Don't be sad. Although BWay put me on ignore about a year ago and my life has been a hollow shell since then. _
You can post as many charts with temps as you like but the real question is "How much of climate change is caused by humans and how much is just the natural cycle?". Being we only have a miniscule number of years of real data to look at those temperature charts give a slanted view and no real answer. Now if we look at how much those in charge have to gain by having everyone believe it is all humans fault then we can get a clearer picture of why they want us to believe it. I mean they even have a failed exchange that Obama, Gore and Goldman Sachs were involved in that they expected to make Billions if Waxman-Markey had passed. As I stated before,
We have many more years of temperatures to look at than the NOAA database. We have ice core data on temperatures that goes back thousands and thousands of years. There's a book I'd like to recommend called The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. It looks at the entire period of the rise of civilization, from about 10,000 BC onwards, and tries to correlate that rise with the long warming after the Younger Dryas Ice Age. It's a great starting point for developing a conversation about what happened and why we got where we are now. Fagan is a very controversial writer in that he believes that climate determines the fate of societies. This type of cultural determinism was very much frowned upon in academia up until the 70's and 80's. When Fagan was teaching he was one of the loud counterpoints to the establishment in this regard. He doesn't just say stuff though. He looks at the data that has accumulated over a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines and he correlates it. He doesn't gather his own data, he assimilates long-standing databases and describes them in ways that make sense. It's not a long book by the way and it's not dry at all. Fagan goes out of his way to make the thing readable and he intersperses anecdotes about his own favorite pursuit, ocean sailing, along the way. I had a very different opinion on culture and climate before I picked up The Long Summer in 2004. Then I went and actually looked at the data sources he was using and realized he was right. I'm not going to give you the Cliff Notes on this because that would be substituting my own biases about what he wrote for the ones you will acquire when you read the book. It's a worthwhile thing to do. It's about 250 pages in a nice easy to read paperback format.
I suspect somebody was already a complete douchebag long before this forum existed. Call this a hunch.
Actually, it says nothing of the sort. The word "normal" is used nowhere. What you're referring to as normal is an arbitrary reference point in an arbitrarily selected time span. There have been at least five major "ice ages" since the earth was formed; the latter half of each being a period of warming. It is just such a period we are currently within according to the Utah Geological Survey: "What is an ice age? An ice age is a long interval of time (millions to tens of millions of years) when global temperatures are relatively cold and large areas of the Earth are covered by continental ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within an ice age are multiple shorter-term periods of warmer temperatures when glaciers retreat (called interglacials or interglacial cycles) and colder temperatures when glaciers advance (called glacials or glacial cycles). At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth’s history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago. The last period of glaciation, which is often informally called the “Ice Age,” peaked about 20,000 years ago. At that time, the world was on average probably about 10°F (5°C) colder than today, and locally as much as 40°F (22°C) colder." It's hard to see how man's activities contributed to global warming 20,000 years ago, or even 11,000 years ago.
no but there were a bunch of cave-pussies yelling at cavemen about how there massive fires, that feed and kept the clan warm, were causing warming of the earth. then a giant comet smashed the earth and killed everyone. the end.
It's easy however to see how human activities over the last 6,000 years might have accelerated a naturally occurring process. Human beings cut down forests at a tremendous rate. They plant fields in an ordered fashion, causing both albedo and and CO2 exchange issues in the process. Most of central and eastern Europe was a great forest 10,000 years ago. Very little of that forest remains. The highlands of the Middle East had a dense forest cover as little as 4,000 years ago. Most of that cover was cut down from 2,500 BC onwards. The Natufians, the first semi-civilization that we recognize in the Levant had a diet that was based around acorns, pistachios and either gathered or planted rye wheat. They ate fish, fowl, gazelles, aurochs and boar. The region that they lived in, the highlands of the Levant, now known as southern Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel, was a wooded highlands that supported this lifestyle. It was like the Garden of Eden. The extensive deforestation of the area began long before 3,000 BC and continued for nearly 6,000 years. The last of the great oaks that supplied the acorns were cut down as late as the early 20th century by the Ottoman Empire in pursuit of it's vision of building a regional railway to link it's Egyptian and Sudanese possessions with Damascus and Baghdad and Istanbul. The Lebanon had been a major source of wood for the Ottomans and before them the Islamic Caliphates and before them the Romans and before them the Greeks and down through the ages for every empire that claimed the region, of which there were many in sequence. The deforestation of the New World is a much more recent phenomenon, beginning with the rise of advanced civilization in the Andes and the Yucatan and then accelerating as the old world looked in, saw new resources and began harvesting them as usual. It has picked up the pace in the 20th century as nation states split off from the empires that founded them have looked for ways to enrich themselves in the modern economy. This is a very different world than would exist if there weren't 7 billion human beings doing what we do on a daily basis. In 20,000 BC there were somewhere between a million and 5 million people on earth, depending on whose estimates you use. 8,000 BC saw a population of between 5 million and 15 million.
Previously tree ring data was used by some in compiling temperatures charts, then recent tree ring data showed cooling the last 50 years or so when in fact there was warming. Proxy data used to chart temperatures does not a thing to prove human involvement in rising temps. and that is what is really at issue. Not the temperature but what is causing it. Now you bring up Fagan's book, in his other book "The Little Ice Age" he acknowledges the medieval warm period between 900 A.D. and 1300 A.D.. Being there were no cars, no factories and the world population was about 4% of what it is today which would seem to give support to warming not being caused by human involvement but rather just the natural cycle of the earth.
The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are essentially linked with warming creating more moisture in the atmosphere and then very low solar emission cycles (The Maunder Minimum) and heavy volcanic activity in the mid 1250's sealing the deal. Stuff like this happens. The overall trend is still very much upwards at this point. The Vostok Ice Cores show a very strong correlation between CO2 concentrations and temperature over the last 250,000 years. They peak out at about 285 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere about 130,000 years ago at a time when the temperature was slightly warmer than it is now for much of a millenia. The CO2 levels fell quickly and the temperature did also. This was a classic temperature spike, accompanied by relatively high CO2 levels that then corrected as the CO2 sinks in the ocean came into play and captured much of the excess CO2. It took about 3,000 years for the CO2 to spike upwards from just under 200 parts per million to 280 parts per million. The temperature rose along with with that spike from -8C to about +2C. The peak temperatures stuck around for about a thousand years and then fell rapidly as the CO2 levels also declined. Just prior to the temperature spike dust concentrations were very high in the core for about 20 thousand years, suggesting a very cold dry climate that allowed dust to circulate freely in the atmosphere without bring it back to earth in frequent precipitation. By comparison our temperatures have been on the rise for more than 14,000 years now and if you look at the graph of temperature over that span it looks like a steady rise with an unusually long plateau at the peak, assuming we're at the peak. The CO2 rise mirrors the temperature rise, but CO2 has stuck around much longer at peak levels than anything else in the Vostok Cores. It's continuing to rise today and it will soon reach levels not seen in a hundred million years. I don't believe we're at 400 parts per million yet but that seems to be where we're headed. When you look at the data the thing that stands out is how short really warm interludes really are compared to everything else. Temperatures spike and then fall rapidly. You don't get great warm plateaus, this is a world currently defined by long cold plateaus at the bottom and it has been for at least 250,000 years and probably much longer than that. CO2 concentrations don't rise for 14,000 years in multiple waves the way they have over the period of the holocene. They spike up hard in a relatively short drive, alongside the temperature increase and then they subside again bringing about a rapid descent back into sustained cold weather for tens of thousands of years. Assuming that CO2 concentrations remain high the world temperature is going to keep rising alongside them. That's what all the evidence suggests. The thing that's interesting about the Little Ice Age is that it took so long to happen and then it wasn't able to sustain the way past drives back into cold patterns have. So, all of this is occurring in the realm of we just don't know what it means. Obviously we don't want the pattern of Ice Ages to continue. However we don't know what a really warm world is like and we do know that the great extinction cycles have all been accompanied by great climactic variation and they have all taken the most successful life forms, the ones best adapted to the current world and dominant as a result of that down when they happened.
