I see the sentiment often, even in journalism, and I don’t see a realistic path even absent the inevitable new technology.
I'm just thinking that if the oxygen levels drop a few percent that won't kill us, but it will start affecting our cognitive levels - so I'm imagining that those who can afford it will just carry portable oxygen bottles with them. Offices/homes will be equipped with oxygen disperses through the ventilation systems, just so we can feel "normal". I imagine that would cause massive unrest with people who cannot afford this.
But hey, this is just speculation. Maybe we will find a technological solution long before this happens.
We don't actually know that. The time resolution of the data is not good enough to tell us. It's quite possible that it happened faster in the past as well.
> we might not survive long enough to witness the adaptation
Quite honestly, I don't understand why people think our ability to adapt is so poor. We already have more than 5 C variation in average temperature across different regions of Earth, yet people adapt to living in all of those different regions.
Also, all the alarmist rhetoric about the supposed impacts of changes in temperature is not based on actual knowledge or on models with demonstrated predictive power. It's based on very crude extrapolations of trends that assume that people will do nothing at all to adapt. In other words, they assume people won't adapt and then complain that we can't adapt.
What's more, the two main things we can do to adapt are things we should be doing anyway: (1) bring more people out of poverty--the richer people are the easier they can adapt to change; and (2) make our infrastructure more robust. The second, in particular, is exactly what "green energy" should be marketed as--making energy more decentralized, which makes the entire system more robust. And doing those things benefits us regardless of what kind of change happens--whether it's climate change or any other kind of change.
Is that actually true? What's the sampling rate and subsequent Nyquist frequency? It's my impression that the sampling rate given by ice core samples is surprisingly high (something in the neighborhood of year-by-year.)
Ice cores only cover hundreds of thousands of years into the past (I think the oldest is about 800,000 years). I'm talking about times millions of years ago.