alt Hacker NewsIt's my understanding that if you look at a large enough historical time window, although warming has accelerated recently (and we are in part to blame); the Earth is still relatively cool compared to historical averages.
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That is very true, but the issue really is the speed of change not the total amount of it. If we were to raise 2c over 10,000 years, that would be a non issue for the most part, adaption time would be so slow that many civilisations will come and fall between then. That it is happening over a hundred or so years, that is a huge whip lash and thats where the problem lay. We built a large but somewhat fragil industrial system assuming continued stability. Dumping 2 trillion tons of CO2 into an already barely stable system will not go down as the brightest idea we have had.
If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.
Milankovitch cycles? What time frame? Did humans live in the same areas during that time? At -4C cooler new york city was under 2000 feet of ice. +4C would be devastating for most of humanity.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...
Of course, the relevant thing for us as a species is whether or not the forecast temperatures are sustainable for us.
The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.