Global Warning/Climate Change

[mike]

I'm not going to wade into the details of this debate as I'm sure there are plenty here that know more than I do. But I see two fallacies in this post:
1) Hype or lack of hype in "the media" is not an accurate indication of truth.
2) What happened or didn't happen last year means almost nothing in this debate. Look at trends, not a single data point.

The people who post global warming memes every time they have to wear a jacket outside are almost as annoying as climate alarmists.

[Valerie]

I'm not going to wade into the details of this debate as I'm sure there are plenty here that know more than I do. But I see two fallacies in this post:
1) Hype or lack of hype in "the media" is not an accurate indication of truth.
2) What happened or didn't happen last year means almost nothing in this debate. Look at trends, not a single data point.

The people who post global warming memes every time they have to wear a jacket outside are almost as annoying as climate alarmists.

I hope I wasn’t annoying (anymore than usual), I just am trying to convince my husband not to move south, I saw so many customers last year that broke this or tore that in their body from falling on ice so was trying to make light of it with a different silly version of “White Christmas “.

In the 70s another ice age was supposedly predicted so I never know what to think other than none of this is accounted for in “End Times” prophecies . Maranatha!

[Robert]

The people who post global warming memes every time they have to wear a jacket outside are almost as annoying as climate alarmists.

I resemble that remark!

[mike]

The people who post global warming memes every time they have to wear a jacket outside are almost as annoying as climate alarmists.

I resemble that remark!

[Robert]

Clearly, Carbon Dioxide levels have gone way up since the Industrial Revolution:

CO2 levels follow temperature rise. Yes, we are warming as we come out of an ice age. That is a good thing. I would rather it be warming some then getting colder. Many more deaths and costs are from cold then warmth.

[Bootstrap]

Clearly, Carbon Dioxide levels have gone way up since the Industrial Revolution:

CO2 levels follow temperature rise. Yes, we are warming as we come out of an ice age. That is a good thing. I would rather it be warming some then getting colder. Many more deaths and costs are from cold then warmth.

Before the industrial revolution, especially in the warming period after the ice age, temperature changes often came first, followed by changes in atmospheric CO₂. And small changes in Earth’s orbit triggered warming, which caused oceans to release CO₂. But the current interglacial period stabilized about 8,000 years ago. Without human emissions, the long-term trend would likely be very gradual cooling, not rapid warming.

And I don't think that's what the data show today.

What we see now is a sharp rise in atmospheric CO₂ preceding and driving recent warming. Large-scale global warming does not begin until the late 19th to early 20th century, with acceleration after 1970. CO₂ levels have increased by over 50% since the Industrial Revolution. That’s much faster than what we saw in the warming after the last ice age. This is different from ice-age cycles, where temperature leads CO₂ by centuries. Today, the ordering is reversed.

And fossil fuel carbon have very distinctive isotopes. They are low in ¹³C and have essentially zero ¹⁴C. When you burn fossil fuels, you inject large amounts of ¹²C-rich, ¹³C-poor carbon into the atmosphere. We are seeing precisely that kind of change in the isotopes in our atmosphere's carbon, diluting the natural ¹⁴C in the atmosphere. That shows that the added carbon is coming from fossil fuels, not oceans or volcanoes.

[Bootstrap]

A shorter version of the last post:

The age of fossil fuel consumption does not look like the warming period after the ice age. And we are not in a warming period after an ice age. We are in a period where human activity is certainly changing the composition of the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate.

I'm not sure anyone knows exactly how serious that is. Unprecedented means we have not been here before. But it could be quite serious.

[Robert]

If the northern ice cap stays all year round, we are still in an ice age. We are not out of it yet.

Median temperatures through prehistory are 10 degrees C higher than now.

[Bootstrap]

If the northern ice cap stays all year round, we are still in an ice age. We are not out of it yet.

That's one way the phrase "ice age" is used. I think a lot of people use the term the way I did ...

I used the term to describe the time when massive ice sheets covered large parts of North America and Europe. By that definition, we are not in an ice age today. The massive glaciers ended thousands of years ago, and the climate has been relatively stable through all of human history.

But that has changed. The natural post-glacial warming finished long ago, and the rapid warming of the last century doesn’t fit that pattern.

Median temperatures through prehistory are 10 degrees C higher than now.

I don't think that's true. Prehistory is a very long time, and it includes an enormous range of climates at a wide variety of temperatures.

Are you thinking of the Mesozoic period? Do you think human civilization would thrive under those conditions?

[Robert]

But that has changed. The natural post-glacial warming finished long ago, and the rapid warming of the last century doesn’t fit that pattern.

What rapid warming are you talking about? The median temperature has raised about .5C