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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed."

Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.

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There is not a graph of prehistoric ocean surface temperatures (doesn’t seem possible to obtain this data other than collecting it as it happens as far as I can tell) but there is global historical temperature data. Here is an XKCD comic, scroll to the bottom and pay attention to the rate of change since 1850 vs the prior 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/

This Wikipedia article has a graph of the last 2000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature

And yes, I am aware that earth has possibly been covered in ice/slush and also that the avg global temp has been 10C (or more) higher than it is now, but humans were not around for either scenario.

How does the global temperature relate to El Nino temperature? Do we know without having El Nino data?

> there is global historical temperature data

Reconstructed from proxies. Not all experts in the field agree on how reliable the proxies actually are, especially over such long time periods.

so do you not know what the word "modern" means? or did you just choose to ignore it?

You can't be serious. Modern civilization is not just the past few decades.

You are an engineer or programmer? Why are you working in this industry if you can't take the time to learn about how this system works. We are supposed to be systems thinkers with a scientific mindset. How can you make a statement like "Nobody has that kind of temperature data" without researching first?

I'm embarrassed for my industry. I'm shocked how many climate denialists there are among engineers and programmers.

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