What if I told you that global warming is not caused by man (not alone, at least) but it's a global natural (maybe even cosmic) cycle which happens every 62 million years?

I would answer then “what do we do?” ” What is the next step?”

@RedDeerGuy1: God Save the Earth! :-)

I would point out that no one who has even the slightest idea what they are talking about thinks it’s entirely anthropomorphic. Pointing to historical cycles belies a fundamental ignorance of the fact that the contemporary science regarding global warming is about the observed difference between the amount of warming that we could reasonably expect from non-human sources and the amount of warming that has actually occurred.

You also seem to have misunderstood your source. It is a site aimed at undermining skepticism about the mainstream theory of global warming.

@SavoirFaire: Here’s anothe source:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mass-extinction

Search inside the webpage “62-million year (Myr) sine wave”.

No one is saying there is no such thing as cyclic climate change. But it’s been well proven that nothing in the history of the earth has come close to the rapid changes we’ve seen since the dawn of the industrial age.

The second thing I would say is that it doesn’t matter. We still have to find alternate sources of energy because we’re very quickly running out of fossil fuels.

As far as I can tell your latest link deals mass extinctions, not climate change.

@Dutchess_III: (Replying to last paragraph) I guess global warming is part of a bigger, more complex cosmic phenomenon.

The warming that’s been occurring since the industrial age began is an issue separate from natural climate changes.

@Dutchess_III: No, of course not. That is made by man. Not that is helping the planet anyway, or it slows it down.

It’s killing life on the planet by changing habitats so radically and quickly that the plants and animals don’t have to to adjust.
It has no affect on the speed of the rotation or orbit.

Luckily we’re Fluther Jellies: we can become younger we die. We’re, it’s said, jellyfish. Don’t you agree?

@luigirovatti Your second source does not change anything. You keep citing pro-science websites as if they are making anti-science arguments. They are not.

“I guess global warming is part of a bigger, more complex cosmic phenomenon.”

Yes, of course it is. And that fact has always been part of the mainstream theory of global warming. You seem to think you are making an argument that somehow contradicts that theory, but all you are doing is rehashing it in confused terms.

And BTW climate changes happen pretty regularly. That’s what caused the ice ages 10,000 and 20,000 years ago and allowed people to walk over to North America from Asia.
It’s also what caused the ice to eventually melt.

I’d say build some mechanism so we don’t have massive flooding affecting our cities. Physical barriers, and routing water.

I’d also say the government should give out some scholarships for marine biologists, and some other sciences and engineers to help develop solutions to these problems.

Maybe, just like NASA and the space program, we need a program, or a department, for dealing with the harsher weather if we don’t already have one.

Start building more houses on stilts, and I saw they can now make 3D printing cement small houses, which should hold up well to wind storms, and simply be in the frame of mind of building for 100 year storms.

Cities need to have really good emergency plans. A friend of mine couldn’t get out of her house for radiation treatment for her breast cancer when they flooded, luckily a neighbor had a truck and took her 50 minutes one way to her treatment.

Flooding is only one result of global warming. I’m not as worried about the effect on humans as I am the effect on animals who can’t do a thing about it, like the polar bears.

^^That’s why I mentioned marine biologists and other scientists. We need to worry about the flora and the fauna on the planet. :)

What if I told you that climate scientists already account for natural cycles?

@Darth_Algar: I’d answer they still don’t know how to solve it.

No, they know how to solve it. The problem is that society lacks the will to.

I wouldn’t buy it.
There may be a natural cycle to rising world temperatures. BUT! -
Mankind is obviously adding to green house gasses. Mankind is also depleting rainforests.
Humanity is not helping!
It couldn’t hurt if mankind helped in curbing, or attempting to put a halt to our additions of CO2 and other green house gasses.
You want to know how to solve it? In addition to what I mentioned previously, try reducing the number of humans on the planet to less than 500 million.

I don’t understand your statement that global warming’s not caused by man. The first article clearly states that past global extinctions resulted from climate changes generated primarily by out gassings from volcanoes. But this time, it is OUR output of such gasses which accelerates rising temperatures and acidification of the seas.

@luigirovatti “What if I told you that global warming is not caused by man (not alone, at least) but it’s a global natural (maybe even cosmic) cycle which happens every 62 million years?”

I would say show me your math.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

It has been suggested variously that extinction events occurred periodically, every 26 to 30 million years,[30][31] or that diversity fluctuates episodically every ~62 million years.[32] Various ideas attempt to explain the supposed pattern, including the presence of a hypothetical companion star to the sun,[33][34] oscillations in the galactic plane, or passage through the Milky Way’s spiral arms.[35]

What if I told you that the only reason that you believe there is a scientific controversy surrounding anthropogenic climate change is because there are large industries that have poured money into convincing you of this?

Sixty-five million years is a long time. The changes we are seeing are in the order of hundreds of years. The large time cycle does not account for it.

@stanleybmanly: The current global warming is made by man, as I’ve already said. The point I make is that the extinction’d have happened anyway, with or without global warming, after 59 millions of years. It’s a natural, cosmic cycle. This, because 65 million years ago, dinosaurs became extinct, and 3 million years ago, Central America rose up destabilizing ocean currents.

@kritiper: You can’t be serious with reducing the population of the world of 500 million people. A much better solution, at least for me, is to prevent further births in the world.

@luigirovatti Desperate times call for desperate measures. And I didn’t say it would be pretty! As rapidly as climate change is coming on, we don’t have enough time to delay until some other alternate might be found. The growth of the population is steady and has remained so since about 1930. Based on UN estimates, the world’s population will hit 16.3 billion by the end of this century.

@luigirovatti 6 million years ago South America was almost exactly it is today. It didn’t “rise up” from anything. It was part of the super continent, Pangaea.. Pangaea started breaking up into the modern continents 175 million years ago.

Preventing future births would certainly lead to our extinction, with no help from the climate!

@luigirovatti , The dinosaurs became extinct over a rather short period of time due to the Earth being hit by an asteroid. The rate of extinction due to man is comparable. A few years ago, a book The Sixth Extinction came out (which I have not had the chance to read), that discusses this topic.

The mess caused by that asteroid, the dust blotting out the sun, depriving the earth of sunlight etc., was cleaned up in just a few short years, too. But it was too late for any animal over 50 pounds.
If it wasn’t for that asteroid humans would have never evolved.

@Dutchess_III: I was merely going along with the logic of @kritiper and see if it would lead to anything.

Not sure which part of his logic, all of which is sound, you’re “going along with,” and where it’s supposed to lead.

Even if there were cycles in the past that does not mean we should give up and do nothing.
Sure oceans rose and fell over the eons. But the fact remains there are 8 billion people living on the planet now. ⅓ of them live in coastal regioins. 1 billion live in low lying regioins susceptible to flooding.
There are trillions of dollar in real estate and infrastructure near the coasts now. (Think of New Orleans and the Fukushima debacles.)
The oceans might have risen 10,000 years ago or 100,000 or a 1 million years ago. So what? Back then the planet was not completely inhabited and altered by humans as it is today.

Weren’t human beings the ones who blew a hole in the ozone layer? Or something like that.

^The hole in the ozone layer is one problem that has been taken care of, which is why you do not hear about it anymore. As I understand it, freon was replaced by other refrigerants that don’t react with ozone.

@LostInParadise: Freon was replaced in the US. Was it replaced around the world?

@jca2

By this point most nations have ratified the Montreal Protocol, yes. Granted, Freon, and other CFCs, haven’t been entirely replaced in all applications (indeed there are still some applications where a suitable alternative does not yet exist), but they’ve been phased out in most cases and are tightly regulated in most nations.

@luigirovatti “It’s a natural, cosmic cycle. This, because 65 million years ago, dinosaurs became extinct, and 3 million years ago, Central America rose up destabilizing ocean currents.”

Perhaps you’d care to explain how the cosmic cycle caused Central America to rise up?

I already told him that South America didn’t come into being that way! I wonder where he learned this stuff from?

I think by “Central America rising up” he’s talking about the isthmus of Panama which resulted from land uplifting due to tectonic plate collisions. But this was going on for at least 100 million years. The relatively recent and rapid fluctuations between the existence and disappearance of the land link between North & South America are the result of the ice ages during which so much of the earth’s water was concentrated in the massive ice sheets that sea levels dropped to reveal the isthmus and scads of other real estate world wide.

@Dutchess_III: I don’t agree with reducing the population of 1 person, let alone 500 million. What does sound more sensible, is to let only some women be pregnant and others be sterile. Balancing the death of older people with the birth of new people.

Wait…I think you are totally misconstruing reducing the population. He doesn’t mean we start killing people off. He means reducing it going forward, by birth control.
And there is no way in hell you, or any government, or any one else can ever tell me I can’t have a baby and no government is going to sterilize me against my will! The idea is ludicrous for a free nation.

@Dutchess_III: I agree the nation in which we live is free, obviously, but if you want to have a baby, you can’t do birth control. In this sense, it’s not much different from not being sterile. But if you do that, how can we reduce the population?

@Dutchess_III I agree with you. And thus, we, and so many of the other animals on this planet, are doomed.

Some people are smart enough to control how many children they have. You rarely see families with 9, 10 kids any more.

@luigirovatti I don’t understand “If you want to have a baby you can’t do birth control.” I was on birth control for years. Went off to have the two babies, then went back on.

“Some people,” maybe, but not enough to make the difference needed. Even 2 kids are too many.
“You rarely see families with 9, 10 kids any more.” You don’t know any Mormons do you??
I had a neighbor who I don’t think had been married 5 years and his wife was preggers with their third child.
There’s another young couple down the street where I doubt the father is 30 years old.
7 kids!!!
It’s ridiculous!

I think it’s ridiculous and irresponsible.