Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise • Hacker News Board

Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise

#21

Post by andygates » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

transcriptase wrote: post #3

How do current climate scientists reconcile reporting the relatively slow loss of glacial ice at both poles currently is something that’s unnatural, worrying, proof of humans destroying the planet, a doomsday scenario for life on earth… with the fact that North America was covered by a sheet of ice that was 2-3 kilometres thick only 20,000 years ago. A blink in geological time. Disclaimer: Yes, human greenhouse gas e…

Deep geological time isn't very relevant to human civilisations. The Fall Of Civilisations podcast has great long deep dives into what does threaten them, and the score is about 50:50 between climate change and Outside Context Problems.

Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise

#22

Post by PheonixPharts » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

transcriptase wrote: post #9

JoshTriplett wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

And when you extend it back to 120k years before present? Or if you don’t use a smoothed averaged-sliding-window for everything except the most recent datapoints you’re trying to draw attention to?

> And when you extend it back to 120k years before present?

If you do that you realize we're approaching temperatures that the planet hasn't seen in about 5 million years. [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise

#23

Post by PheonixPharts » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 7:56 PM UTC

solardev wrote: post #18

transcriptase wrote: post #3

How do current climate scientists reconcile reporting the relatively slow loss of glacial ice at both poles currently is something that’s unnatural, worrying, proof of humans destroying the planet, a doomsday scenario for life on earth… with the fact that North America was covered by a sheet of ice that was 2-3 kilometres thick only 20,000 years ago. A blink in geological time. Disclaimer: Yes, human greenhouse gas e…

I don't quite get what you're getting at. If North America froze under 3km of ice today, quite a few people would be annoyed. Life wouldn't go extinct, but it'd be harder to commute to work. Similarly, climate change isn't a threat to life on earth as we know it, but it does inconvenience a few species. And asking people to move to another country because you drowned their island or burnt their city isn't a great way…

> climate change isn't a threat to life on earth as we know it

But there is plenty of evidence that it is. Peter Ward has done some great work (and plenty of geologists agree) that most of the planets mass extinction events are triggered by rapid rises in CO2 leading to abrupt climate change and mass die offs.

The big difference with our current situation is that the CO2 is being released much faster than in previous extinction events.