Originally Posted by
ragingpup
The earth is constantly going through changes frog but slowly. I haven't look only at the last 20 years, here's what I wrote earlier and is the most important thing I've been trying to get over, the crux of why the current global warming spike is very different to the natural climate change you're talking about:
In very, very simple terms, Earth's temperature only changes very slowly, like really really slowly over 1000s and millions of years. The main periods are the Eocene period, 50 million years ago when we were a greenhouse, the ice caps were tropical and the global temp was about 24 deg centigrade. Over millions of years, and with some dips and ups on the way it fell down to the lowest point, the last Glacial period approx 22000 years ago, and since has been climbing up to the crucial and current holocene period starting around 12000 years ago where the global tem settled at around 13.8 deg and thus settled in the sweet spot that enibled life to flourish and within this temperature, between 13.8 and 14 deg global temp, human life has evolved and developed all of our existing infrastructure with only a very, very little upturn of temp from 13.8 to 14 degrees in this last 12000 years.
But then, just in the last 150 years alone, the global temperature has risen to approx 15.2 degrees!! That's a huge jump and it is demonstrably down to human activity. It's unprecedented in that space of time! No other point of history shows that level of change.
Scientists pretty much agree that we can manage this increase without huge changes in our climate experience up to about 15.5 degrees, the first 'tipping point' at which point you would start to see significant changes in climates with increases in 'wild weather' and some parts of the Earth starting to become uninhabitable due to water loss. At the current rate of change, we will hit this point in around 10 years time.
Beyond this, the next tipping point - 16 degrees, is where there would be very significant changes with melting ice sheets increasing sea levels back into the lower reaches of the Eocene period, and at this point significant parts of the hotter continents wouuld not be habitable through water loss and much of the inhabitable parts including Europe would be lost to raised sea levels.
As I said the main point is that a temperature change from 14 to 16 degrees in the space of 200 years is completely unprecedented in the natural evolution of the Earth (save natural catastrophes,
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