eschelon said that we are in an ice age and multiple people asked “how can you call this an ice age?” I either didn’t see the linked reference or it wasn’t there when I read eschelon’s comment.
Either way, I’ve seen the Little Ice Age come up enough lately to be extremely irritating. So, I knee-jerked the rebuttal.
I'm not a climate change denier. I'm very interested in climate science, I'm just not informed as I'd like to be.
I edited my comment to include sources for things I knew off-hand. I left the core comment largely intact, just changing a few words to better flow with the sources.
I want more information and reading around the questions I asked.
From my understanding, it looks like we're about to enter a period that is actually slightly more sustainable for humans on average (increases in arable land, easier to access hydrocarbons - yikes) [1].
But from there, we may quickly slip into ranges that kill everything. Especially if the Clathrate gun hypothesis [2] or similar runaway mechanisms turn out correct.
And obviously even if slightly warmer temperatures are better for people on average, every temperature increment results in enormous and permanent erasure of species diversity. That's an incalculable loss that we cannot recover.
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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ... "And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. It is positioned farther north than all of its South Asian neighbors, which collectively are home to the largest global population fending off displacement from rising seas, drought and an overheating climate. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow. Its crop production is expected to be boosted by warming temperatures over the coming decades even as farm yields in the United States, Europe and India are all forecast to decrease. And whether by accident or cunning strategy or, most likely, some combination of the two, the steps its leaders have steadily taken — planting flags in the Arctic and propping up domestic grain production among them — have increasingly positioned Russia to regain its superpower mantle in a warmer world." (There are lots of other geopolitical takes on climate change that cite similar outcomes for a host of other countries.)
Either way, I’ve seen the Little Ice Age come up enough lately to be extremely irritating. So, I knee-jerked the rebuttal.
Now I think eschelon was actually asking if we are overriding the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation which would normally take millions of years to happen.