alt Hacker News> "Humans are altering the planet on an unthinkable scale"
Mesmerizing photos, but hard to draw causal conclusions. Drought in Iraq is pictured directly above flooding in Australia. Maybe this is just the natural cycle of the planet. We don't have data to compare for more than just the last couple generations.
Replies
burkaman • last Thursday at 7:14 PM
Yes we do. Please read the IPCC reports if you're curious about where the data comes from, there is a huge amount of climate data beyond the direct weather measurements you're referring to.
phtrivier • last Thursday at 7:08 PM
Paleogeologists beg to differ.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?lo...
The "natural cycle" argument is one of the most common points around climate change denial. It's also one of the most commonly debunked. See the following:
UN - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/debunking-eight-...
MIT - https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/todays-climate-change-simila...
Columbia University - https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/04/04/how-we-know-cli...
It's also unclear to me how scientists might not have enough data to validate climate change in the last several hundred years, but they do have enough data to validate the natural cycle hypothesis spanning thousands of years.
I'm not going to engage more deeply here because this post has the smell of trolling to it, but if you're engaging in good faith, there are hundreds of reputable reports refuting the natural cycle hypothesis:
https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+cycle+arguments+on+c...