Earth's climate has varied greatly over time but its the current rate of change that is so alarming. During the last ice age it was about 4.5 degrees colder but it took 10,000 years to reach modern temperatures. We're currently on a path to changes of that magnitude within the next 70-100 years.
And then more recently, after the last glacial period had ended, you had incidents like the Younger Dryas, for example, where temps plunged to near ice age levels (up to 6C drop in a few decades) and then rapidly warmed all of a sudden. If you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas) some are suggesting that a warming episode at the end of the Younger Dryas occurred in as little as a few years and warmed global temps by 7C.
Note, that by the end of the Younger Dryas, the Arctic was as much as 7C hotter than it is today (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...).
There's thousands of papers on the Little Ice Age. It certainly shows up all over the world in the fossil record. https://www.sciencedirect.com/search/advanced?qs=little%20ic...
Those rapid global warming events were almost always highly destructive for life, causing mass extinctions such as at the end of the Permian, Triassic, or even mid-Cambrian periods. The symptoms from those events (huge and rapid carbon emissions, a big rapid jump in global temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, widespread oxygen-starved zones in the oceans) are all happening today with human-caused climate change. The outcomes for life on Earth were often dire. The end Permian extinction saw around 90% of species go extinct, and it left tropical regions on the planet lethally hot, too hot for complex life to survive. The Triassic extinction was another, one of the 5 biggest mass extinctions in the geological record. Even in the end Cretaceous extinction, in which dinosaurs were finally wiped out by an asteroid impact, a major global-warming extinction event was already underway causing a major extinction within 150,000 years of the impact. That global warming 66 million years ago was due to catastrophic eruptions in India, which emitted a pulse of CO2 that sent global temperatures soaring by 7°C (13°F).
So yes, the climate has changed before, and in most cases scientists know why. In all cases we see the same association between CO2 levels and global temperatures. And past examples of rapid carbon emissions offer no comfort at all for the likely outcome from today’s climate change."
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-m...
I could have phrased it better, I'm talking about the temperature difference between the end of the last age and the current day.
> ...Dansgaard-Oeschger events
The recorded temperature swings are local rather than global, global temperature does not rise by five degrees in a matter of decades unless something catastrophic happens.
> There's thousands of papers on the Little Ice Age. It certainly shows up all over the world in the fossil record.
Yes, but average global temperatures were barely affected.
Even if you solve atmospheric conditions, CO2 and temperature, still you have the pollution of the waters, mass extinctions due to habitat loss, car-tyres rubbering off everywhere, unknown untested toxins even on your cloths. Thats like, not talked about.
EDIT: Cant believe somebody downvoted you. Yes nature has done fast changes, faster than human-induced change currently, and "nature" has mass-exterminated most of its life several times over, and other forms of life caused the deaths and biological disaster for most of other life on earth as well. These are facts.
Somehow these Greata climate activists, would like to believe that humans are more powerful in their destruction than cyanobacteria. Wishful thinking really.
Also, it is easy to pinpoint this issue to a little girl from Sweden, but unfortunately she is just repeating the general scientific consensus. Harder to argue against that, is it?
I'm beginning to think that countering illogical arguments with logical ones is actually some kind of tactical error in many situations - I have no idea what the alternative is but I increasingly feel that it is too easy to goad people (particularly those with some kind of scientific training) into types of arguments that really don't resonate with a lot of people.
No.
My argument is, fuck the climatists, and their self-good crusade, since its not good, and their suggested solutions would actually cause more poverty and hurt poor people more.
My argument is, the rich are the problem, not pollution per se. 0.1% of the world population can pollute and destroy the environment of the rest. They can even ensalve the rest without destroying the environment.
Thats where the problem lies, oppression of the very few on the many, thats the problem we need to solve. The "climate atmospherists" are a side-show, stealing the light from the real issues.
EDIT: scientific consensus
Im not arguing against sci consensus, this climate issue is not "science" its politics, and should be treated as such. Everything is politics, remember that.
They are trying to use soft means like climate meetings and "targets of CO2", instead of spurring eco terrorism and beginning violence to save the planet. Thats a terrible path to take, to just "lets hold each others hands and sign really nice and come to a solution".
When the problem is caused by the same oppressive relationships now as it was 2000 years ago - slavery, and can only be solved with violence.
Have you been living under a rock? They're talked about all the time.
Kidnap CEOs of the fossil fuel industry, and citizen-jail Monsanto managers, you know... disruption.
This is how I know you've never engaged seriously with climate activists. These things are definitely talked about.
For example, leaf area index has increased by 8% since the 80s. CO2 is fertilizing plant growth.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0236...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
If you listen to a lot of the hype, it seems it's all bad, when really it's a mixed bag of complex trade offs.
We currently track the "average annual daily global mean temperature" to somewhere around 4 digits of precision, with an accuracy of around 3 digits of precision (back in the day my university TAs would fail any lab report with inverse precision like that, but I'm no PhD in climate science), and with a time frame of hours. Estimated historic temperatures are presented with 2 or 3 digits of precision over a timeframe of centuries or kiloyears.
Saying current trends are unprecedented is motivational and technically correct, but not scientifically sound given the actual data. Well, science as in hard sciences like chemistry and physics in which we could run controlled experiments to generate confidence in our understanding; not soft sciences like economics or nutrition where controlled experiments would be unethical and results are only as good as the next product you're selling.
My point is that you can see the current short-term trends because we have precision and accuracy to be able to do that. We lack the precision and accuracy of historical data to be able to do that, which makes it an argumentum ad ignorantiam.