Arctic is indeed shrinking. 15000 years ago (or so) there were miles of ice on top of the place I'm currently sitting.
The writers of the economist article know, climate scientists know, and hackernews readers all know that the climate has been colder and hotter in the past over geologic time scales. We all know this.
It is not correct to imply that the current warming is just a continuation of the usual inter-glacial cycles. It isn't, the rate of change is completely different by orders of magnitude, and the causes are observably different.
See up-thread, where scientists were predicting an "ice-free Arctic" for 2013. And 2019. And now 2040.
I believe there were predictions for the Arctic to be "ice-free" by 2000 as well, but a quick Google isn't turning up a solid reference.
Yes, the earth has been colder than it is now. Many times. It's also been warmer than it is now. Many times.
"It isn't, the rate of change is completely different by orders of magnitude"
That is simply not correct. There is plenty of evidence that ice ages can occur over a time scale of less than a hundred years, and some evidence that it can happen on a decadal scale.
Heck, some of us are old enough when the threat of an ice age was the scare story.
That's nor surprising, considering you're a libertarian, but from the perspective of people who live in the real world, it's lunacy.
So what? The whole thread is predicated on an "article by a journo".
"expect us to take that as some holy grail of evidence that GW isn't happening"
Please don't put words in my mouth. Thanks.
Far from "expecting you to take it as a "holy grail of evidence", I'm pointing out that these sensationalist scare articles have been around for a long, long time (at least since the time of Malthus in the 1700s), and yet the promised doomsday has never occurred.
And far from saying that climate change "isn't happening", I explicitly said "Yes, the earth has been colder than it is now. Many times. It's also been warmer than it is now. Many times."
Do you guys feel any guilt at all when you grossly misrepresent someone else's statements, or does the warm glow of virtue you get from Proper Thinking counteract it?
"considering you're a libertarian"
You act like that's some kind of pejorative.
Becoming critical of "climate change" just happened to me recently. I've been critical of the usual suspects like foreign policy, finance, media, etc. for a while, but climate change was a sacred cow.
Then I read this.
https://www.fairobserver.com/more/environment/forgotten-sun-...
Before anyone accuses me of bringing scientism onto HN, realize that never did I call climate change a "hoax." Most intelligent people critical of climate change don't either. Obviously, it's happening...to some degree. I'm merely critical of the mainstream perspective of its causes and effects.
And I'm not sure one can ever be too critical in science.
source is this solid rebuttal: http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/11/15/record-heat-despit...
Xkcd summed it up nicely: https://xkcd.com/1732/
It is not representative of the history of the Earth.
To take just one example, I'm pretty sure that the sudden arrival of the Chicxulub "dinosaur killer" asteroid produced a change in Earth's climate that was vastly more devastating and immensely more rapid than anything we're seeing today.
"Unprecedented", indeed.
Edit: added a few references.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379104...
"We revisit the portion of (Nature 391 (1998) 141) devoted to the abrupt temperature increase reconstruction at the Younger Dryas/Preboreal transition...Three quasi-independent approaches employed in this work all give the same result of a +10 °C warming in several decades or less."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X08...
"Here, we report on the second abrupt warming (4 ± 1.5 °C), which occurred at the end of a short lived cooler interval known as the Preboreal Oscillation (11,270 ± 30 B.P.). A rapid snow accumulation increase suggests that the climatic transition may have occurred within a few years."
One ten degree event and one 4 degree event. Both much larger than anything we've seen.
There have been many others. In fact, it is believed that at least 25 such events took place in the last glacial period alone. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_eve...
I'd like to know what you think about my sibling comment, about how this five-year-old article makes a prediction that has already failed. In particular, the article talks about how the 0.8C warming since 1850 fits their hypothesis... but warming has continued quite rapidly since that article was written, so if you wrote that today you'd have to talk about ~1.4C warming since 1850. Does that still fit?
Finally, although it's not relevant to your overall argument, I have to say that Chicxulub is the worst argument I've seen in this space for quite a long time.