800,000 Years of CO2 - Beautiful and Sad

[Essay]

I guarantee this: no one will ever say, "This beautiful spring day can be attributed to Global Warming."

 

However, people can easily say that the increase in beautiful spring days, during winter and summer,

is consistent with predictions made about Global Warming's destabilizing effect on the climate.

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p.s. It is that loss of relative stability, compared with the long record, which is the serious threat to civilization that scientist are trying to warn us about, istm.

 

Edited January 26, 2015 by Essay

[Harold Squared]

CO2 levels are going up and temperatures have remained largely stable for years now, despite media hype. One can "document" any trend you like by choosing the desired time scale. The current period is part of a "rebound" effect from the so called "Little Ice Age" which ended around the 1870s. The glaciers people are fretting about today were grinding whole cities into dust and forcing people to move south in Europe to regions where agriculture was still possible.And they didn't freaking drive there in SUVs, of course, but you can bet they were burning everything in sight trying to stay warm.

eh-resources.org

Edited January 28, 2015 by Harold Squared

[Essay]

CO2 levels are going up and temperatures have remained largely stable for years now....

 

Your idea that these two, temperature and the level of carbon dioxide, should go hand-in-hand travelling in lockstep, is a common misconception. Confusing measurable temperature with heat content is what leads to that mistake.

 

The explanation is related to that notion, I’m sure you've heard, about how even if we stopped CO2 emissions totally today, heating would continue for decades or centuries to come. It’s also why policy makers need to add expertise into the mix, with ‘common sense’ and normal everyday logic, as they make decisions. This continuous, global, and long-term extra heating is a real and serious problem, but fortunately solvable.

 

The extra heating now is far beyond the change in global heat content that flipped the glacial and interglacial switching over the past 800,000 years. But to your point, the ‘Little Ice Age’ would still count as “relative stability” on the scale of the record we’re talking about here.

 

However, greenhouse theory isn't based on trends in the records anyway, though trends are good at lending perspective to the various timescales involved, as well as to the scale of geochemical changes involved. Plus ‘trends’ make for good media hype, as you have noticed.

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