So now you don’t know if it’s correct or not? I have my doubts.
Sounds like you need to do some research.
Let’s say over the last 200 years or so.
Yes. 200 years ago, Earth was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. It’s certainly warmer now than it was then.
Excellent! And have we been warming over the last 50 years?
Sure. Where are you going with this? I already told you that it warmed significantly from the mid 70s to the late 90s.
All right then. So we both agree it has been warming.
What effects will we see if it warms?
Only if you look at fabricated data.
Give me the high and low temps in each of the following locations for today’s date, 500, 1,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 years.
A) McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
B) Fairbanks, Alaska
C) NYC
D) Pretoria, South Africa.
E) Rome Italy.
More available water and more cropland to raise food on.
Yes. Depending on the time frame you are referring to.
Fewer people dying of cold related causes. If you really want a global catastrophe, try an ice age.
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Are we at risk of an Ice Age today? Seems like a nonsequitor.
Sounds like you should take your own advice before declaring something correct.
Sorry but I’m not your undergrad research assistant. Do your own work.
The geological record shows quite clearly that the next ice age is nigh. Probably not in our lifetime, but certainly while humans still exist as a species.
Incidentally, when it comes, it will come very quickly. Ice cores from Greenland show the climate can turn from full interglacial warmth to full ice age cold in less than 100 years … in as few as 10 years.
I have. He is correct.
But you can’t prove it?
I don’t have to. You are the challenger. It’s up to you to prove me wrong.
That’s totally backwards.
But I don’t expect any actual effort from you to back up any statements you make. That would be pretty out of character.
So what is causing the earth to heat up?
I’ve been trying to follow this thread and I guess I’ve sort of lost the thread, so to speak. The arguments appear to center around defining time intervals to assess warming or cooling. I cut my teeth on climate change with Richard Foster Flint’s “Glacial and Pleistocene Geology” our textbook for my course on Pleistocene Geology at the University of Wisconsin in 1976. I still have my copy, which has a photograph of Mount Huntington, Alaska as the frontispiece. I climbed it’s higher neighbor, Denali, in 1973.
As I recollect, the earth is in a long term cooling trend, and eventually a threshold was was reached in which orbital cycles resulted in the the ice age oscillations of the Pleistocene, the most recent of which were associated with the advance retreat of continental ice sheets.
If that is true, which I’m not sure is still the case, one might expect progressively cooler maximums for interglacial temperatures. Indeed I believe the early Holocene experienced slightly higher temperatures than the the later Holocene (present day). A new glacial period might be expected in the next several thousand years. Yes, I kind of like to throw that in people’s faces. So, if a glacier were to cover New York, and it is “natural” and not human induced, should we do anything about it? But I digress.
I think the current concern is that the warming is accelerating and that the forcing is primarily carbon related. I believe that is true. So why is this warming event more significant, slow or not, than previous interglacial maxima. The answer, in my opinion, is that humans are less adaptable than were our ancestors. Humans have migrated to large cities to the coasts, populations have grown so that small perturbations in rainfall, available oceanic resources, and energy requirements can spell the difference between prosperity of devastation.
Our ancestors knew how to live as humans, and survived, at least as a species, any number of climate changes. The modern human experiment, beginning with origins of plant and animal domestication, has yet proven to be a long-term adaptive strategy.
