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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing about the rapidness being unprecedented, but then also that there are methane seems in the arctic that will be released, which should result in an even more rapid change. If this natural process exists, then really the rapidness of change in global temperatures can't be unprecedented, since any major climate swing would result in methane releases.

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It's absolutely unprecedented for human civilisation.

If you want to compare it with catastrophic climate changes in pre-human times, go ahead. But that's far more likely to damage your argument than help it because they were far more catastrophic, up to and including mass extinction events.

The downstream effects are also accelerated due to the rapid change of the inputs.

Normally we study climate change on the scale of 10s to 100s of millions of years.

This current change in CO2 concentration is unprecedented because it happened in the span of a century. 5-6 orders of magnitude faster than anything previously.

It's so fast, it looks like an impulse on any graph with historical data: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

The Clathrate Gun idea you’re referring to is not considered mainstream, it’s not endorsed by the IPCC for instance.

That's interesting. Thank you!

"Unprecedented" is a dog whistle which is supported on the basis that technically the rise will have been unprecedented within the anthropocene timeframe, i.e., an ending ice age.

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