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As the sibling comment points out, the rate of increase is important.

Dynamical systems are often sensitive to the value of a parameter, its rate of change and/or its rate of rate of change.

Eg. You can warm milk to a certain temperature (the parameter) on a stove on gentle heat and it will be fine. If you warm it to the same temperature on high heat (i.e. increased rate of parameter), it will burn. That's because the convection process in this system has limited maximum speed.

If you look at when previously the Earth's atmosphere had high CO2, it took hundreds of thousands to many millions of years get there. We did it in a 100 years, so at least a thousand times faster.



I can warm water up slowly or quickly and get the same result. So maybe the substance you're heating plays a role here?

I'm not denying that the rate is significant in this specific conversation, but maybe that wasn't the best example?


Seeing as we're being pedantic, if you heated water slowly enough it would all evaporate before it boiled, so it wouldn't be exactly the same.




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