so what is the correct climate for the earth?

[foxtrottinngg]

if climate change is bad then it stands to reason there is a perfect climate for the earth?
also how do you propose to stop the climate changing when it has done constantly for the last 5 billion years with the temperature at some points being both a lot warmer and a lot colder.

I think the idea is more that there is a perfect range of climates for its current inhabitants. The earth isn’t going anywhere. It’s s massive rock in space. But obviously if our food dies so do we.

What do you mean "if" climate change is bad

The theory is that the Earth's temperature shifts are cyclic in nature but the greenhouse gas emissions have forced it to get hotter faster than it should have done in line with its cycles and may cause it to get hotter than it should have done and be unable to cool itself afterward.

What do you mean "if" climate change is bad hmm i ean lots of people say that but then are nether asked this question as another point does it ae the ocean more or less salty? i dont want to disagree with experts but it seems they contradict each other.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/oct/27/climate-change-water
www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/oct/27/climate-change-water

www.livescience.com/3883-global-warming-sea-salty.html

oh god.

Climate change is not bad, the climate is forever changing as you point out.
Man made climate change is bad because we have changed the planet at a rate that has only previously occurred due to huge world wide disasters such as mega volcanoes erupting or impact from large asteroids. It leads to a mass extinction of many life forms on the planet. If you can't work out why eco systems collapsing will have a devastating impact on humanity then you need to read up on it.

The planet will be fine, but many of the species on it, possibly including humanity, will not be. At some stage it may not support any complex life at all which is depressing when you think that it has done for billions of years and we fuck it all up in a few hundred.

Oh, can we put our orders in?

Ideally the Earth would roll back to pre- industrial temperatures apart from the North East which would adopt a Mediterranean climate.

The climate for the earth naturally fluctuates eg ice ages. It's not so much what's best for the earth as the earth will be fine, it's not going anywhere.

It's the rate of change and the scale of the change that is dangerous, not for the earth itself but for ecosystems that can't adapt quickly enough. For example in past times if the earth heated up, animals would adapt or gradually move to cooler climates. It's changing too fast for them to adapt and there arent enough of them and there are too many people in the way, for them to move and flourish in cooler climates. So they will die out.

And that's not touching on the impact on humans

op both your articles are over ten years old. why is that?

Its not a contradiction. Areas of the sea where there are massive freshwater influxes due to melting ice caps will be less salty than normal.

Other areas that are hotter and far away from the ice caps and not in the current, will have more evaporation and be more salty.

The sea is so big it isn't like a cup of tea where you put a tea bag in and stir and the tea is equally distributed. It has different temperature and characteristics, including salt, everywhere.

Easy-to-understand visual graph answering your question about previous climate changes compared to the manmade changes we're seeing now:

xkcd.com/1732

op both your articles are over ten years old. why is that?
so which article is wrong

It's the rate of change and the scale of the change that is dangerous,
evidence? same evidence that al gore used when he said there would be no north polar ice cap by now was inconvinietly for him turned out to be false.

climate.nasa.gov/evidence

HTH

im interested because 98-99% of scientists believe man made climate change is real - and will be harmful to humansbut youve found an article from 2005 that suggests something dofferent to another article from...2005...and seem to be trying to use it in order to discredit what 98% know.

can i ask how you voted in the ref? just a theory...

can i ask how you voted in the ref? just a theory...
Knew that was coming , you just can't help it can you.

how do you propose to stop the climate changing when it has done constantly for the last 5 billion years with the temperature at some points being both a lot warmer and a lot colder.

You should be frightened, not comforted by past fluctuations. I once saw a climate graph which was a wild zigzag with a very, very short straightish bit at the end, representing unusual stability. The whole evolution of the human race happened towards the tail end of that tiny straight bit.

For most of Earths history, the climate would have made life impossible for us.

Fuck, you only have to back just over half of your 5 billion years, and as you step out of your time machine, you will immediately die as there's no oxygen in the air for you to breath. Plants hadn't put it there yet. (Google "great oxygenation event" for more info.)

Recently, watching the BBC series on planets, and Mars used to be blue planet just like the earth, then it lost it's magnetic field and started losing it's atmosphere, which leaked away into space. I wonder if that could happen to us.

What you should take from this is that the conditions that enable us to exist are hugely anomalous and could easily be different. And that's even before we start fucking with the climate. I don't think we should be poking it.

I do not know, but I do know there is no point to investing in shares in air-conditioning makers. Although aircon only perpetuates the climate change problem, by the time my shares have reached maximum value, the planet will have boiled dry and I won’t be able to spend it.

OP, neither article is wrong. In fact, they actually agree with each other: in very northern latitudes, the Altlantic was found to be getting less salty (due to increased inflow of freshwater). The Guardian article then also says that at tropical latitudes the Altantic is getting more salty. As a PP explained it is possible for both of these effects to occur.

OP, I'm not sure what you are trying to gain by questioning what has already been accepted by 97% of world scientists. Whether or not anyone on here can present you with the evidence that you want is immaterial. Humans are driving climate change (in addition to all the other damage that we are doing). The increasing incidents of extreme weather is one obvious marker as well as the melting icecaps. The scepticism is mostly being driven by the fossil fuel lobby who clearly stand to lose by a move towards cleaner energy (although in my mind it is such a short sighted view because all the money in the world is pretty useless in a dying world). Also denying something doesn't make it go away or we would all be happily questioning death, taxes and old age.

The thing is that we can mitigate this by drastically cutting back on emissons, instituting large scale tree planting projects and protecting rain forests. We really can do this and we can save the planet but the will needs to be there.

The Viking sagas indicate that the temperature was warmer and more settled (e.g. less storms leading to calmer oceans for sea navigation) from around 100AD to 1250AD.

So I suppose that would have been considered more "ideal".

However, given that there was a fairly rapid drop in temperature after that, which could be measured in a single lifetime or a few decades, it seems that the rate of increase in temperature is not considered ideal by current standards.

i cant

well there was a thread about a connection between climate change deniers and brexit. many respondents were shocked by a suggested connection. i was shocked they were shocked because i thought it was fairly well-known.

So what can we, as individuals, do to help avert/reverse, man-made climate change?

I gave up owning a car about ten years ago, I eat a vegetarian diet, and I keep my household energy consumption to no more than 2 kWh per day. Not boasting, to be clear - just wondering how that compares to what other people do.

Correction. Electricity consumption.