Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years | Hacker News Reader

Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years

washingtonpost.com

20 pointsBrajeshwar8 comments

The climate is changing for the worse due to humans. However, the article has a selection bias:

In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.

It is almost like 130,000 years ago it was even higher than now[1]. It is not that the article is factually wrong, but it removes legitimacy from the Climate Change debate if we use biased or skewed datasets.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/EP...

This naysaying reflexive contrarianism dooms us all to die in fire. Please stop.

The Eemian period was a brief spike of extreme heat amid cold glacial periods. It was a geological anomaly in the Pleistocene, an unstable relatively extreme.

If we want the last time earth was actually this hot & going to stay this hot it's 2.5 million years ago, in the Pliocene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Ov...

If we're only going to look at the temperature, and ignore why temperature is important to the billions of humans who depend on large-scale agriculture, why stop at 125kya? Looking back even further, the earth's atmosphere was once 230°C https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean

Non-cherry-picked corollary: It's hotter now than it's ever been since the first Agricultural Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

The time between the 130kya maximum and the invention of agriculture was a literal ice age: an outcome that has historically resulted after maxima. Neither extreme is thought to support large human populations.

But, regardless: making of a note of "the last time we saw this statistic is X years ago" is not at all cherry-picking. Because if we blow past that 130kya spike, the last time will have been millions of years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#...

Well, the plot that you linked is awful, since it changes scale few times along the X axis, but is seems to me that mankind evolved in the one of the coolest periods ever, and the warming that we are observing now might just as well be Earth reverting to its normal state, and not caused by our CO2 emissions at all...

That's a logarithmic scale, it's not "awful". The human contribution to the CO2 emissions has been extremely well-measured for a very long time, and the greenhouse effect has been understood by almost 150 years. The rate of increase is anthropogenic. There is no natural system on Earth, including plate tectonics, that remains untouched by human industry. Regardless, "natural" does not mean "good." A solar system in its natural state is devoid of life.

Prelife, atmosphere was 90% co2. Now it’s less than 1%. Even if we burned all the existing fossil fuel, I don’t think we could get co2 above 2% if we tried. But the whole debate is moot as electricity is so much more efficient carrier of energy than carbon-hydrogen.

That doesn't seem like selection bias to me.

Can you define how you're using the term?

If I say the stock market had the biggest crash since 1929 it's the same thing: a statement of how exceptional the circumstances are.

What is your objection to that kind of framing?

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/68DhV

Reply on news.ycombinator.com