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by mikeash 3211 days ago
https://xkcd.com/1732/
1 comments
anotherbrownguy 3211 days ago
That's all nice and good, except it assumes that CO2 emissions is the cause of warming and no such causality has been established.
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mikeash 3211 days ago
A single chart can't possibly explain the entirety of climate change. I was just addressing your points that climate change in the past is like what we're seeing now and that the current trend is cooling.
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anotherbrownguy 3211 days ago
It's very convenient to start from the ice age and show how it's warming up. Here is a much longer timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
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mikeash 3211 days ago
What do you think is the correct staring point? Obviously if you go back far enough the earth was just a hot ball of lava, and temperatures have been below that ever since.

Showing that temperatures have been relatively steady for a big chunk of human history/prehistory and then suddenly started shooting up right when we started burning mass quantities of fossil fuels seems most relevant to me.

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anotherbrownguy 3210 days ago
>relatively steady for a big chunk of human history/prehistory

Please refer to the linked graph again. Homo sapiens evolved around 200k years ago. You can see endless spikes during and before that time. Climate has been relatively "steady" for ~10k years after it recovered from an ice age. If the latest is due to "human activities", what about all the countless spikes which have occurred forever?

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mikeash 3210 days ago
When was the last spike that was this fast?
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