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Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

Except for Mar's climate change happens on the course of hundreds of thousands of years, and yet here on Earth the biggest climate change has happened in the past 100-200 years, and just so happens to perfectly coincide with humans discovering industry etc.

I assume if humans didn't exist Earth would still have climate change, see also: ice ages etc.. but that kind of thing doesn't happen over the course of 100 years, not without some external influence anyway (such as an asteroid impact etc)

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Well, doesn't Earth go through warm and cold periods just as Mars does? In fact not so long ago we had a mini ice age, and that was not caused by human activities. We are destroying our environment, and I'm not climate change denier, but I do think this is little more complex issue than we're being told.

Not only that, but not so long ago (in geological terms) the Midwestern United States was covered in several miles of ice.

We are technically still in an ice age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation

In fact the Little Ice Age was probably caused in part by human activity, or rather the lack of human activity due to reduced populations in Europe and especially in the Americas.

>> on Earth the biggest climate change has happened in the past 100-200 years

Oh, really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

Yes, really "NumberCruncher". Which period on that chart do you think shows a more rapid change?

There are several periods in the Pleistocene that see dramatic rises. The graph itself, with it's logarithmic scale on the X axis, does not make it at all clear. Also, the methods used to determine the average temperature are necessarily going to be different for the Pleistocene than now. That makes it inherently hard to make useful comparisons.

Look at the scales on that chart. It starts at millions of years before present, then drops to thousands of years before present, and then our last 200 years is basically a vertical line at the very end of the graph.

What's your point? If you're posting a graph as confusing as this one (4 completely different x scales) at least tell us your interpretation.

I didn't find it confusing.

This is a silly comment.

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