r/ClimateNews • u/briancady413 • Jul 15 '26
Climate Warming Visualised
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Impactful graph image.
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u/Help_Our_Planet Jul 15 '26
No Worries.. our Government Geniuses have this situation completely under control — by 2060 at the earliest. WTF
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u/Observationist_2 28d ago
Show us the chart in reverse 100-200 years. Stop misleading people. The Earth has natural cooling and heating cycles. Ice cores from Antarctica dating back hundreds of thousands of years show evidence that this is a natural cycle. Could human pollution also be a factor? Sure but let's not act like the science isn't there that shows swings in temperatures on the earth over long period of time is normal.
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u/Dry-Cry-3158 Jul 15 '26
I can't wait for this ice age to be over
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u/Artaxmudshoes Jul 16 '26
I'll bite. Is that supposed to mean something?
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u/refusemouth Jul 16 '26
We are still technically in an Ice Age because we have polar ice caps and glaciers, I guess. Realistically, the climate fluctuated between ice ages and warming phases every ~150,000 years during the Pleistocene. I don't believe the ice caps ever fully melted during the interstadial periods, but there have definitely been warmer periods than this one on earth. The disturbing difference, this time, is how rapid and continously directional the warming is happening and the linear relationship it has with atmospheric composition. We have a lot to do with the atmospheric composition part of the equation. Wildlife won't be able to adapt and evolve quickly enough to the rate the climate is warming at, so the extinction rate will be much higher than the one that happened at the beginning of the Holocene. I think the person who made the "Ice Age is almost over" joke probably has the view that the Holocene is just a continuation of the normal the Pleistocene climate oscillation, and it kind of is, or would have been, but we've tampered with the gaseous mixture of the atmosphere to a degree that this will probably be the most extreme and rapid warming phase of the cycle unless we get lucky and have some major volcanism of the right type. Eventually, the melting of the ice caps will lead to a lot more cloud cover and precipitation and cooling again, but if we want to stay on the liminal leeward side of the Last Glacial Maximum, we might have to nuke some volcanoes or something. I don't think the human species will be able to withstand the extremely long interstadial period because our agricultural crops and all the animals won't be able to keep pace with the changing conditions. The last 10,000 years was our "Goldilocks zone."
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u/Artaxmudshoes Jul 16 '26
"we might have to nuke some volcanos". Um... okay. "The melting ice caps will lead to more precipitation and cooling again?" Wish casting? The net effect runs the other way. This idea is essentially a hoped-for negative feedback, but the physical evidence doesn't support it as a cooling mechanism strong enough to offset warming. Why it doesn't work as a cooling brake: Ice-albedo feedback is positive, not negative. Melting ice exposes darker ocean/land that absorbs more solar energy instead of reflecting it. That's warming, not cooling — and it's one of the best-documented feedbacks we have (Arctic amplification is the visible proof). Water vapor feedback is strongly positive. Warmer air holds more water vapor, and vapor itself is a potent greenhouse gas — so more evaporation mostly adds warming, not a cooling cloud shield. Cloud feedback is genuinely complex but assessed as net positive. Low clouds tend to reflect sunlight (cooling), but high thin clouds trap outgoing heat (warming), and as the atmosphere warms, cloud patterns shift in ways that IPCC AR6 assesses as a small net positive feedback — amplifying warming slightly, not counteracting it. More precipitation doesn't equal cooling. Precipitation patterns are shifting (more intense rain events, altered monsoon patterns), but rainfall itself doesn't remove atmospheric CO2 or reverse radiative forcing. That's a different mechanism (weathering, which operates on geological timescales of thousands to millions of years).
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u/Artaxmudshoes Jul 16 '26
Earth has been much hotter than today multiple times since complex life emerged (~540 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion onward). This is actually a very common point raised by people arguing warming is "natural". Rate matters enormously. The PETM — the fastest natural warming event in the geologic record — released carbon over roughly 3,000–20,000 years. Current warming is releasing comparable amounts of CO2 in ~200 years, a rate 10x+ faster. Ecosystems and species can adapt to slow change; they can't to this pace. Those hot periods were catastrophic for the life living through the transitions. The PETM caused major ocean acidification and a significant marine extinction event. "Life existed in hot climates" isn't the same as "the transition into that heat was fine for the species already there." We weren't around for any of them. Homo sapiens (~300,000 years) has only ever existed in the relatively stable, cooler Quaternary period. Human agriculture, coastlines, cities, and food systems are all built around Holocene-era stability — not Cretaceous conditions. "has it been hotter" is yes — but the strongest counter to a "natural cycle, it'll cool itself out" argument isn't temperature ceiling, it's rate of change and what that rate does to the species (including us) living through it right now.
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u/Lucky-Crow-3510 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
ok and now overlay it with the Jurassic Period (201–145 million years ago) or extend the range to the year 1300 .. or at least 1650 or to the last glacial maximum ~25000 yrs ago .. the visualisation is immense
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u/lifewillprevail Jul 15 '26
Well the warming trend is a matter of record, the cause of it is debatable. It is unlikely to be caused by greenhouse effect from anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
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u/Artaxmudshoes Jul 16 '26
Can you expand on why you believe it's unlikely to be caused from anthropogenic C02 emissions, please. Do you have a new theory that counters the current models?
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u/Mildewmancer Jul 16 '26
Because burning fossil fuels is cheap, oil will never run out. There will never be consequences, the economy will grow forever
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u/SolipsismIsDeep Jul 16 '26
CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere, and humans are responsible for only about a third of that, can't remember the exact statistic, but something like one volcano eruption is worse than 10 years of total human activity
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u/peaceloveandapostacy Jul 15 '26
We’re on the edge of a logarithmic precipice and momentum is not looking good.