- cross-posted to:
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- progressivepolitics
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- progressivepolitics
“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.
“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.
Could you help me understand how we differentiate the latest warming temperatures being related to climate change and not just another period like the one you mentioned?
To be clear, I fully believe that climate change is real, but sometimes when discussing it with people they will be of the camp that things are cyclical and just natural. I want to better arm myself for these arguments.
Mass extinction events have a cause. The Permian/Triassic one I mentioned, is generally agreed to be from unusual movement of earth’s crust, creating severe volcanic activity. The eruptions caused CO2 and pollution, meaning greenhouse gasses built up. The heat shifted water currents and the temperatures, mixed with acid rain, decimated life in the oceans.
Humans are basically the volcanoes in modern times. Yes, the earth goes through normal changes, but these temperatures are increasing at a speed that, to my knowledge, has never happened. There is a way of teaching kids about how long the earth’s had life, that visualizes it pretty well. If all of earth’s history were to fit on your arm, shoulder to fingertips, if you gently scratched your fingernail on something rough, you’d erase all of humankind. We have barely existed on earth, but are throwing it off balance like never before. (With the exception of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, but that’s a whole other tangent)
Having taken years of pathology/physiology classes, it really feels like the earth is a body, and it’s getting a fever to try and deal with an illness… us.
Lmk if you need any sources. I can’t exactly copy my books or the ones from my old college’s libraries, but there’s plenty of studies/resources out there if you’re nerdy enough to dig 😊 (fossil pun)!
I think you’d get your point across even better with less understatement.
Let’s put it this way: by “severe volcanic activity,” what you really mean is that an area roughly the size of Europe was buried half a kilometer deep in lava!
I think we may very well be on par with the meteor, TBH. Especially in the worst-case emission scenario.
(Speaking of the K-Pg meteor, another large igneous province, similar to but smaller than the one at the P-T boundary, was basically the “exit wound” of that meteor impact. It could very well be that the P-T extinction was caused the same way, but all evidence of the crator would have been obliterated by subduction over the past 250 MY because the antipode of Siberia back then would’ve been somewhere in the middle of the Panthalassic Ocean. Edit: I take that back; turns out there is some evidence for it that managed to survive, so that’s neat.)
Thank you for adding more information. I love reading more about this stuff. It would make sense if a meteor was related to the P-T volcanic activity. It would easily have enough force to mess with the crust of the earth.
I have a fun snarky way to handle “cyclical” people. If they say it’s cyclical I’ll say “so there will be dinosaurs.” And if they ask what I mean, I say “it’s a cycle, so there will be dinosaurs again.” If they say no, I ask if the continents will come together again. It’s an argument towards absurdity to point out that the world is always changing, as is the climate, so there is not a “cycle.”