Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming 5 Million Years Ago In Antarctic Drastically Raised Sea Levels
An anonymous reader writes "As temperatures rise, scientists continue to worry about the effects of melting Antarctic ice, which threatens to raise sea levels and swamp coastal communities. This event, though, isn't unprecedented. Researchers have uncovered evidence that reveals global warming five million years ago may have caused parts of Antarctica's ice sheets to melt, causing sea levels to rise by about 20 meters."
How many thousands of years did it take for that warming... the equivalent of *one* century? But no, zillions of barrels of oil and coal, burned, can't *possibly* affect the whole world's climate, no, no....
mark
Because there can't be both natural and man-made causes for warming and cooling? Really? That seems arbitrary, especially if it's just the argument from disbelief.
We've got very good evidence that there are climate cycles, and very good evidence that we should be cooling right now, but we're not. We have very good evidence that we're warming specifically because of our own actions, and that's overwhelming the natural cycles, both in speed of change and intensity.
If you are comfortable with natural cycles, then the physics of artificial change should not faze you, because the physics behind them is the same. If something can be changed by natural forces, then it can be affected by artificial ones of sufficient scale and intensity. Excluding the latter is simply ignoring evidence.
French - The lingua franca of Europe!
Before anyone smugly proclaims that this proves humans aren't responsible for climate change, remember that it's possible for some phenomenon to have multiple causes. It's entirely possible for there to be both natural and man-made causes for variations in climate. Giving examples of natural causes doesn't do anything to weaken the argument against anthropogenic climate change in this epoch.
If climate change is currently man-made, or partially man-made, or being made worse by human activity, then it's still worth bending every effort to slow or reverse it.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
It's idiocy like this that causes software to suck so badly. Faced with a bug report that has the same symptoms as a previous solved bug, the issue is marked as "resolved".
It is possible to have events with broadly the same symptoms that actually have different underlying causes. (Although as others point out the timescale of the symptoms is massively different).
whether life can adapt to them fast enough.
Depends on the life which is trying to adapt. Sealife, in the instance of rising sea levels, probably has a better chance at adapting than air sucking land dwellers.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"Heaven forfend" (forfend? wtf?) we stop using tricks and misleading data to try and justify our stance: http://www.skepticalscience.com/cherrypicking-deny-continued-ocean-global-warming.html
Funny that I knew that the most simplistic, mindless interpretation of the info in this article would be put forth by deniers. But it moves into the realm of sadness that it would be comment 1 & 2.
The problem is that "facts" and "science" generally support the liberal and progressive points of view. Pollution was a liberal hippy issue, until the Cuyahoga River caught fire. The link between smoking and cancer was just a liberal conspiracy to bankrupt tobacco companies. Overuse of antibiotics was a liberal attack on upstanding pharmaceutical companies, until MRSA appeared. And of course conservatives said that all of our financial woes in the 1980s could be solved by simply deregulating everything, while liberals pointed at every single prior case of financial deregulation leading to chaos in a desperate attempt to prevent today's economy.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin