Quote:
Originally Posted by bgilbert
. Well Bob, your guess is as good as mine, looking at the cycles we could slip into the next interglacial (cooling), tomorrow, or the next thousand years or so, the increased CO2 could save us by postponing it a tadd.
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Yes, it is a complex issue.
The thing to keep in mind with those cycles though is that higher levels of CO2 will move the temperature above what would have been otherwise expected. There can be other disruptions/complications of course like volcanoes and changes in ocean currents.
My understanding is that it was observations of Venus and Mars that first drew attention to the role of CO2. Theoretical calculations, which used the assumption that air was simply air fell well short of the observed temperatures. From that, the penny dropped that higher levels of CO2 traps heat on those planets well beyond that of Earth’s atmosphere.
We humans have thrived in the last 10,000 because of a relatively steady climate. It may at some stage turn cool and that will be a whole new issue. There was a horrible suggestion that we could put beads in orbit and cool the planet through dispersing the Sun’s heat. What a nightmare that would be when the Earth hits a cooling phase.
However, the current problem is that we are seeing far more high-temperature records being broken than low-temperature records and put simply: That’s not good.
Just re rising Sea Levels, that a vexed issue as well. Some places are going under, but that is more related to the Earth crust rising and falling at different places and unfortunately, the scientific data on that is generally ignored in this most emotional of debates.