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whoa_dude_fangtooth t1_ivz2zaf wrote

The single incidence is negligible but cumulative effects are the issue.

As my mom used to say- what if every person picked a leaf off the tree?

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glieseg t1_ivz4o0z wrote

This precisely. It's the same argument about volcanoes. Yeah, they release a huge amount of CO^2 in a single eruption, but compared to the total emissions of cars, then volcanoes does nothing.

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avogadros_number OP t1_iw0m57u wrote

Let's try to add some reality instead of playing with metaphors. All cumulative scenarios are just that... cumulative, but some are more important than others, and some are fallacious (ie. slippery slope). Here, this leads to 0.000018C of additional warming over a 20-year period and is then reduced as time goes on. You would need over 11,000 of these events to add an additional 0.2C of warming. The reality is that this event has negligible impact on our climate:

>“Such a tiny warming cannot be perceived in ecosystems or human society,” explains Dr. Xiaolong Chen, first author of the study.

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