heat) but by removing energy from it (wind, radiation)
I think both will have issues. But for now removing lots and lots of energy from the system will greatly benefit us.
In the end it will always come down to population control or going interplanetary as a species.
More people on this planet, in this system will always mean more heat. Remove the excess from the system and it will find its equilibrium again.
But.. Removing the excess sounds nice but isn't. Especially when you are deemed to be the excessive one.
You want to know where global warming can lead to? Look no further then Venus.
Billions of years ago there was no multi-cellular life.
Trillions of years ago there was no universe.
And it just doesn't matter how hot it was in the distant past. Our modern civilization with everything we now depend on (agriculture, technology and so on) was built in the last couple hundred to thousand years where the climate wasn't all that different from the 1800's. The issue is that it's now changing too fast for us to adapt.
If you're callous, you don't have to give a fuck about the plants or the wildlife, fuck what's "natural", go ahead and kill all polar bears and pandas! But global warming is going to cause famines and disasters for us that will force billions of people to migrate north, which will trigger an upheaval of all societies and a global war that could turn nuclear. Because the systems we have in place now aren't designed for a hotter climate, and the crops we have now can't handle it.
How hot the dinosaurs had it doesn't factor into it at all.
-200F in the ice age WAS the warm spot. The polar caps were closer to -500F. The whole planet was an ice planet. It's not like Florida was -200F, but Ohio was 73F.
-500F is about 40 degrees F colder than absolute zero. It has never been that cold anywhere in the universe. -200F is certainly more "actually possible in our current understanding of physics", but it's over 100 degrees colder than the current Martian temperature and thus also not a temperature it's ever been on Earth, even at the heart of the coldest Ice Age directly on the poles. While Earth's average temperature has certainly fluctuated, the temperatures you're talking about are so cold that all life on Earth would have gone extinct.
No......it was extremely hot before the ice age. Do you seriously think the dinosaurs were just hanging out in 70 degree weather?
Look at insects, as oxygen levels decreased they became smaller. Even alligators used to be like 150 feet.....now they're closer to 18-30 feet depending on type.
The living creatures of that era were all bigger. It was more humid. There was more oxygen in the air. And then astroids hit, and basically were world ending events. Happened twice, hundreds of millions of years apart.
And you think that YOU can kill a planet? No. This planet decides if it ALLOWS you to live. And humans are awful pests. Honestly surprised the 2 nukes in WWII didn't trigger a 3rd ice age.
But until the 3rd ice age, it's just always going to get hotter. Humans or not.
Just checked from wikipedia, the yucatan impact was "The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ)." The Little Boy dropped on hiroshima was 15 kilotons of TNT. To say theres a vast difference is a understatement of the century.
You either have wrong understanding or no understanding of physics.
This user has 600 comments in their one month since joining. That's 20 comments per day. Maybe they should try to spend less time commenting falsehoods, and more time reading?
"Hey everybody, check out this loser who actually is active, and posts more activity in a day, than I do in a month.......he should go away, so lemmy can remain small and unheard of!"
Seriously? THATS your attack??? If anything 20 messages per day sounds really low. These messages take like 20 seconds to write, and boost activity and engagement on an almost completely dead platform.
But then I see posts elsewhere on Lemmy "what have you done to boost niche communities?"
Uhhhhh.......have you guys tried POSTING AND COMMENTING???
I know its a crazy idea, but it just might work! I look forward to seeing your reply......in like 4 days after I've long forgotten about any of this.
I have little tolerance left for your climate change denialism, and a similarly miniscule need to "engage" via misinformation or with you and your ilk. So here's my reply. Cherish it, print it out, put it in your back pocket if you want. I don't care.
Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that's because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We're now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.
If fossil fuels hadn't come along, it's possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we've gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don't want to see an "age of the dinosaurs" climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.
the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do
Over a long enough timeline, the high temperatures will force a sharp decline in human population and economic activity. But this isn't earth dictating its own temperature any more than a guy with a gun to his head is an example of a bullet dictating its own velocity.