This brings to mind one of the more fascinating topics discussed in Bill Bryson's (phenomenal, wide-ranging) book A Short History of Nearly Everything. Until reading that book, I had no clue that the discovery of plate tectonics caused huge religious and philosophical turmoil similar to the discovery of natural selection. It shattered the image of Earth as a static creation of God, who of course was beneficent enough to put rivers near old cities and provide pretty consistent rain patterns near farmland, etc. etc.
I guess that’s a continuation of what Galileo shattered hundreds of years previously with his five observations through his homemade telescope that the Catholic Church was gonna burn him for.
From memory all these bodies were supposed to be “perfect and unblemished” or some such:
- lunar surface was textured
- Venus appeared as a crescent
- Jupiter had its own moons
- Saturn had “ears” (aperture was too small to resolve rings)
I think he means to say that you can see the texture with the naked eye. So should not have been controversial. But many such stories exist of controversies inside a normalized society.
I keep wanting some sort of dynamic desktop globe, where I can set the maps to basically any era and picture the world back then. See Alexander’s conquests, Rome’s rise etc. Feels like this hardware must be possible at this point?
That's an interesting idea. I could see some sort of flexible OLED or something that could change, but the textures to show mountains would be the difficult part. I could see some sort of reverse idea of those desk toys with all of the pins that you can leave the shape of objects in. Only, this would push the pins up/down to change the elevations accordingly. That would be an interesting OLED material that could stretch without stretching the "pixels".
It's interesting to think how the geography of the earth could've shaped the anthroposphere and its history differently had humanity happened a few million years earlier.
30 million years ago the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans were directly connected, for example, but the Black Sea was landlocked. The Bosporus straight in Istanbul and the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt have been very significant historically and geopolitically— history would be very different in a world where these don't exist.
Interesting to me - the NYC area (I’m from Connecticut nearby) seems like it’s been on solid ground for most of the timescale represented. And Florida didn’t exist 20mm years ago.
Really awesome! couple of things to take it to next level.
1. A timeline or animation to show how a city location or land mass changed over time.
2. Predict the future where would my city be in 100 million years. May be under water
it would be hard to predict the water levels from climate change vs just where land will be based on plate tectonics. they could move the land masses around, and then maybe allow adjustments to say if there's no more polar ice, current levels, etc. but then i'm sure there would be mass hysteria from the climate deniers. neat idea though.
Perfect timing - I just finished John McPhee’s wonderful “Assembling California”. It goes into quite a bit of detail of how California came together, and includes some history of tectonic plate theory, the gold rush, and quite a lot more.
It is interesting to see the landmasses move over time. I am not sure if I expected them to move faster or slower. At any rate, things can change a lot in just a few tens of millions of years.
Or you can recognize "climate change" is a constant. That bit has been lost with the recent debate over climate science - far too many people view any change as a disaster.
We can look at this map and recognize vast dramatic changes occurred before humans were ever here.
Humans undeniably have an impact on climate change. That much isn't up for debate. What is up for debate is the exact extent human actions are actually influencing change vs. expediting a predetermined change vs. creating changes that would not have existed otherwise.
Poles have changed[1]... oceans come and go, land disappears then reappears. The earth is surprisingly constantly changing - just not on time scales humans normally contemplate.
The changes that we're seeing now are occurring at such a horrifyingly rapid rate compared to the changes we've seen historically though. My reading of your message is that you're conflating historical changes in oceans, landmass, atmospheric streams and polar orientation with modern climate change. The latter is happening at 7 orders of magnitude faster than the former.
And yet nobody really knows for sure how quickly climates changed in the past, or how fast they're supposed to change, or if they always change at a similar rate.
On some level, what people advocate doing is creating climate change to benefit humans, which is kind of the antithesis of what climate science activists claim they want.
I'm confident we don't understand the earth and climate well enough to "engineer" it to our will.
I cannot imagine what a pole reversal would look like today. The truly scary thing is contemplating just how many things depend on, or assume polar north is where it is today.
Even more scary, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about polar reversal, and absolutely nothing humans do that is provoking it. It's just a natural phenomenon, during which things will indeed become extremely unpleasant.
> My point was if we're saying something is changing at an alarming rate - then the natural question would be what is a normal rate
Danger can be alarming even if on a wide enough time window its not unusual (that the current warming is unusual on any timeline as narrow as, say, “the history of human civilization on Earth” is clear, though.)
We actually don't even know that much. Written records only go back so far, and the ability to measure say temperature in any relatively accurate way is a modern invention. Majority (or all?) dependable temperature data starts around 1900...
If it's alarming because within recent human history something is changing quickly - well fine, but that's not how this stuff is being offered.
Even so, the question remains - is it an actual problem? Has human activity created the change, accelerated change, or was the change inevitable (ie. caused by polar reversal)? These are difficult questions to answer absolutely.
Even if we could answer these questions confidently - should we do anything about it? Would our actions to "combat" climate change cause unknown side effects? Probably... how do we square those potentially negative impacts with the "good" changes we've created?
It's pretty complicated. Anyone offering absolutes or hysterics should be taken skeptically in my opinion.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of climate proxies (1). E.g., tree rings, coral, pollen, forams/ostracods/coccolithophores/radiolaria, varves/lake sediments, water isotopes, membrane lipids, etc. See also Wikipedia article re. temperature proxies, 'Paleothermometer'(2).
So, yes, we do have proxies for past climates and rates of change. Yes, there have been some pretty spectacular excursions in climate (e.g., the entry into the Younger Dryas happened within 50 years, and brought the climate of Nome, Alaska to San Francisco). However, I saw a research presentation that compared the rate of change in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) to Homo sapiens' injection of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the rate of our injection beat the PETM, and it may very well exceed any such injection in Earth's history (the latter is my speculation).
Tree rings tell us there were years where there was more or less rainfall relative to what that tree/forest normally sees - but it does not provide a measurement of how much water/rainfall there was. Different geographical regions experience different norms over time as well.
Same with temperature. We can infer there were hotter years, and colder years within those regions all throughout history. Being able to say the temperature averaged say 30*C was not possible until relatively recently.
It's all observational science, and we can't observe all of the factors unfortunately so we have to infer a great deal.
Agree on absolutes and hysterics.. Though, if the data tells us very bad things are on the horizon, how can that not be discounted as hysterics?
> Majority (or all?) dependable temperature data starts around 1900...
I don't think this is quite true. We don't need a thermometer measurement to know historical temperature.
"After analyzing enough ice core slices, which may each represent anywhere from a week to a year of time, a researcher can look for patterns to track changes in the atmosphere's composition and temperature, and what activity on Earth shaped it... The ratio of "light" oxygen-16 to "heavy" oxygen-18 in a sample, for instance, reveals the global temperature when the ice formed; " [1]
I think the question we need to ask is how fast climate can change and how much can climate change.
For which I'd say, at a rate and total amount of change low enough to be compatible with the survival of human civilization, not having mass deaths, and keeping ecosystems intact, even if changed.
Civilization developed during a time of relatively stable weather. Rapid instability can cause mass dieoffs which at the very least will cause havoc with our food supply -- think fish. Or what's happening with peach production in Georgia.
We need to stop the bleeding (by going carbon neutral), and in parallel think about how to mitigate the problems, and reverse the changes.
"For example, bubbles of air in glacial ice trap tiny samples of Earth’s atmosphere, giving scientists a history of greenhouse gases that stretches back more than 800,000 years. The chemical make-up of the ice provides clues to the average global temperature." [1]
Is NASA incorrect about this?
This XKCD visualizes the historic rates of temperature change in a pretty compelling way: https://xkcd.com/1732/
> I cannot imagine what a pole reversal would look like today. The truly scary thing is contemplating just how many things depend on, or assume polar north is where it is today.
I would ask in response - do magnetic poles impact climate change? (I presume you are talking about the magnetic polar north & south).
According to NASA the magnetic poles have essentially no impact on climate change: "Some people have claimed that variations in Earth’s magnetic field are contributing to current global warming and can cause catastrophic climate change. However, the science doesn’t support that argument. In this blog, we’ll examine a number of proposed hypotheses regarding the effects of changes in Earth’s magnetic field on climate. We’ll also discuss physics-based reasons why changes in the magnetic field can’t impact climate." [2]
What other impacts do the magnetic poles have?
It is very interesting to me that the magnetic poles move by "34 miles (55 kilometers) per year" [2]. That is a pretty reasonably steady and fast rate of change. Seems like navigation equipment and anything else that relies on polar north should already be baking this in. After a decade, it's 340 miles of movement.
Animal migration | navigation and sheilding from cosmic gamma rays and high energy solar flux.
On that last point for humans an instantanous reversal is not the big issue, it would be the transition from one state to the next that could conceivably see long (ish) periods either unprotected from high energy cosmic rays and|or some areas enduring concentrated gamma rays focused in by changing magnetic field lines.
> Seems like navigation equipment and anything else that relies on polar north should already be baking this in.
Have been for a century at least (in a rough fashion), the World Magnetic Model (WMM) and the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) date back to the 1960s or so and have their parameters updated on a five year epoch to provide a detailed fine resolution surface field model with local vecotors and rates of change.
Thing is, humans weren't there for nearly all of it. It's not a question of whether things change, it's a question of whether we can survive it as a species, or as a civilisation. Empires have risen and fallen throughout history, but it doesn't mean you'd rather live as part of a society in which you could die of a toothache instead of something more advanced.
It's going to get extremely unpleasant, it's a no brainer that we'd like to limit the fallout.
It'd be quite callous to hope that nothing will happen from the countries above the tropics that
1. Colonized Africa and Asia to secure raw materials and captive markets to develop its industry, pumping all this carbon into the atmosphere in the process
2. Will probably be able to withstand the impact of Climate Change either due to geographical reasons or due to having more developed infrastructure and economies
In light of that, is the idea of asking Westerners using their cars less and switch to clean energy _such a terrible thing to ask?_
Did I say anything about western civilisation? I'm talking about humanity. It's quite a leap for you to assume I don't regard countries from the global south as civilised...
Indeed, which is why I call myself an environmentalist. I just mean that other life surviving without humans isn't good enough for me, I want the human race to continue in some form.
If you're right, that's probably a good thing, not sure it'll be enjoyable.. However records are being broken much faster than the worst predictions, so it might be faster than you think.
The request to load in the suggested cities should not block the UI. There should also be a loading indicator so that the user knows it's not a normal text input and it should prevent the user from selecting a city when the list goes stale.
