
The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before - daegloe
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-mass-extinction.html
======
tambourine_man
For some definition of sudden. What we're seeing now regarding geological
speed is unprecedented.

[https://xkcd.com/1732/](https://xkcd.com/1732/)

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AuthorizedCust
Your support of that claim only describes 0.00055% of Earth's geological
history.

~~~
tambourine_man
That's a good point. Is there record of such sudden change before?

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contravariant
I'm not sure we have records that are precise enough to tell at that scale.

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rhcom2
Scientists use ice cores to recreate temperatures

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eloff
And we don't have ice cores going back that far.

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rhcom2
"The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in
Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica."

[https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-
an...](https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-and-climate-
change/)

It's not a scale of millions of years but that's pretty good.

~~~
eloff
It is good, but that's relative. A million years is so recent in geological
history. It's like a quarter of 1% of the story.

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DuskStar
Wouldn't it be a quarter of a tenth of 1%?

~~~
eloff
Indeed it is!

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lisper
The original headline is "The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped
Out Almost Everything." The truncated version is very misleading because many
people will naturally interpolate it as, "The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming
Before [and so there is nothing to worry about because everything worked out
OK the last time]." The full version is only 74 characters so there's really
no excuse.

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moultano
It's starting to feel like a waste of time to work on anything other than
this, and whatever we need to stay functional while working on this. Anyone
out there working on climate/energy/carbon-removal and hiring?

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sradu
I don't know if you've seen this:
[http://carbon.ycombinator.com](http://carbon.ycombinator.com). Want to drop
me an email with what you'd be interested in helping out with?

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amaccuish
I'm no scientist, but it amazes me that people can still think with all the
industry, all the forests cut down, all the cars on the road, that our planet
is magical and can handle it all.

~~~
aphextron
>I'm no scientist, but it amazes me that people can still think with all the
industry, all the forests cut down, all the cars on the road, that our planet
is magical and can handle it all.

No one really does. They just have enough accumulated conflicts of interest to
accepting that fact that life is easier for them to not do so.

~~~
ergothus
I think you underestimate the various causes for willful ignorance.

It is very easy for a tiny human to assume the planet is huge and little the
human can do will be significant. Ask a human to imagine 100,000 people and
they are already outside our capacity. To ask them to realistically imagine
millions or billions over decades and, well, the behavior is undefined.

I certainly think there are a LOT of people choosing to take the easiest
(short-term) belief, but I also think there are plenty of people who just
can't imagine people-scale impacting world-scale.

I had a friend who made the argument that he thinks it is arrogance to assume
humans can harm the global environment on the scale of climate change. I see
it as arrogance to assume we CAN'T. But I don't think he's being disingenuous
- he just handles the overflow error differently.

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CalRobert
A few months ago it was speculated that if Earth had seen industrial
civilizations before, we would be none the wiser. While this isn't saying that
would be the cause, it does give one pause.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-
we-e...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-
only-civilization/557180/)

~~~
amvalo
> When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like
> cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s
> called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago.

What a nonsense argument, unless they managed to build an industrial
civilization without iron
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_iron_formation)).
It would be glaringly obvious if these ores had already been mined.

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Jarb
Maybe, but stuff tends to erode and shift a lot over millions of years,
possibly smoothing over evidence to a degree where we wouldn't be able to
recognize it today... on Earth. However, AFAIK the moon is fairly stable, so
if there were prior civilizations, they would have to have been far less
advanced than we are. Otherwise they would have surely left evidence of their
existence on the moon.

~~~
tabtab
Being that animals did not even appear until about 600 million years ago, It's
quite unlikely industrial beings evolved before that. And any industrial
civilization after 600m would leave sufficient fossils/evidence. If there were
civilization before 600m, it would likely have to be aliens.

~~~
CalRobert
What evidence of us will exist in 600 million years? Some of the combusion
products of engines are distinct as I understand it, perhaps some materials
are stable that long (and if so, they could pose large pollution problems)?

~~~
tabtab
I'm sure there's plenty of junk in landfills that will make for interesting
fossils. The material doesn't have to be "stable", it just has to make an
imprint. Most existing fossils don't comprise the original material, but are
rather "mineral shadows" of what was there before.

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ilove_banh_mi
The best hypothesis at the moment is that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction
event was caused by the enormous, million-year long eruptions that formed the
Siberian Traps, combined with their ignition of carbonate rocks (which were in
the process of forming large coal beds). The rise in CO2 levels and global
temperature was not the fundamental problem for life on Earth -- it was the
complete disruption of photosynthesis both on land and in the oceans.

If you consider the scale, mechanisms, duration, and size of the Siberian
Traps eruptions [1] there is no reasonable comparison with the current effects
and future consequences of just the industrial rise in atmospheric CO2 levels.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps)

~~~
thomasahle
What's your point? That maybe this time 95% of all life won't die?

~~~
ilove_banh_mi
Well, would you assert that the industrial rise in CO2 levels, as such, will
have consequences comparable to one of the worst mass-extinction events,
caused by gigantic volcanic eruptions lasting millions of years?

I hold that unlike causes have unlike effects. The Permian-Triassic extinction
started with and involved many more destructive elements than merely increased
CO2 and global warming. Unlike what we are experiencing today.

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ivoras
And the sad thing is, if it takes hundreds of millions of years to evolve an
intelligent species, as far as we know there is absolutely no way we can leave
a message to the ones who could presumably come after us. Even choosing a
location on Earth for the message is impossible because even optimal places
for life to flourish become deserts or buried under ice or rocks on those time
scales.

Makes you think how small we are.

The best bet would probably be to draw a giant smiley face on the light side
of the Moon - but that's assuming that a new species will have faces like
ours. Maybe the "Moon rabbit" is a perfectly obvious drawing by some ancient
species' standards.

~~~
topmonk
A mathematical concept would work best. A series of prime numbers represented
as dots, for example.

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dogma1138
It’s not about the planet, it never was the planet will be here until the sun
inflates and even that might not be enough to “kill it”.

This is about humans and our ability to survive as a civilization yet alone as
a species.

Climate change poses no risk to the planet or even life as we know it in
general (as while there will be an extinction event, life will persist),
however it poses an existential risk to our civilization.

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lisper
The slogan "The planet has seen sudden warming before" misses a crucial point:
yes, the _planet_ has seen sudden warming before (for some value of "sudden").
But _human civilization_ never has. Climate change is not an existential
threat to the planet, nor to life, nor probably even to homo sapiens. But it
is very much an existential threat to civilization. Personally, that worries
me. I'm a big fan of civilization, and I don't want to see it die. But right
now it's not looking good.

[UPDATE:] As anyone who has read the story will be able to tell, I wrote the
above comment before reading the story. Because the full headline is "The
Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything."

~~~
moultano
The purpose of the article is to point out that the last time the Earth saw
sudden warming, almost all complex life went extinct.

~~~
lisper
Yes, I just updated my comment to reflect that.

But I think many people will, as I did, interpolate the truncated headline as,
"The earth has seen sudden warming before [and therefore there's nothing to
worry about because it all worked out the last time]."

~~~
craftyguy
That's why it is usually helpful to read more than just the headline.

~~~
lisper
Well, yeah, but the fact of the matter is that many people don't, and this is
not entirely indefensible. One must be selective about what one reads. There
just aren't enough hours in the day.

You can re-interpret my original comment as being about how misleading it is
to truncate the original headline if you like. The untruncated version is <80
characters so there's no excuse.

~~~
craftyguy
> but the fact of the matter is that many people don't

And yet they find ample time to read/respond to many comments here.

~~~
lisper
Evidently.

FWIW, my original comment was about the truncated headline and not the
substance of the article.

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jellicle
The most sudden warmings Earth has ever seen happened at 1/100th or 1/1000th
the speed of the current warming, and wiped out most life on Earth.

~~~
chipperyman573
That is true, however one argument that can be made is that most of life on
earth was nowhere near as smart as humans are and didn't have, for example
HVAC. You could make the argument that humans' intelligence will outweigh
nature's attempts to wipe us out.

Of course, that doesn't mean that global warming isn't a massive problem, and
HVAC won't save us. It's just important to consider all sides of an argument.

Edit: To be clear I disagree with this argument, it's just the most common one
I've heard.

~~~
DennisP
I would sure hate to live in a world in which most of nature has been
destroyed, and the remaining humans huddle in air-conditioned buildings.

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tbirrell
Okay, so if the planet has done it on its own before, who are we to think we
can stop it? Are we gods to command the sea and tides?

On a slightly less melodramatic note, it takes a massive amount of hubris to
think that we can do anything to the rock we live on that will affect it in
any meaningful way. The worst thing we can do is set our civilization back a
couple hundred years.

Earth has been through several mass extinction events and life keeps coming
back, we are only the current stage. There is nothing we can do to change the
course nature has set.

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namirez
> _it takes a massive amount of hubris to think that we can do anything to the
> rock we live on that will affect it in any meaningful way._

I think the scientific consensus is that we already have, sadly for the worse.

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yters
Are we doing more than a massive comet hitting the earth?

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thereisnospork
Is smoking a cigarette worse for you than getting shot in the head?

If you want a discussion you have to ask a real question.

~~~
yters
The context is people in this thread claim current climate change is happening
at a historically unprecedented rate. However, supposedly a comet struck our
planet and wiped out most large animals. That would presumably be a global
climate change that happened really quickly, probably more quickly than
anything we can do. If so, it is false to say current climate change is
historically unprecedented.

~~~
thereisnospork
Sure if you want to be pedantic about it there have (probably) been a few
years in the geological record with higher deltaT's than what is currently
being experienced due to volcanoes, comets, and etc. I'm sure someone else
might want to debate what qualifies as 'climate' in climate change.

My point: the implication of your statement is that the former is irrelevant
to us [modern humanity] because the more extreme latter has occurred
previously - which is a logical non-sequitur.

~~~
yters
And yet we are here, despite the past.

