• gimsy@feddit.it
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    5 months ago

    The real question would be: was it also shrinking before?

    Because if the trend was already negative might not be related to human activities

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      How are you alive today in 2024 and are not aware that there are essentially no people who study the climate for a living who think that the Earth isn’t warming and humans are not the cause?

      Or is this one of those “I’m not going to listen to any dumb scienticificians when I have Jesus” arguments?

      • gimsy@feddit.it
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        5 months ago

        You are the only dogmatic one here

        I just posed a question, worth thinking about, and you answered with a dogma, which I am not allowed to dispute.

        I am not a denier, but I despise you climate Talibans like any other religious fanatic

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          i love that you think you posed a question you think no climatologist has thought about before.

          “yeah we’ve been studying this for decades and the climate is definitely warming and the CO2 levels are rising…”

          “well, could it be just a regular thing?”

          all scientists start looking at each other confused

          “uh… we didn’t check…”

          congratulations on being the first to ask questions.

      • gimsy@feddit.it
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        5 months ago

        Can you elaborate a bit?

        I know that some icers on the Alps have been shrinking since the last 120 years (more or less since we started measuring them) a bit too early IMO for humans to be the cause, yet the melting has significantly accelerated in the last 30-40 years (which is likely to be correlated to human activities)

        • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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          5 months ago

          Sure. We’ve taken ice cores out of glaciers that are super long. Basically there’s an isotope of Oxygen that strongly correlates to air temperatures that we can measure at different levels of the core. We know roughly how much ice gets deposited onto the glacier every year so we can extrapolate how long ago each layer was deposited and then measure that isotope to get an estimate of how warm it was that winter going back a few thousand years. Taking that data and combining it with modern temperature readings we can see a sharp uptick around the late 19th century where increased human greenhouse gas output begins.

          • gimsy@feddit.it
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            5 months ago

            But that’s about the local temperature of the year, it says nothing about the glaciers shrinking or expanding, also if glaciers are shrinking, wouldn’t we lose some readings? I mean if the glacier this year is smaller than last year, means that we have lost at least one year readings (most likely much more than that), not to mention that it contradicts that ice gets deposited every year.

            It is my understanding that glaciers expand and shrink seasonally every year, and lately the expansion (if any) is always smaller than the shrinking, but it is a trend that started more than 100y ago (basically since when we started keeping record) and has been accellerating, because of this how can you extrapolate when to start dating in reverse? If you never saw a the, let’s call it inflationary phase, how do you know when it reversed? The error might be small… or not

            Is there an error in my reasoning (or my assumptions)? Consider that I am not the only one having this doubts.

            • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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              5 months ago

              Most of the glacial loss, especially on higher elevations, is from sublimation and not directly melting. That doesnt cause the loss of the measurable isotopes.