Scientists use climate proxy records like coral skeletons, tree rings, glacial ice cores, and sediment layers. For example, the levels of oxygen 16 in a layer of ocean debris and fossils go up as temperatures rise. So a high level of oxygen 16 in sediment from one layer tells scientists that the planet was hot and watery when the sediment was laid down.
The presence of oxygen 16 tells you the planet was warm. It does NOT tell you atmospheric temperature.
The claim made in the image is fear-mongering non-sense. The earth is 4 billion years old and was almost certainly hotter in the past, and within the last 100,000 years.
Scientists need to stop being deliberately melodramatic - to the point of lying - to make a point. It is counter-productive.
The point isn’t the temperature per se. The planet will be fine with or WITHOUT humans. If temperatures continue to rise, humans will become very uncomfortable letting to wars and instability of society.
The point is that they’ve established a relationship between o16 levels and temperature, so if you’ve got twice the o16 then say it was 25% warmer (made up ratio, I haven’t read the study).
This doesn’t tell us what the air temperature was, but it does tell us what it wasn’t (IE upper and lower bounds).
When you have several of these proxies it helps narrow down the temperature range (think how your god works better when you have more satellites).
Now if you know that the last seven days are the hottest on record and you know from your proxies that you are outside of temperatures of the past 100k years then it’s a pretty safe bet to state that we’re at the hottest time in the past 100k years.
There is no melodrama or lying in this fact, unfortunately.
It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).
Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.
Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place.
For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C).
Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.
The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly higher concentration of heavy oxygen compared to the universal standard, and the ice develops a higher concentration of light oxygen. Thus, high concentrations of heavy oxygen in the ocean tell scientists that light oxygen was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios can show how much ice covered the Earth.
Sources:
I’ll never understand why some supermarkets choose to individually package stuff like eggplant or zucchini in plastic baggies. Or ‘oh, you want some habaneros? here’s their weight in packaging as well. you earned it!’
I mean, you’re technically right but that also isn’t a helpful mentality. No one individual can single-handedly stop climate change by living in a more environmentally conscious way, we have to come together and implement systemic solutions in order for things to change.
I might be erring on the naive side here, but I read the comment you replied to less as holier than thou and more as ‘shout out to us all’.
Either that or they don’t understand that even posting the comment involves using lots of petroleum products to create the magic box that browses lemmy. And the magic boxes that host the lemmy content. And the magic boxes that connect the previous two.
We got blamed for climate change for using plastic straws when when we go out to eat once a week and the companies causing the real destruction slipped under the radar.
I 100% believe the plastic straw thing was an intentional distraction to 1. get us to fight amongst ourselves, pointing the finger at one another rather than coming together to actually solve the problem, and 2. allow a few companies to solve an easy to solve problem by using PLA (corn-based plastic) or paper straws and then sniffing their own farts for it and ignore the real problem.
I absolutely agree about systematic change. But pointing at an oil company and saying “look this is the organisation responsible for climate change” is to misidentify the problem in my opinion. Setting aside for a moment the misinformation that the oil companies funded regarding climate change, which - yes - I would like to see people in prison for - the main problem, I think is that we are still very dependent on oil.
We’ll remain dependent on oil until there is concerted government action. That action will require that we change our lifestyles and are probably a bit poorer, more constrained. No-one will vote those governments in. So, we’ll sit here like boiled frogs
Shipping can certainly be made much less impactful, if that’s what you are thinking. A lot of shipping is overland trucking, and a lot of overland trucking can be replaced with trains, and a lot of trains can be replaced with electrified trains. That would make quite a bit of difference
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives?
The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
meat production is SO much worse is not even funny… i thinkl its somethinglike you could produce 6x more vegetal protein with the same carbon footprint
Meat industry is responsible for most of the farmland. If everyone was vegan we could reduce the amount of farmland we use by like 70%. Thermodynamics says its better to eat plants instead of feeding them to animals and eating animals.
Yeah, it’s been in the news 😩 We broke the global average temperature record something like 3 times last week. The graph that accompanies the articles is actually quite scary
The company I work for makes power infrastructure for data centres and the like, 3 phase 400v conductors, the smallest we make is 1000 amp rated and we go up to 6000 amp rated, that is a hell of a lot of power and we run 24 hours a day 7 days a week pumping out miles of these to power the data centres that run the internet so we can be shitty to each other
I guess this is supposed to be taken as a bleak joke but it won’t be over soon. We all will likely experience a direct hit to our quality of life. If you’re poor, your survival will get harder. If you have or want children they will have fundamentally worse lives, compared to what we experienced so far. This can go on for decades or centuries, depending on how much we can stsill fix and what tipping points occur.
So yeah, hope that is some motivation to change something. Or at least shout at some people. :)
One thing to note is that if everyone stops having children, it will create a demographic crisis with a lot of older people / pensioners not able to work and not a lot of working age people to support the aging population. Good for environment ofc but quite bad for the remainder of population.
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Thanks, now I got the song stuck in my head. Could be worse though
OK, now point me to the place I can give money for the food that doesn’t pollute/throw it all away.
Curious: how do they know that? Recorded history is like 5k years right?
Scientists use climate proxy records like coral skeletons, tree rings, glacial ice cores, and sediment layers. For example, the levels of oxygen 16 in a layer of ocean debris and fossils go up as temperatures rise. So a high level of oxygen 16 in sediment from one layer tells scientists that the planet was hot and watery when the sediment was laid down.
The presence of oxygen 16 tells you the planet was warm. It does NOT tell you atmospheric temperature.
The claim made in the image is fear-mongering non-sense. The earth is 4 billion years old and was almost certainly hotter in the past, and within the last 100,000 years.
Scientists need to stop being deliberately melodramatic - to the point of lying - to make a point. It is counter-productive.
The point isn’t the temperature per se. The planet will be fine with or WITHOUT humans. If temperatures continue to rise, humans will become very uncomfortable letting to wars and instability of society.
The point is that they’ve established a relationship between o16 levels and temperature, so if you’ve got twice the o16 then say it was 25% warmer (made up ratio, I haven’t read the study).
This doesn’t tell us what the air temperature was, but it does tell us what it wasn’t (IE upper and lower bounds).
When you have several of these proxies it helps narrow down the temperature range (think how your god works better when you have more satellites).
Now if you know that the last seven days are the hottest on record and you know from your proxies that you are outside of temperatures of the past 100k years then it’s a pretty safe bet to state that we’re at the hottest time in the past 100k years.
There is no melodrama or lying in this fact, unfortunately.
It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).
Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.
Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place. For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C). Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.
Sources:
Also, about oxygen 16 and oxygen 18:
Shout out to all of us who buy anything shipped, any petroleum or oil-based products and those of us who aren’t vegan
I’ll never understand why some supermarkets choose to individually package stuff like eggplant or zucchini in plastic baggies. Or ‘oh, you want some habaneros? here’s their weight in packaging as well. you earned it!’
Cool, I’ll continue to get my life-saving medications shipped overnight and eat primarily a vegetarian-based diet and not feel bad about it.
Everything you buy is shipped in some capacity
I mean, you’re technically right but that also isn’t a helpful mentality. No one individual can single-handedly stop climate change by living in a more environmentally conscious way, we have to come together and implement systemic solutions in order for things to change.
I might be erring on the naive side here, but I read the comment you replied to less as holier than thou and more as ‘shout out to us all’.
Either that or they don’t understand that even posting the comment involves using lots of petroleum products to create the magic box that browses lemmy. And the magic boxes that host the lemmy content. And the magic boxes that connect the previous two.
Systemic problems require systematic changes
The whole “individual carbon footprint” thing is crazy when you look at the amount of emissions emitted by major corporations.
Hell the largest 16 cargo ships emit more CO2 than the all the cars in the world.
We got blamed for climate change for using plastic straws when when we go out to eat once a week and the companies causing the real destruction slipped under the radar.
I 100% believe the plastic straw thing was an intentional distraction to 1. get us to fight amongst ourselves, pointing the finger at one another rather than coming together to actually solve the problem, and 2. allow a few companies to solve an easy to solve problem by using PLA (corn-based plastic) or paper straws and then sniffing their own farts for it and ignore the real problem.
PLA isn’t biodegradable. Its also emits toxic fumes every reuse.
When I say reuse, I mean specifically during production when the PLA is being melted into place.
The last statement is debunked in the very link you shared, if you scroll down and open the summary and conclusions pdf.
That being said, compeltely agree with more accountability on corporate side.
I absolutely agree about systematic change. But pointing at an oil company and saying “look this is the organisation responsible for climate change” is to misidentify the problem in my opinion. Setting aside for a moment the misinformation that the oil companies funded regarding climate change, which - yes - I would like to see people in prison for - the main problem, I think is that we are still very dependent on oil.
We’ll remain dependent on oil until there is concerted government action. That action will require that we change our lifestyles and are probably a bit poorer, more constrained. No-one will vote those governments in. So, we’ll sit here like boiled frogs
government action will also require eradicating corruption as big oil will always try to influence legislation in their favor
Absolutely agreed again
So far.
So true it burns.
…enjoy this summer; it’s the coolest one you’ll experience for the rest of your life…
literally…
The oil, meat and shipping industries: “It’s called a streak, baby”
One of the three is not like the other, in the way that it can never be eliminated. Let’s play guess…
Shipping can certainly be made much less impactful, if that’s what you are thinking. A lot of shipping is overland trucking, and a lot of overland trucking can be replaced with trains, and a lot of trains can be replaced with electrified trains. That would make quite a bit of difference
Don’t just single out meat. All of industrialized agriculture is massively carbon and energy intensive and built on gradual topsoil depletion.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
meat production is SO much worse is not even funny… i thinkl its somethinglike you could produce 6x more vegetal protein with the same carbon footprint
Meat industry is responsible for most of the farmland. If everyone was vegan we could reduce the amount of farmland we use by like 70%. Thermodynamics says its better to eat plants instead of feeding them to animals and eating animals.
Biology teachers when them teaching the 10 percent law for ecological efficiency to their class 5 years ago is actually useful
Wait, is this true?
Yeah, it’s been in the news 😩 We broke the global average temperature record something like 3 times last week. The graph that accompanies the articles is actually quite scary
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/climate/climate-change-record-heat.html
Here’s a mirror to the chart you mentioned.
And here’s a mirror to the article you mentioned.
You weren’t kidding about that chart, it’s mighty scary and depressing.
Especially seeing the part that we’re not even at the typical hottest part of the year yet.
The real G right here
Fuck yeah setting records lads, high fives all round, good work, good work!!
Sadly, it is. https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/11/uncharted-territory-un-declares-first-week-of-july-worlds-hottest-ever-recorded
Have you been living under a rock?
What kind of news are you following to be so so surprised about this?
Vermont just had flooding that was on par with Hurricane Irene.
They’re calling it a 1000 year rarity. It happened 12 years ago. Only this time there was no hurricane.
There are ocean temperatures in the fucking 90s.
This hurricane season is gonna be batshit crazy, y’all.
The concept of seasons will also get super fucked. Already feeling it in North-East India - weather trends are not very predictable any more.
I’m waiting for the hot part of the year to start where I live, and I live in a tropical country! It will be so funny! 🫠
The company I work for makes power infrastructure for data centres and the like, 3 phase 400v conductors, the smallest we make is 1000 amp rated and we go up to 6000 amp rated, that is a hell of a lot of power and we run 24 hours a day 7 days a week pumping out miles of these to power the data centres that run the internet so we can be shitty to each other
Gotta love them for giving us nice warm weather
Don’t worry all of this will soon be over.
I guess this is supposed to be taken as a bleak joke but it won’t be over soon. We all will likely experience a direct hit to our quality of life. If you’re poor, your survival will get harder. If you have or want children they will have fundamentally worse lives, compared to what we experienced so far. This can go on for decades or centuries, depending on how much we can stsill fix and what tipping points occur.
So yeah, hope that is some motivation to change something. Or at least shout at some people. :)
The solution is not to have children. Everything else is pissing in the wind.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Fully agreed. But harder to sell unfortunately :(
There are other fulfilling things to do with your life besides having kids. People need to realize this.
Yes. But you are arguing against lots of social programming, cultural expectations and religious backgrounds. It’s hard.
One thing to note is that if everyone stops having children, it will create a demographic crisis with a lot of older people / pensioners not able to work and not a lot of working age people to support the aging population. Good for environment ofc but quite bad for the remainder of population.
Until we colonize other planets, downsizing is the only way humanity will survive. Every other person just can’t be having tons of kids anymore.
Don’t forget steel. quick stats
Global temps can’t melt steel beams…