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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

Stable climate have never existed. 9000 years ago the average temperature was likely higher than presently by 1 - 1.5 degree. 1000 years ago Northern Atlantic and Pacific were warmer than today. Vikings called Newfoundland Wine Land due to grapes that where grown there. Then that rapidly shifted into much colder conditions.

And then the next ice age can start within the next 1000-2000 years which is much worse for the civilization than global warming to the point that perhaps pumping CO2 into atmosphere is not a bad idea if it allows to stop that.

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Based on the the contrast of your text to the background this kind of factual comment is not popular here lol.

I think stop global warming at all costs segment here as well as society as a whole would be better served by getting behind initiatives that promote anti pollution ie getting rid of coal and burning oil to produce grid energy. Solar is good too. Put your energy into promoting that and other solutions such as planting more trees instead of planting yourselves in front of a badly needed oil pipeline. I and a large segment of the population might support those efforts more if they were more centrist and weren’t so hostile to society. Focus on the common sense stuff.

Short-term given the current political situation burning coal is better than burning oil or natural gas. Coal is distributed much more evenly among countries than oil and gas. Wars like in Ukraine or Yemen are only possible due to money Russian or Saudi Arabia earns from the energy export. And pollution from wars may offset any savings from supposedly cleaner energy sources. Plus coal transportation is much more distributed operation making it resilient in case of natural disasters or terrorism. Plus the latest coal plants approaching 50% efficiency with proper capture of bad things in coal are not that bad.

Longer term wind and especially solar are way better precisely because they allow very local production, but full switch to those is a far future especially with the current realization that cloudy sky with no wind can lasts for months even in supposedly sunny places.

Current climate change is happening at an incredibly fast rate compared to historical fluctuations. I don't think they are comparable. But the point is nobody knows for certain so when it comes to modifying our environment at a grand scale we should probably try to be conservative.

There were a lot of rather abrupt changes even during Holocene [1]. We do not understand what could have been triggers for those changes. Which really emphasizes that we do not know how the climate works and as a civilization should have being preparing for the worst.

[1] - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-16006-...

This is not true at all. During the recent period known as the Younger Dryas average global temps changed about 5°C over a few decades and then did it again in the opposite direction 1000 years later.

The post-industrial period is so short it wouldn't even register on most historical proxies.

In general it is true, that climate changes are normal.

But the drastic, artifical change we are about to wittness, is something new.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

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