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Comment by _petronius

I think in the context of convincing people that we urgently need to address the current climate problem (for economic, ecological, and security reasons), that might be distracting.

Assuming there are probably other interglacial periods in Earth's long history that were a lot warmer than the current one[0], or maybe had lots more greenhouse gasses from some non-human source (if such a thing is geologically possible), that doesn't make the implications of global temperature rise on current human society any less disastrous, or absolve the fact that the current warming period is from gasses released by burning fossil fuels.

The fact is, that the Earth has had worse ecological disasters than the human species (although not many, and most of them were caused by big asteroid impacts[1]). So I'm less afraid of how this stacks up against the entire climatalogical history of the planet than I am of armed conflicts breaking out over water rights, or the loss of huge swaths of agricultural land.

[0]: And it looks like there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Major_extinct...

parent _petronius 11 years ago

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