A 500M-year survey of Earth's climate reveals dire warning for humanity | Hacker News Reader

A 500M-year survey of Earth's climate reveals dire warning for humanity

sciencemag.org

40 pointspseudolus5 comments

This might be / likely is trollbait (that I will not engrave in discourse on), but it looks like we are in the bottom 15% of what’s been figured as the range in the last 500 million years. Is it too aggressive to suggest humans have more impact that zero plants or routine catastrophic volcano eruptions? Get over ourselves a bit? I mean, earth ruined its own atmosphere enough times, and certainly can ruin us without too much effort really. Eventually it will. Maybe we speed it up by N years or whatever, but the eventuality is earth kills us or the sun immolates us or Andromeda collides with us. Either way we are fucked. Let’s ride it out as long as we can, but this is not a permanent home, and I doubt the human race is resilient enough to be considered permanent by any stretch. Maybe go party this weekend?

Looking at the chart on that page, it seems like the 'low' temperatures we have now are an anomaly rather than the norm.

True, but on a shorter time scale, we're at a peak, and due for another ice age: https://opentextbc.ca/geology/wp-content/uploads/sites/110/2...

That chart you give is especially misleading to understand what is going on now:

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

Note where the year 2100 temperature is going to be (that is, if we do something to limit the emissions, otherwise it even higher) and when the last time it was that high. Also note how fast it changes in the last 100 years and the scale of possible changes we can produce.

Also note the changes of the orders of magnitude in time in different sections of the graph. The rate of change we are experiencing now is unbelievably fast compared to what is known about the previous times.

"A preliminary global temperature curve shows that marine life diversified in extreme heat (1) before land-based plants absorbed carbon dioxide (CO2) and polar ice caps formed (2). Volcanoes and erosion swung CO2 levels up and down (3), but mammals evolved in a warm period (4). Now, humans are rapidly warming the climate again (5)."

The chart explains that the human activity effect is at the magnitude of cataclysmic volcanoes, and other global geological/ecological effects. I sure vote that we don't accept the status quo that this stuff happens over millions of years already. We should care, since this time, we actually exist. Nevertheless, I understand how this makes the conversation harder, which is unfortunate but expected in any nuanced discussion. I, by no means, am an expert and I had a similar reaction in the beginning.

To put things in perspective, our current effect in some hundred years, used to take thousands, if not 10s/100s of thousands of years.

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