Blowing.Rock Master wrote:
The globe has been warming since the early 1800's. It spent the previous 500 years cooling, but before that it had spent the previous 700-800 years warming. The planet was as warm or warmer than it is now 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago, and 3000 to 8000 years ago.
CO2 follows temperature change, not the reverse. When temperature rises, CO2 rises. But when temperature falls, CO2 can continue to rise, stay at a high level, or fall slowly. Elevated CO2 levels don't cause temperature to rise endlessly.
CO2 levels have continued to rise over the last decade, but temperatures have not.
The climate changes. People don't cause it.
+15 for trying to cite to science as evidence to support your refutation. (I had to take out your links to clear the spam detection)
First, the legitimate issue raised is the normative climate argument: who is to say what the climate should be? The problem with this argument is that it assumes that humans will be able to adapt to a radical change in climate. There is no evidence that 6.6 billion people on this planet could withstand the loss of fresh water from glaciers, the loss of fisheries due to flooded estuaries, killing the organisms that need brackish water to survive, the relocation of hundreds of millions due to sea level rise (100+ million in Bangladesh alone), the loss of agricultrual output due to radical climate variations and so on. Just look at how ineptly the world handled famines in Somalia, Ethiopia and the Sudan. Thus, it is legitimate to say that our current climate is ideal and a radically altered climate should be avoided, even at great expense.
-5 for repeating the climate myth that because warming has preceded CO2 increase in the past, increases in CO2 does not drive warming. While it is true that CO2 increases lagged behind warming trends after the last ice age, it is also true that CO2 drove warming during the Palaeo-Eocene Thermal Maximum. The basic physics behind CO2 as a green house gas is undisuptable.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11659-climate-myths-ice-cores-show-co2-increases-lag-behind-temperature-rises-disproving-the-link-to-global-warming.html?page=2-5 for citing a study that actually refutes your contention. The conclusion of the Vostok ice core study was that the current accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v399/n6735/abs/399429a0.htmlThe lag in CO2 increases at the end of the last ice age occurred over hundreds of years. The current accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature rise associated with it have occurred in a fraction of the time span. Hardly a valid comparator to enable anyone to refute CO2 as driving warming.
-5 for linking to a web page that refutes your position. The well accepted conclusion of the ice core studies is that climate has historically been very unstable. The past 10,000 years have been relatively stable. Green house gases may bring the climate back to a period of instability, not just a linear warming trend. This is actually worse because it will be much more difficult to adapt to a radically changing environment, especially when we are heavily dependent on monoculture that is not capable of adapting to different climatic conditions.
http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/climate/page/3057.aspx-5 for believing that warming will be linear and not taking into account the effects of la nina ocean current patterns. That is why it is called climate change instead of global warming. We will not see a linear, year to year, steady increase in temperature. Over the long run, we have seen a significant rise in temperatures, but no one ever claimed a clear linear rise. Finally, even your own chart shows this decade to have been very warm. Indications are that this past decade has been the warmest on record:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/09/2765726.htm?section=justin