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From The Guardian :
The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it "very unlikely" that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa's top climate scientist.
[...] But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.
[...] [Director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin] Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 02 2016, @08:40PM
I wanted to note the article says we have climate data going back 800,000 years but only the last 1000 has a high degree of certainty; the temperatures are easily the highest on that record. It's a shame we don't have 100,000 years of good data but I guess you take what you can get.
The earth for reference is probably roughly 4,500,000,000 years old. It was quite different for most of that though, I just thought it was interesting to mention.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 02 2016, @08:46PM
The Sun was apparently as much as 30% dimmer earlier in Earth's history, and will become a red giant in the long run, destroying the Earth and making places like Titan [wikipedia.org] potentially habitable.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @12:50AM
Hence why we should keep off Titan, else we destroy a world's life development in many millions of years (billions?). Mine a place for resources and the galactic future of that world might shift. Course, that's all scifi right?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:34AM
Well, our understanding of life in the universe is going to increase dramatically in the next hundred years or so, before many significant off-world bases/colonies are established. We have a number of next-gen telescopes [nextbigfuture.com] going up in the next 2 decades that may be able to spot life on exoplanets or at least find liquid water. We also have missions such as JUICE [wikipedia.org] and future lander concepts that can check for microbes in icy subsurface oceans.
We also have this finding [soylentnews.org].
What's the point? We will be in a better position to fill in the Drake equation and predict where and when life can be found. With the Titan example, maybe it will have an atmosphere that is human breathable in a couple billion years, but the low gravity (0.14g) and other conditions aren't going to make it hard for something on the level of primates to develop from microbes from scratch. The fossil article I linked points to microbes easily forming, but complex life taking extra billions of years. And if we find microbes in icy subsurface oceans in our own solar system, we'll truly find that microbial life is the low-hanging fruit of the universe (there's also a panspermia argument, and asteroid impacts on Earth could have delivered microbes elsewhere in the solar system, but whatever).
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 02 2016, @10:59PM
> The earth for reference is probably roughly 4,500,000,000 years old. It was quite different for most of that though, I just thought it was interesting to mention.
What really matters is how much of that time the Earth been habitable for humans. Because even if humans are not causing these changes, if they continue at this rate we are going to face our own extinction within about a century.
Who the fuck cares if the earth continues on without us?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JNCF on Friday September 02 2016, @11:15PM
Who the fuck cares if the earth continues on without us?
Lots of people, myself included! It's squishy and irrational, but so is caring about literally anything. If the options are between dead rock or a living planet, I'll take what I can get.
Bacteria? Better than nothing.
Insects? Better than bacteria.
Octopuses? Well shit, their descendants might be able to colonize Mars some day. Now we're talking!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 03 2016, @12:29AM
This. Complete nihilists that haven't committed suicide are deceiving themselves.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:02AM
well takyon me old fruit, i fear thee is under a misapprehension.
as a nihilist allow me to elucidate, nihilism only says their is no objective meaning, there is no $DEITY in the sky, no arbiter, nothing, but we are free to create our own meaning, indeed the only meaning is that which we create.
as such a nihilst would have no problem with "caring about literally anything".
your in truth,
ac
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:11AM
I'm free to create my own meaning for the term "complete nihilist" :^)
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(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday September 03 2016, @03:19AM
I'm free to create my own meaning for the term "complete nihilist" :^)
And yet, creating your own meaning for a term without explaining it isn't very helpful for communication (not that you should care about communication, just that I do, sometimes). I don't entirely agree with AC's take on nihilism (I think AC is conflating nihilism with atheism and relativism), but it seems like you're using "nihilism" in a way that oddly encompasses caring. I think a human can care about something without attaching meaning to that thing -- caring is just a mental process, it is the state of being interested in something. Interest is not meaning.
I also don't think a meaningless universe logically leads to the conclusion of suicide any more than it logically leads to any other action; it just doesn't lead anywhere. Not leading anywhere is not the same as leading to a quick acceptance of death.
What do you mean when you say "complete nihilist?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @02:23AM
If the options are between dead rock or a living planet,
What a load of fucking bullshit.
Seriously. Your response to "we should to try preserve the Earth as it is so the human race can survive" is "eh, as long as it doesn't turn into a dead rock, I'm good."
WTF is wrong with you that you do not give a damn about billions of lives?
A little perspective indeed.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday September 03 2016, @03:37AM
Read the sentence I quoted again. I'm not saying that I don't care about human life, I'm saying that I do care about other life. We're quite a bit closer to Mars colonization than the octopuses are, and I'd rather we not go extinct yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:47AM
I wrote the sentence.
At best your response was an unrelated tangent caused by you brainfarting on a syntax parsing error that context should have corrected.
Its liked you pulled an "all lives matter" cop-out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:57PM
What really matters is how much of that time the Earth been habitable for humans. Because even if humans are not causing these changes, if they continue at this rate we are going to face our own extinction within about a century.
If we go extinct, it won't be from climate change. Funny how various slight changes in climate (which is all that is being predicted by actual scientists) are being spun as the end of the world. Chicken little much?