How do you know that the climate is changing at a pace never before seen? Were you there to see it? There have been many mass extinctions in Earth’s history. It’ll be fine.
We know what the climate was like in the past by looking at layers in the earth, tree rings, even carbon dating can sometimes given evidence of how the composition of the atmosphere was in the past. There a lot of neat chemistry that we can use to learn what composition the atmosphere and climate had. Obviously there is some amount of error in models, but we do know.
I think there are a lot of errors in the models. Tree rings can only go back so far because most of the early trees are now coal. And trees, while they do live for a long time, don’t live forever. Fossilization is rare and I don’t know if we can get weather data from fossilized tree rings. Carbon dating is useful for organic matter up to 60,000 years ago. The other methods used to determine what the atmosphere was in the past include studying ice samples from Antarctica but that’s only good for the time Antarctica froze till now, it was tropical at some point. Since most scientist think complex life has been around for 500 million years I don’t think we can really say we know exactly what the climate was like and how it changed anywhere past a certain time period.
How do you know that the climate is changing at a pace never before seen? Were you there to see it? There have been many mass extinctions in Earth’s history. It’ll be fine.
We know what the climate was like in the past by looking at layers in the earth, tree rings, even carbon dating can sometimes given evidence of how the composition of the atmosphere was in the past. There a lot of neat chemistry that we can use to learn what composition the atmosphere and climate had. Obviously there is some amount of error in models, but we do know.
I think there are a lot of errors in the models. Tree rings can only go back so far because most of the early trees are now coal. And trees, while they do live for a long time, don’t live forever. Fossilization is rare and I don’t know if we can get weather data from fossilized tree rings. Carbon dating is useful for organic matter up to 60,000 years ago. The other methods used to determine what the atmosphere was in the past include studying ice samples from Antarctica but that’s only good for the time Antarctica froze till now, it was tropical at some point. Since most scientist think complex life has been around for 500 million years I don’t think we can really say we know exactly what the climate was like and how it changed anywhere past a certain time period.
xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline