I understand, as you apparently don't, the earth's temperature is controlled by the Sun's output. That the earth wobbles on it's axis, also changing temperatures and climate. That CO2 levels have been much, much higher in the past before the Model T was invented. I also know that the R12 ozone scare was one of the biggest frauds every perpetrated (it's very audacity and success gave the Greens hope they could change the world).

Short of that, yeah, I don't have a clue. Nonetheless, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man rules.

Sounds like you still have no idea what you are talking about.

Otherwise you would know that the forcing from the output of the sun is not near enough to keep the earth as warm as it is. The greenhouse effect that traps the suns energy rays is required. This is elementary school stuff.

Then you refer to milankovitch cycles, which again, do not provide enough of a forcing on their own to cause glacials and interglacials.

Then you refer to a climate period 500 million years ago and pretend you can make some sort of parallel to our situation today without any understanding of how different that climate was and all the other forcings at play. We are talking about a time when all the continents were pushed together to form pangea.

Nice try at pretending to have a clue though.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

But the actual glaciation ended 10 000 years ago. This is what is usually referred to as the end of an ice age, or the end of the glacial maximum. But sure, as long as ice sheets and ice caps are still present, we are technically in an 'ice age'.

Often times a new glaciation starts before all the ice melts, its not as if the earth is trying to get warmer, if anything the earth shows evidence of trying to remain cooler. But that is not absolute either. The earth could surprise with a negative feedback as a response to our meddling and throw us back into a snowball earth scenario. Or it could shift to hot state in any number of positive feedback loops.

How can the earth have a "proper" temperature?

This still makes no sense to me. Who sets this temperature? Do you think humans would thrive in a much hotter climate than today's? If so, where would we get our fresh water when the glaciers melt? Where will we grow our food when the grain belts dry up? How will we deal with the new diseases that migrate to the northern hemisphere? etc, etc, etc..

Im concerned about my future and that of my children, not about species that went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

Regurgitating the talking points is hardly understanding the science supposedly behind the spin.

CO2 was 1000x higher in previous times?

I can prove that is false.

Right now the CO2 levels are 387 PPM, that is 0.0387%. If the levels were 1,000 times higher, they would have been at 38%. CO2 exposures of 4% and above are essentially immediately fatal - at best you might live a few minutes. This means even if levels were only 100x greater than today, they would have been at 3.8%, which is basically fatal within a few minutes of exposure. He's claiming they were even 10x higher than that?!!?!?!!?

When I say fatal, I mean nearly all animal lifeforms, especially mammalian life forms. Baby chicks and canaries (not mammals) die at 1-2% CO2 concentrations.

I didn't bother to read any other junk from that fraud. If he's that erroneous in one of his claims and can be so easily debunked, he isn't even worth considering.

1000x greater ....

Dont' confuse glaciation with ice age, they are two seperate things. Let me ask you think question...

What are the catalysts for ice ages? Was it something that just happened as a normal cycle or is it something caused by disaster? I know our most recent ice age is believed to have been cause by an asteroid hitting the earth.

__________________
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

I don't believe if you oxidized all the carbon on earth it would achieve that level. OTOH, before life on earth, you and I have no idea how high the rate was. It would contradict the evidence, however, to think there was an ice age at that point.

Nonetheless, if all carbon in and on earth were oxidized it probably could achieve such a level. That doesn't explain what happened to all that oxygen required to oxidize it. Oxygen being about 21% of the atmosphere.

BTW, the fatal rate in humans for CO2 is roughly 7%. Above 5% is considered very dangerous.

I was not confusing them, only noting that when people talk about the end of the ice age they are typically referring to glacial maximum. As in, whatever process was causing the ice to advance had either stopped or reversed. Its just a bit of splitting hairs.

The most common and accepted (but still debated) theory for ice ages has to do with Milankovitch cycles. I.e., the eccentricities in the earths orbit. A certain level of cooling takes place that causes increased snow in the northern hemisphere which, through the albedo effect, acts as a positive feedback for accelerated increased snow and ice advance.

Other processes that catalyse an ice age are atmospheric GHG composition, tectonic plate movements, the earths orbit around the galaxy, variations in solar irradiance...

The most important point to consider in all these effects is that the initial catalyst is always followed up by a positive feedback which has always been eventually mitigated and ended by a negative feedback. In other words, the forcings from the milankovitch cycles, variation in solar ouput, etc are not strong enough by themselves to cover the earth in ice (or on the flipside, end it).

The recent abrupt ice age you refer to is the Younger Dryas period (only lasting about 1300 years), one theory is that this was caused by a comet or comets exploding over the northern hemisphere (like Tunguska but orders of magnitude larger). This theory has enjoyed some pretty strong evidence lately with the discovery of nanodiamonds in a layer of the earth in multiple clovis locations.

The other more popular theory is that a massive influx of fresh water from the deglaciation of the wisconsin ice age shut down the thermohaline circulation in the north atlantic. This locked the global climate into a cooling phase until the north atlantic froze completely, and moved the fresh water to the surface, allowing the thermohaline circulation to resume.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

Unfortunately that is all Ian Plimers book is, long debunked denialist talking points. Especially the use of fraudulent graphs from previously debunked films who themselves admitted to the fraud and corrected their mistakes.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

Thank you for the further support that CO2 levels being 1000x higher is complete nonsense.

Wikipedia claimed 7%, basing it on an EPA report which I looked through. From the literature I read years ago, it is wrong. I used to work in an area related to airline shipping of goods (including dry ice), and knew all of the particulars of CO2 and its danger levels. 3% is dangerous and can make you feel quite ill - its very dangerous or fatal to small children and small animals who can die at those levels. 5% is fatal because it can make you pass out, and if you aren't removed from the area (or given lower concentrations of CO2) you will eventually die.

The small difference in numbers (5% vs 7%) could just be a confusion about molar concentration vs volume concentration vs mass concentration, etc. In any case 38% concentration by any measurement standard is fatal and 4% wouldn't allow most animal species to viably continue to exist.

Here is the graph of the Phanerozoic CO2 concentrations.



One line does put CO2 concentrations at 7000 PPM.


and indeed there were glacial periods during periods of high CO2 concentration as per the below graph.



But as i have already mentioned, going back hundreds of millions of years requires a context where the earth was a radically different place than it is today. Everyhting from atmospheric composition to the position of the tectonic plates in Pangaea was different and caused its own set of feedbacks.

Using the earth 500 million years ago to draw conclusions about todays climate is not possible.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

Do a majority of geologists not know what they are talking about either?

38% of CO2 sounds far fetched, nonetheless, if Nitrogen had combined into other forms rather than gas or existed in large pockets beneath the earth's surface, it's possible. A much lowered rate of gaseous nitrogen and anything's possible.

I'm not defending Pilmer's work, merely commenting his theory is as good a guess as the Global Alarmists. There's no doubt we had ice ages with much, much more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Edit: Oxygen is a tricky thing. H2O amounts could have been a lot less, which would have meant the biggest GHG wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is today. Given a Solar minimum with less H2O there possibly could have been a massive ice age. If you open your mind to all possibilities things can be discovered.

Are you suggesting that a majority of geologists are frauds like Ian Plimer?

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

Maybe Plimer is making a guess, but decades of observation, lab analysis, and theory that has gone into understanding todays climate and its various forcings by thousands of climate scientists and is not "guess work". Not even in the slightest.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen