Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. I like how it goes from 20 million years ago to present in one jump, which is sort of interesting on the timeline. We had a warm period without ice ages 3-5 million years ago, then had the onset of ice ages 2 million years ago(and that cycle might have been terminated by current fossil fuel use). Just a blip in time from this perspective.

View on HN

Just so we’re clear—the most recent ice age was already ending before the industrial revolution.

Unless you believe like a couple did in the 70s that there was a coming ice age which we completely stopped and reversed. I would love to hear the steelmanning for that.

Not a true ice age, but the so called "little ice age" [1] ends about 100 years after the start of the industrial revolution. So you could argue we helped in its demise, even if it wasn't a "true" global ice age and more of a regional abnormaly that lasted a couple centuries.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

I think all the scientific evidence indicates that we'd be on a long ~50,000 year slide into a new ice age right now, except that human ingenuity in the pursuit of energy resulted in a massive injection of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in the form of coal, oil and gas combustion.

However, if the goal was to head off the next Ice Age, all the scientists agree, "Mission Accomplished!"

Probably best to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix immediately, don't you think?

After 2x-ing the amount of carbon in the whole planet atmosphere in the shortest time ever (ever is a long time btw)? Maybe we could pause and evaluate effects of this geoengineering experiment

We’re still technically in an ice age - there is permanent ice at the poles (for now). In contrast during other ages all the ice melted in summer, even at the poles.

That’s fascinating!

Where can I read more?

Try Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

As I understand it, the claim that there was to be a coming ice age was based on our increased rate of particulate matter into the atmosphere, not greenhouse gases. The claim was that in addition to greenhouse gases, we were also exponentially increasing soot, aerosols, and other light dampening particulate matter. They argued that the C02 emissions would increase the temperature, but that cooling particulate matter pollution would outpace the warming greenhouse-gas pollution.

We've very much curbed out aerosol, but increased our greenhouse-gas pollution. I very much doubt that their analysis was correct to begin with, and I doubt had we not curbed the aerosol pollution, we'd be facing an ice age today - but I'm just some jerk on the internet - I could easily be wrong! Right or wrong, the first paragraph above is how I understand the argument to have been made at the time.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com