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Stromrider
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The little ice age and global warming
#27463474 - 09/10/21 07:07 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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I've recently been learning about the little ice age that lasted from approximately 1300 to 1850. It got me thinking about the current warming of the planet.
What do you suppose would be worse for humanity as a whole, global warming or global cooling? Both would definitely be catastrophic but I feel like global cooling would be much more of a problem for humanity as a whole
If we stop pumping out co2 in the coming decades and the planet starts cooling its going to be mandatory hummers and suburbans for all
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The Thing
ТнغТнརиو


Registered: 03/01/18
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: Stromrider]
#27463579 - 09/10/21 09:13 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Volcanoes would become 'hot property' in an ice age.
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Darwin23
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: Stromrider]
#27463627 - 09/10/21 10:37 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Warming is worse, without a doubt.
During extreme warming, ocean circulation shuts down. It's like the oceans going stagnant. Worse, as waters warm, they start releasing dissolved gases. They become stripped of oxygen and marine life starts suffocating. The oceans turn into a toxic graveyard and life on land suffers as well. During The Great Dying, some 80% of marine life died and 70% of land vertebrates.
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trees


Registered: 02/08/09
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: Darwin23]
#27463630 - 09/10/21 10:43 PM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Cooling is always worse because crops, literally everything dies, no food for grazers, no food for predators, no food for people
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Lynnch
Strangerer



Registered: 04/29/09
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: trees] 1
#27463678 - 09/11/21 12:51 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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You ever live somewhere where it gets to 115+F? Its fuckin brutal man. If it gets cold, we all put a sweater on, knowhatimean?
Lucky for us, we get to find out which is worse for sure. We lived through to 1850.. Will we still be around in 2150?
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ONE OZ SLUG
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: Lynnch]
#27463679 - 09/11/21 12:53 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Fuck no the cold sucks ass. The heat sucks for sure, but cold is death. A global cooling is a lot more damaging to life than warming, although neither are ideal obviously.
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Lynnch
Strangerer



Registered: 04/29/09
Posts: 7,852
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: ONE OZ SLUG]
#27463688 - 09/11/21 01:14 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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*I am a soft california boy that has never had to shovel snow.
Maybe a natural mini ice age will come and cancel out our stupid man made global warming.
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Loaded Shaman
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: trees]
#27463707 - 09/11/21 02:00 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
trees said: Cooling is always worse because crops, literally everything dies, no food for grazers, no food for predators, no food for people
Correct.
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  "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance." — Confucius
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Stromrider
This must be the place



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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: Darwin23]
#27463757 - 09/11/21 04:34 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
Darwin23 said: Warming is worse, without a doubt.
During extreme warming, ocean circulation shuts down. It's like the oceans going stagnant. Worse, as waters warm, they start releasing dissolved gases. They become stripped of oxygen and marine life starts suffocating. The oceans turn into a toxic graveyard and life on land suffers as well. During The Great Dying, some 80% of marine life died and 70% of land vertebrates.
I don't think this is correct. If you look at the geologic record there were times in the past that earth was 10 to 15 degrees celcius warmer than now and life in the ocean and on land was thriving
Cold means plant and crop die off. It also mean algae and plankton die of which goes up the ocean food chain.
I really can't see how warming would be worse than cooling
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Jean-Luc Picard
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Re: The little ice age and global warming [Re: Stromrider] 2
#27463851 - 09/11/21 07:15 AM (2 years, 4 months ago) |
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I think its very difficult to say whether "global cooling" or "global warming" would be worse or better, because it really depends on a lot of factors.
The OP specifically mentions the Little Ice Age, which was a relatively long period of slightly lower global average temperatures, that happened very gradually compared to today's warming trends. There are also mentions of times in the deep past of the Earth where temperatures were much higher than they are today and the observation that ocean/land life was thriving, suggesting that cold would have the opposite effect. This is not supported by evidence we have from known glacial periods, including the Cryogenian (aka snowball earth) period, where all evidence suggests that shallow marine life survived the event mostly unscathed, and a marked lack of evidence suggesting mass extinction during this time suggests that both extreme hot and extreme cold on the planet do not seem to cause mass die-off events, as we are all quick to claim.
From what I've seen, it appears that the rate of temperature change, seems to have more of an effect. If you have millions of years to evolve in response to a changing global average temperature, then evolution will drive the adaptation and the slow change will mostly go unnoticed. If 10-15C of temperature deviations happens over the course of several hundred years, you do not have enough time for the current species to adapt, and mass die-offs occur in response to the sudden temp changes and the side-effects of sudden temp changes. Ocean currents collapse during quickly changing conditions, but will re-establish in the long term as dictated by the laws of thermodynamics and the temperature difference between the earth's interior and the single-digit absolute temperature of the cosmic microwave background. All of the effects proposed in this thread so far to positive or negative temperature changes depend very, very heavily on magnitude of the change, and the rate at which the change occurs.
And trying to use historical data (aka the little ice age, which took hundreds of years and involved very small changes in temps...or deep historical glacial and greenhouse events, which happened over millions of years and did not involve a technologically advanced global society) is purely speculative. The rate of advance in modern tech could mean that we directly tap into the power of the sun (which currently supplies the Earth with roughly 1000x the total human energy consumption in 2019) and literally dial in the atmospheric characteristics necessary to keep the earth at the right global temperature for humans and their food supply, or force evolution or speciation of plants and animals (including humans) to adapt to whatever changing temps are headed our way.
I think its just safe to say that, based on our very limited experience with past temperature changes and current temperature changes, that it makes it much harder to make assumptions about resource availability and habitability of the planet once average temperatures and variability around those temperatures starts to deviate from the "norm" from which we've done most of our expansion and advancement. This becomes more concerning when we realize that the global average temperature is changing faster than any other period on the planet that we have records for, which goes back several billion years, so we are truly guessing in uncharted territory.
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Bacchuschillin
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Well put. I Concur
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