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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure all of these "ever recorded" records for global temps are only since 1979.

> Our planet’s seas have been warming for decades. The most recent decade has been the sea surface’s hottest since at least the 1800s.

Over the last 500M years, the world has been hotter than it is today for ~400M of those years: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

And for the majority of that time, it has been MUCH hotter.

Yeah and for the majority of time of the planet humans didn’t exist

> And for the majority of that time, it has been MUCH hotter.

Good thing humans only evolved after the climate became more hospitable.

Exactly. People keep saying that we need to stop climate change to save the planet. The planet does not care and will be just fine. We need to stop climate change to save ourselves.

My god, I hate this line. Obviously people aren't referring to the ball of molten rock getting a case of the sniffles and achoo-ing all over the solar system. People are referring to - you know - ALL THE LIFE ON THAT PLANET. Wow, amazing, an amoeba will survive us fucking the planet up! Since life and the planet will survive, go nuts! Blow up your nukes, why should the rock care? That's all that matters, we will not literally destroy the planet!

Well that's kinda the reason _for_ the line. Climate change kills people. "Save the planet" is too vague, it's disempowering.

No. "Save the ecosystem on our planet on which we rely on" is too long, and only incredibly pedantic people would come in and say "well, akshually, the planet will not care either way". People who say this are not people worth talking to.

And akshually, climate change doesn't kill people. Higher temperatures and catastrophes kill people.

In the meanwhile, Pangea formed and split, and trees came into existence.

Pretty sure you're dead wrong.

Unfortunately their statement is too vague to be wrong, obviously there are numerous different ways to define global temperature, and different ways to measure it at the time, and different ways to infer it after the fact. amongst all that, probably one of them does only go back to the 70's. Does it make incomparable to any of the methods that go back centuries or millennia? Probably not.

The recent headlines are all based on NCEP, a model which isn't exactly super reliable.

https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1676391692461547522

In fact, if you read past the headlines in the articles, they also include the same caveat:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/0...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/climate/climate-change-re...

The NYT article buries the fact by making it seem like they were only presenting data that far back, but it is literally in the first sentence of the WP article... directly contradicting the very same article's headline.

(also, just wanted to let you know this comes off as a bit unnecessarily rude -- you might want to phrase it more gently / give some reasons why you believe so next time)

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