[mikeash]

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.

[anotherbrownguy]

>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?

[mikeash]

When was the last spike that was this fast?

[anotherbrownguy]

The current data is the only recorded data that we have which is why we can see it fine grained enough to know how "fast" it is. All the previous temperatures are speculations and it is impossible to know if the rise and fall has been this fast or way much faster.

Anyways, the fact of the matter is, all the climate studies have shown us is that climate is very unpredictable. All of the predictions based on various modeling of historical climate data have failed. And the reason is simple. The climate system is too chaotic. A butterfly flapping its wings can lead to a hurricane... or not, but nobody can predict it based on the observation of the butterfly or all the events in all parts of the world for that matter. Even if we had those data points of all butterflies flapping wings and all koalas farting, it would be impossible to compute what would happen in a very long time from now (a year or decades or centuries). Anyone who tells you otherwise is a snake oil salesman and it's pathetic to see reasonable people fall for this nonsense.

The reason it is still popular despite easy debunking is because why people fall for this has nothing to do with science. There was negligible data and climate models in the 70s and 80s but there was no less enthusiasm in people who wanted to shut down big corporations for "harming the environment". All of the "science" people reference now came very recently and not without organized effort to "prove" that it is the case while silencing and threatening anyone who disagrees by using ecoterrorist organizations and political slamming.

The main idea behind the religious following of climate change narrative comes from the fact that certain people are rich and they somehow should be doing something bad to be that rich, and being rich is bad so they should be departed of their money. That is all there is to it.