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Comment by OpticalWindows | Hacker News Reader

This photo is rather alarming

https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1320024088954294275/photo/1

The more recent graphs https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-sea-ice-extentconcentrati... (linked to in that tweet) look less immediately alarming (this year is no longer an outlier), but the general trend is still perfectly clear.

Two standard deviations from the mean is an outlier.

It's an outlier if you assume nothing's changing, but there are better ways to say that sea ice is generally shrinking than by pointing out that the current year is an outlier.

I meant that it doesn't look like an outlier if you assume arctic sea ice is decreasing (linearly?) over time (it does look like an outlier even there if you focus on October 24th).

Nothing to be alarmed about. We are but passengers on this great planet. 10,000 years is nothing.

The planet will still be here in immediate future. Ofc in short term it will be eventually gone due to sun engulfing it.

How is there nothing to be alarmed about when the cause of the ice retreating is anthropogenic?

And then everyone clapped

Nah we all know global warming is a hoax. /s

Sure, but we now can say with certainty that 2020 isn't the hottest year on record for that particular region.

Just an exponential function showing its true colors, not sure what is alarming here. /s

Hasn't done this for 6000 years. Its doing things like this everywhere. So while one data point can be thought of as 'normal' or 'just how an exponential function works', a global phenomenon is damning. We're in a very fast, very abrupt warming time. Nothing like any historical period. Not explainable as normal variation.

Sweet giant plants and firestorms that cover the planet making more coal for future generations.

They don't, though; firestorms are the opposite of what you want for coal generation.

Also coal was made in the Carboniferous when there were no wood eating microbes. The lack of creatures digesting wood is gave us coal.

So...no. No silver lining. Or at least not that one.

Most of our coal reserves were deposited as charcoal, after a firestorm.

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