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by bsaul 2470 days ago
After having tried to understand what made climate change skeptics skeptical, i’ve stumbled upon this graph (This is just one link, but i’ve seen it in a lot of places) :

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/climate.htm Which gives a very weird feeling about the scale of recent temperature change.

Since the planet have known huge temperature variations in the previous thousands of years ( long before humans emitted co2), and those kind of changes seem to be extremely cyclical, i must say i’m starting to wonder about the current general panic and human activity blaming.

Could anyone here more knowledgeable explain what’s the counter-argument to this « it’s cyclical and huge, and human have very little thing to do with it » skeptical argument ?
2 comments
sasasassy 2470 days ago
It usually happens much slower than pictured in the graph, and it is believed that humans are the cause for the acceleration.

On the other hand it also isn't the end of the world as some people would have you believe.

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scrollaway 2470 days ago
In terms of graphs, I think this one gives a good overview of how ridiculously precipitated everything is:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

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bsaul 2470 days ago
I know this graph as well, but i've always been suscipicious of the "hockey stick with multiple lines" in the end. Seems like it has been heavily critized as well :

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/20/josh-takes-on-xkcds-c...

I'm pretty sure climate change is an extremely complex subject, but i must say the "simple" data tells a story that's so different from what seems to say the majority of professionals working in the field that it makes me a bit nervous.

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scrollaway 2470 days ago
Sorry, I'm tuning off. A quick browse of that site raises a ridiculous amount of "propaganda" red flags.

IME when it comes to climate change, where there's smoke, there's fire. It's tempting to let yourself go and get wrapped by a nice "it'll all work out because they're either wrong or lying" narrative. I certainly wish everyone on earth who says climate change is happening was either wrong or lying.

But the truth is hard and sucks hard. I remember even five years ago seeing an image of a French meteorologist doing the weather forecast for August 2050. high 30s / low 40s everywhere. I remember this vividly, the prospect shocked me.

Here's the image I'm talking about, alongside the real french weather forecast for the last week of July 2019: https://i.redd.it/c37bdoqu4nd31.jpg

Let it sink in that things are progressing off-the-charts rapidly.

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