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Originally Posted by onon
What overall warming trend?
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The one that began about 600,000 years ago. Here's your source:

Notice the upward trend beginning about 600,000 years ago. Even though temperature eventually tops out and falls several times, the overall trend is up. Each interglacial a little higher than the last, each glacial a little higher than the last. But all collectively serving to take us out of the Pleistocene - "The Great Ice Age".
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The records show that interglacial warming occurs in a few thousand years, never longer than 10,000 years.
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We're not talking about interglacials. The OP asked about ice ages.
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That's not the only way of trapping heat. I didn't say CO2 is a blanket, I said it was like a blanket in terms of trapping heat.
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lol! Nice backtrack. Were you under the impression I thought you meant CO2 was a
real blanket? No, I understand analogies, and this one doesn't fit. A blanket inhibits convection between the area under it and the area above it. CO2, and other "greenhouse" gases most certainly do not inhibit convection. Therefore, they are not "like a blanket" in trapping heat.
This is a link to an encyclopedia article on ice cores in general. I would like the study. There have been several studies on Vostok ice cores. In all the ones I've read, CO2 lags temperature. Which study does your source reference?
Well, perhaps you should think about reading the actual studies rather than looking for data which support your conclusions? As I pointed out before, trying to devine causation from graphs of such massive time scales is nearly impossible.
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The 800 year lag is figured out from such ice core data on huge scales (http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/CaillonTermIII.pdf). So are you now saying the lag might not even exist and might just be a side effect of using such a large scale?
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You're the one maintaining that CO2 concentrations began increasing 150-odd years ago and lead to increasing temperatures. I'm asking where the data your conclusion is based upon came from, remember?
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No, orbital forcings operate on scales of thousands of years. The amount of orbital change in the past 100 is too miniscule to have any measureable effect on temperature. This is true of other long term forcings like overall volcanic activity of earth. They produce gradual ups and downs over hundreds of thousands and millions of years but not ups and downs within a few decades or a century. They don't variate that quick.
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Oh. So, other forcings work for a little while, then stop working? I've got to try and cut this short, onon, because I'm running out of time. You're attibuting the entire warming of the past 150 years to CO2. Or at the very least, you're denying other forcings (like those taking us out of the current ice age) have any impact at all. That was the statement I replied to originally. In effect what you're arguing is that all other forcings take a back-seat to CO2. A ridiculous proposition.
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That is because on geological timescales co2 is not the primary forcing.
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Doesn't matter. At some point your "more temperature -> increased co2 after ~800 years -> further increase in temperature" paradigm breaks down. In fact, it breaks down for the exact reason I've been trying to exlain to you from the beginning: it's a complex system and we don't know nearly enough to make the exclusive statements you've been making. You claim CO2 has caused the rise in temperature over the past 150 years (if there has been a change), yet other forcings have been working right along with it the entire time. Some we know about. There are probably others we know nothing about.
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Not all positive feedbacks lead to runaway effects.
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Not according to your paradigm. It's circular.
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I have already noted that there is natural variation that co2 is on top of.
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Then the "recent" warming could be attributable to anything - including whatever is working to bring us out of the current ice age.
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I don't know which site you got that from, but here is what he actually said:
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I see no material difference between your quotes and mine.
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Quite clearly they were not. I cannot guarantee there weren't one or two scientists saying this, but as a whole the scientific consensus at that time was definitely not scare tactics that the world was headed for another ice age.
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We could've saved a whole lot of time if you would've said this originally. You wrote "the scientists did not" claim the world was headed for another ice age. Clearly, there were those who did. Consensus means nothing.
I don't have the time to read through this report. What I'm asking is if you can tell me how much temperature would vary if CO2 were the only forcing, and what is the error rate. For example: if CO2 were the only climate forcing, temperature would vary 1 degree (+/- .5 degree) for every 100ppm.
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Could be [some other forcing].
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Then it could be the same forcings which are taking us out of the current ice age.
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We have put co2 levels to at least a 650,000 year high, possibily even higher than for millions of years back. We might be ants, but we are a lot of ants and can cause change.
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No doubt. You just have to prove we're doing this whole lotta' change with a 60% increase in a trace atmospheric gas to the exclusion of all others.
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A change in 100 years is totally meaningless in geological trends.
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No, it's not totally meaningless. It's part of the trend. You're claiming that my one step from California toward New York means nothing because it's only one of billions.
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It is not reasonable for the planet to warm an additional 10C over the next 2,000 years because such a large and rapid change is unlike anything seen in millions of years (possibily even more)
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You've been arguing that the 8C rise between 12,000 y.a. and 10,000 y.a. is "normal". Is an extra 2C so unreasonable? In fact, the graph you posted shows a pretty rapid ascent from ~-9C to ~+3C about 140,000y.a.. Rapid and large temperature changes are quite common, judging from your sources.
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We are on the left hand side in both of these graphs at temperature 0C. A 10C rise is off the top of the first graph and is equivalent to temperature 50 million years ago in the 2nd. So a 10C rise in the next 2000 years due to natural processes is very unreasonable.
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Too bad the planet doesn't know how to read graphs.
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How can a 1C increase be "a lot" and "measly" at the same time?
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I wrote "we are attributing a lot to the past 100 years and it's measly 1C increase". The "a lot" describes what we are attributing to the 1C increase (it's all caused by CO2, it's an unprecedented increase in temperature, the planet is going to continue warming unless we stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere, cats and dogs are going to start living together, etc...); an increase in temperature which is "measly".
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I have posted plenty of graphs and all kinds of different scales. The one over the past 5 million years shows more than just 3 occurences, it shows a couple of dozen since glacial and interglacial periods began:
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We're not talking about interglacials and glacials. We're talking about ice ages. There have been, to the best of our knowledge, only four ice ages in the planet's history. One of which we are in right now.
No, it is not. Mechanism is my car's engine. Just because it's running, doesn't mean my car is moving. CO2 has shown no ability to cause the earth to start warming.
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The mechanism doesn't have a disconnect,
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It does. You said yourself that it is self-limiting. If the mechanism did not have a disconnect, we would be living on a star.
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The observations are not restricted to computer models.
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Yes, they are. With any non-linear, chaotic system empirical evidence is impossible. You can find data which supports your conclusion, but that's very different from observing changes in a controlled environment. We don't know all the machinations of this planet, and we don't know how they interact.
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In this case have nothing to do with the long term trend
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Just as one tree means nothing to a forest?
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Yet you seem to be saying we can attribute every short term change in temperature on a scale of millions of years to the same cause.
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Why can it not? Especially if that "cause" is a confluence of several different processes working in concert which have been driving this planet since its birth?
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I am talking about glacial periods and interglacial periods in which the change does happen in a few thousand years. On scales of major ice ages the last century is absolutely totally meaningless.
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The OP asked about "ice ages", not interglacials.
You get the last word, onon. I simply don't have time, nor desire, to rehash this argument.
My response to the OP: yes, it is quite possible that the increase in temperature over the past 100 years can be attributed to coming out of an ice age. The planet seems to vascillate between ice ages normally, and the past 100 years could be just one of the many hundreds of baby steps the planet takes towards getting from one ice age to another with a period of no ice in between. This is going to take millions of years, and we will probably experience colder temperatures (glacials), a subsequent expansion of ice sheets, followed by a warmer period with it's subsequent retreat of ice sheets (interglacials), and then another cold period, and so on. This will continue an unknown number of times before the planet finally succeedes in melting all the ice on the planet. At that point, we will be out of the current ice age and can expect to slip into another over the following millions of years. That is if we don't blow the planet up before then.