Comment by rybosome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rybosome | Hacker News Reader

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This is a thoughtfully written post, thank you for taking the time to put it together. As a software engineer, I'm not really qualified to have a complex, technical discussion on climate change. However, one point that you made, I can address...

> but, if this were really how it happened and co2 is the overwhelmingly main forcing for temperature increase, then why wasn't the planet already destroyed back when we had 10x+ the amount of carbon in the atmosphere than what we are doing today?

A sharp increase in CO2 is thought to be one of the precipitating factors in the Permian extinction, which wiped out >70% of land-dwelling vertebrates and >90% of all marine species. No credible person is saying the planet is threatened by climate change, they're saying humans are. This planet, and even life itself, will go on no matter what happens - cold comfort taken against the damage it could cause to our species.

thanks for your insight. i also am a software engineer, so maybe i'm not qualified to have a complex, technical discussion either. but, i do think that most issues can be summarized/presented in a way that makes the technical discussion available to anyone of reasonable intelligence. it just takes either a feynman-type or a collaborator with an einstein-type to be interested in doing it. (i, myself, learned quantum mechanics well enough to present on it because i had a professional interest in quantum computing).

as per the theory of co2 precipitating the Permian extinction, i am aware of some very recent research that makes the claim that the extinction entirely happened during an 80,000 year ice age on the border of the Permian and Triassic periods. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306091927.h...)

if the data are correct, it seems pretty convincing to me that it wasn't the warming that caused that extinction.

btw, your point about the planet not being destroyed is well taken. i guess what i'm trying to understand is how the positive feedback loop of temp->co2->temp is broken if trace amounts of co2 is such a massive forcing. when the earth had 4000+ ppm of co2 in the atmosphere, there had to be some other, much stronger, forcing to bring the temperature back down.

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