Most of Earth's history is dominated by long phases of greenhouse climate. During these, the global climate is more stable and much warmer.
Shouldn't we welcome this? Lost in the debate about climate change is the question of whether or not the earth would be better off much warmer. Obviously there are costs to such change, but there are clearly benefits.
A lot of earth's land is tied up in uninhabitable frigid places. The idea that we should not slow or even intentionally accelerate global warming is not a completely nonsensical one.
It's a problem of how fast. If the Earth's climate slowly changed over thousands of years, we could probably adapt. Fast climatic changes would be a problem as the biosphere would take time to adapt. For example, remove all the ice from Antarctica (and ignoring most of it is currently below sea level and needs to rebound). You'd have a rocky landscape with no soil. Not very useful for growing crops.
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Shouldn't we welcome this? Lost in the debate about climate change is the question of whether or not the earth would be better off much warmer. Obviously there are costs to such change, but there are clearly benefits.
A lot of earth's land is tied up in uninhabitable frigid places. The idea that we should not slow or even intentionally accelerate global warming is not a completely nonsensical one.
It's a problem of how fast. If the Earth's climate slowly changed over thousands of years, we could probably adapt. Fast climatic changes would be a problem as the biosphere would take time to adapt. For example, remove all the ice from Antarctica (and ignoring most of it is currently below sea level and needs to rebound). You'd have a rocky landscape with no soil. Not very useful for growing crops.