[louistsi]

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.

[Alupis]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> how fast they're supposed to change.

The idea that this is even a coherent question is Creationist, because it presupposes a purposeful design.

[aatharuv]

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.

[seadan83]

"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.

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/pag...

[2] https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3104/flip-...

[developer93]

They hit it on the head with their last sentences but managed to go steaming past the point with nary a glance.