Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost | Hacker News Reader

Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost

washingtonpost.com

37 pointspseudolus9 comments

The problem is not whether there is global warming or cooling per se, the problem is in the RATE of warming or cooling.

Changes that would normally take hundreds of years and allow enough time for gentle, imperceptible migrations are taking mere decades and causing problems with thousands wanting to migrate daily.

Any area on Earth can cope with one or two families leaving or arriving every year. But very few places can cope with hundreds of thousands of people arriving or departing every year.

Fascinating.

Not surprised by the plant life, but the article surprised me when it mentioned that nematodes (typically 0.1mm to 2.5mm worms) up to 40,000 years old had 'awakened'. Which makes (at least one of) them the oldest living individual animals [sic] ever discovered.

These findings make the discussions about climate change very difficult. Because now we have 'proof' that the icecaps were not there a long time ago.

The same applies to glaciers. Some melt away exposing ancient forests.

So I think the whole climate change discussion should be about the influence of humans on the speed of the change. We know climate was different in our history. But when the climate changes too fast we can't prepare for it.

We can’t hide the fact that climate has changed naturally in the past. We just have to point out the important differences, like speed (as you say) and the fact that advanced civilization with seven billion humans wasn’t around for previous changes.

Why? Human civilization didn’t exist at the time that the ice caps weren’t there. The contemporaneous sea levels and temperatures wouldn’t have suited us, especially our current civilizations in the tropics.

As George Carlin famously quipped, it's not about saving the Earth. The Earth will be fine. We on the other hand may be fucked.

He's right, if your definition of "fine" includes things like the Permian mass extinction.

...Evidently some people here think it's inconceivable that we could be replicating the Permian extinction. Here's a recent MIT study supporting that claim.

http://news.mit.edu/2019/carbon-threshold-mass-extinction-07...

The fact that the climate has gone through major warming events in the past is the reason we're so concerned about climate change.

If the planet had been stable for a couple hundred million years, we'd know there are strong negative feedbacks that keep it stable. Instead we see instability and positive feedbacks.

For example, we see minor amounts of warming caused by orbital variations, followed by massive releases of greenhouse gases bringing several degrees of additional warming. So we know that we only have to warm the planet a little, e.g. by our own greenhouse releases, to tip the planet into a warming cycle that does much more damage than we directly did ourselves.

That's why people keep talking about thresholds and carbon budgets and deadlines. If we take things too far, it will be out of our hands; the planet will keep warming even if we stop our own emissions entirely.

A great introductory source on the geological history of climate, and the evidence for it, is Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.

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