Image: Illustration by Ron Miller
In Brief
- Global temperature rose five degrees Celsius 56 million years ago in response to a massive injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
- That intense gas release was only 10 percent of the rate at which heat-trapping greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere today.
- The speed of today’s rise is more troubling than the absolute magnitude, because adjusting to rapid climate change is very difficult.
More In This Article
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Photo Album
View the images from Kump's Arctic quest
Polar bears draw most visitors to Spitsbergen, the largest island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. For me, rocks were the allure. My colleagues and I, all geologists and climate scientists, flew to this remote Arctic island in the summer of 2007 to find definitive evidence of what was then considered the most abrupt global warming episode of all time. Getting to the rocky outcrops that might entomb these clues meant a rugged, two-hour hike from our old bunkhouse in the former coal-mining village of Longyearbyen, so we set out early after a night’s rest. As we trudged over slippery pockets of snow and stunted plants, I imagined a time when palm trees, ferns and alligators probably inhabited this area.
Back then, around 56 million years ago, I would have been drenched with sweat rather than fighting off a chill. Research had indicated that in the course of a few thousand years—a mere instant in geologic time—global temperatures rose five degrees Celsius, marking a planetary fever known to scientists as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. Climate zones shifted toward the poles, on land and at sea, forcing plants and animals to migrate, adapt or die. Some of the deepest realms of the ocean became acidified and oxygen-starved, killing off many of the organisms living there. It took nearly 200,000 years for the earth’s natural buffers to bring the fever down.
This article was originally published with the title The Last Great Global Warming.
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34 Comments
Add CommentAlso see "CO2 Currently Rising Faster Than The PETM Extinction Event" posted today (June 17) by Rob Painting on Skeptical Science. Painting's article is based on Krump's work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-rising-ten-times-faster-than-petm-extinction.html
Hasn't the globe been warming for the last 6,000 years or so? Aren't we due for another ice age sometime soon (geologically speaking)? And isn't a greenhouse a closed system inside which high energy photons are absorbed, converting their energy to longer wave radiation (IR) which is trapped by the greenhouse structure, increasing the temperature inside the greenhouse, exactly like a closed automobile? Last time I looked, the globe was open to space - not exactly a closed greenhouse. As to CO2 being a 'greenhouse gas,' I thought that notion had been thoroughly discredited. I thought it was an innocuous trace gas (about .04% of the atmosphere) which is totally incapable of producing the dire effects ascribed to it. But that wouldn't track with SciAm's drumbeat that 'calamity awaits us.' Disaster sells. I like the articles on doomsday asteroids better.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho has said the earth has been warming the last 6000 years? It has not- there have been variations in temperature up to the last 40 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC02 is in fact a very potent greenhouse gas- that has been long established- unless you represent a certain political party or a fossil fuel company.
The PETM is an example of C02 being rapidly induced into the atmosphere- by geologic standards (20,000 years) in a natural process.
Today we are inducing C02 at a far more rapid rate- the PETM was the last great 'global warming' of any scale. Of course back then there was an ice free planet- today we have cold deep oceans and still much ice in Greenland and Antarctica- so the warming right now is slow- due to 'climatic inertia' - however at the rate C02 is rising as compared to the PETM- within decades will see profound effects- not millennia.
An ice age will never occur again as long as humans are on the planet. With C02 levels now ay nearly 400ppm, and rising rapidly- and a slowly growing stronger sun. During the last few hundred thousand years ice ages have come and gone- and there is strong evidence that the Milankovitch cycles (orbital eccentricity of the earth and the tilt of the planets axis) affect the occurrence of glacial and interglacial periods within an ice age.
You have created two straw-man arguments in a single post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst, any climate scientist worth his/her salt will tell you that the "greenhouse" analogy is an imperfect analogy.
Second, the only place where the "notion that CO2 is a greenhouse has been thoroughly discredited" is in Denierville.
“The amount of warming caused by the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric CO2 may be one of the most misunderstood subjects in climate science. Many people think the anthropogenic warming can't be quantified, many others think it must be an insignificant amount. However, climate scientists have indeed quantified the anthropogenic contribution to global warming using empirical observations and fundamental physical equations.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSource: “How do we know more CO2 is causing warming?”, Advanced rebuttal , Skeptical Science, Sep 9, 2010
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm
(About the quoted Email below)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, this is the main science against all of the global warming
hysteria. The amount that we can affect with our activity is near zero.
We know that CO2 is just 0.039% of the atmosphere. That is ALL CO2, not
just the man made part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
AND, my brother is quick to point out, it is heavier than air! It tends
to fall toward the surface, where it can feed the plants and cause the
greening of the planet and production of oxygen!
If that is not enough to get the politicians off our backs, then let's
talk about the effect of the man-made portion of the CO2 in the
atmosphere. In other words, the .039% sure seems like a small number,
but how much does that contribute to the greenhouse effect?
The study is this:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
If you care to read and follow all that, it turns out that the man
caused portion of CO2 in the atmosphere accounts for 0.117% of the
greenhouse effect. That is zero-point-one-one-seven, in case you thought
it was a typo. A tenth of a percent. So, if we killed off every human
being on Earth, global warming would rocket right on down by one tenth
of a percent.
I suspect there are a lot of people all around the world who expect to
make a killing on this scam. So far, it seems to be selling fairly well,
becoming a part of pop culture. If you are against the "green" movement,
you are a dirtball and aren't listening to all those scientists.
THE QUOTE:
> Professor Ian Plimer ( a member of the School of Earth and
Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide. He is also a joint
member of the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering )
could not have said it better!
>
>
> If you've read his book you will agree, this is a good summary.
>
> Are you sitting down?
>
> Okay, here's the bombshell. The volcanic eruption in Iceland, since
its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY
SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO 2
emissions on our planet, all of you.
>
> Of course you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying
to suppress, that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to
live and grow, and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans, and all
animal life.
>
Geickmei,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou quote Ian Plimer, who is a professor of geology. He published nothing on climate change, or climate for that matter, until he appointed himself chief critic of the developing scientific concensus that climate change is real and directly affected by human activity.
Plimer has a history of aggressive public action in promoting his own beliefs and attacking the beliefs of others. He published a book Telling Lies for God, refuting creationist arguments. He failed in legal action claiming that an Ark researcher made false claims about a boat-like formation on Mt Ararat. However, Plimer did not litigate when he was accused in a nationally televised debate of scientific fraud and fabrication.
Who is more credible: Plimer, who supports his arguments with a temperature chart that omits the last few decades when temperatures escalated rapidly, or 99 other scientists who look at the data carefully and come to a contrary opinion?
Look back through climate history and it is true that mean temperature has been both much hotter and much colder than at present. What also stands out is that the last 10,000 years has been the longest period of relatively stable temperature in recorded climate history.
It has been during that stable period that humans changed from hunter gatherers with an estimated population of 1 million to complex societies with populations of almost 7 billion.
As Plimer and others have claimed, there are many factors influencing temperatures. One of those has been fluctuation in the level of CO2. This is the first time in millions of years that human activity has had a direct influence on temperature, potentially destabilising the delicate balance that has prevailed for the last 10,000 years.
More importantly, climate change has been a critical factor in human evolution. It thinned out forests in Africa, forcing our ape ancestors to develop as bipedal hunter gatherers to survive on the savannah millions of years ago. The sudden plunge into the Younger Dryas mini Ice Age 11,000 ya forced humans to herd animals they had previously hunted and cultivate crops they had previously gathered in the wild, setting humans on the path to present day complex societies during that stable 10,000 years.
If we ignore the risk of precipitating major climate change through our negligence, we may be precipitating a chain of unpredictable consequences for billions of humans.
Even if you are sceptical about climate change, would you be willing to sign a petition that we should do nothing and run the risk?
"Plimer has a history of aggressive public action in promoting his own beliefs and attacking the beliefs of others." - Doesn't sound like this is the kind of argument one should be using to support a movement that has had to rebrand and waffle over the past 40 years because they have a storied history of promoting ideology over scientific method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi.e. ignoring proxies that don't support the hockey stick
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
If "man made" CO2 is so damaging, why has there been no warming the past 15 years? Why are things like Methane, with 16x the greenhouse potential and has levels that have skyrocketed due to livestock completely ignored? Why are thing like the Urban Heat Island Effect ignored? Any 5 year old knows that pavement holds more heat than grass (or gas). Why do we ignore the overwhelming evidence that humanity doesn't understand themselves let alone a complex system well beyond their comprehension? Why have Polar Bears, the martyr mascots of the green movement, held steady populations for decades? Why are we being told that in order to prevent Armageddon we need to purchase Indulgence credits from international banks and increase federal funding to various campaign contributing cronies? For a gas we can't even measure accurately. And is 100% natural. And we exhale it. Talk about Original Sin.
This kind of statement simply represents a failure to understand the dynamics of equilibrium conditions. Here's a crude analogy. I have a teeter tawter. On each arm of this balanced beam I have a mass of 1000 kg. If I add ONE GRAM to one of the arms of the balance it will tip all the way to that side. It would be nonsensical to predict that because that 1 gram represents 1 part in 100,000 of the mass on that end of the beam it will have a meaningless impact on the equilibrium position of the beam. This is essentially what the argument you and others are advocating amounts to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact an enormous amount of solar energy reaches the surface of the earth every day, and an enormous amount is radiated back into space (an equal amount in fact by definition). The retaining of only a very tiny fraction of this energy at the surface will thus result in a significant change in the equilibrium temperature, a calculation first made by Arrhenius over 100 years ago and which has proven to be accurate.
Note too that while we commonly describe the temperature of the Earth's surface in degrees Celsius in fact thermodynamically this is fairly meaningless. A meaningful comparison would be kelvins. The surface of the Earth averages somewhere in the neighborhood of 290 kelvins. A change of 1% would be 2.9 kelvins, which is 2.9 degrees Celsius. This is an ecologically and climatologically very significant change, but represents only a small shift in the thermodynamic equilibrium.
Thus any argument based on "we've only added a tiny bit of CO2 to the atmosphere in total" is specious and anyone calling himself a scientist who doesn't understand that is either not qualified to comment based on a monumental ignorance of basic thermodynamics, or is simply not being honest. I leave it to you to decide which is the case.
Ok, this is going to take a minute in order to address all the subjects you have brought up. First off, I honestly haven't read enough studies to be able to hold a valid argument as to whether or not the mean temp. of the earth has increased in the past 15 years, however, I do know that the mean temp. has increased over the past few decades and that it has not decreased in the past 15 years. Also, 15 years is easily accountable by sunspots, which i believe we just started a new cycle in and are supposed to see some warming due to that in the near future. CO2 has also had a slight acidifying effect on the ocean as well, which if you know anything about calcium carbonate in living animals you'll know acidity is not a good thing. Second, no one's ignoring the methane produced by livestock, it's just a bit harder and a bit inhumane to put a catilytic converter in a cow's bowels. Third, the urban heat island effect is also not being ignored, it's just hard to come up with a solution that doesn't entail painting every inch of concrete and asphalt white, which, in case you couldn't figure out, would cost alot of time and effort, and who knows how much money. Fourth, I for one will be the first to admit that our understanding of ourselves and the world around us is laughable, but that's exactly why we strive to learn more, and are constantly doing studies on just about everything under the sun. Fifth, the polar bears population has stablized in the past few decades, but only because in the 70's we realized how much their population had been decreasing and we took measures to prevent it's continuation. Finally, about the whole indulgence credit stupidity, well all i can say is that, if there's a way someone (especially the goverment) can make money off the whole "green hysteria", then they're going to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Science is not an Opinion,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour link is thoroughly debunked here: The Biggest Control Knob:http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
This is a video of the Honors Lecture at the 2009 American Geophysical Union. Go watch it and learn why a geophysics researcher has more far more scholarship in paleoclimate than a coalmine engineer defending his industry by cheery picked and dated work.
t
You said, "it [CO2] is heavier than air! It tends
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisto fall toward the surface, where it can feed the plants and cause the
greening of the planet and production of oxygen!"
Baloney! If that were true, the lower elevations of the Earth would have toxic levels of CO2 while no plants would be able to grow on mountains because the concentration of CO2 would be too low. Ever heard of gas diffusion? Partial pressure? Hey, Oxygen is heavier than Nitrogen so, how come all the oxygen hasn't piled up near sea level either?
Also, the concentration of CO2 before the industrial revolution was around 285ppm. We have increased it to 390ppm so far, which is and increase of around 40%. Even just the pre-industrial 285ppm meant the difference between the stable climate of the time and glaciers marching towards the equator. Water vapor might be more abundant in the atmosphere, but it's residency time is very low and it's concentration is capped by the amount of humidity the air can hold. You can't get over 100% relative humidity, right? Any excess water will condense out, unlike the steadily building amount of CO2 in the air that has a dwell time measured in decades or even centuries.
ALSO, when air temperatures are higher, which can be caused by say, CO2 maybe, then the air can hold more water vapor. This is called a POSITIVE FEEDBACK and they are the scariest part of climate change. When ice melts, the earth reflects less sunlight back into space. When permafrost melts, it releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas. When weather patterns are disrupted, wildfires scorch large areas of forest, changing them from carbon sinks into carbon sources. These positive feedbacks are the most concerning because there are so many of them, and there may be many more that we haven't quantified yet. They usually have a non-linear response to initial temperature forcings and in many cases respond exponentially, as in the case of ice sheet collapse. There are a few negative climate feedbacks, but they are slow and too weak to cancel out the climate warming we are causing on timescale that will save us from centuries of climate misery. It's still 10,000 years before we need to worry about another ice age.
For those of you unable to do anything more than parrot some politically motivated lier here is what I have found. By looking at the Antarctic ice core data going back about 450,000 years in every increase in global temperature the leading indicator has been CH4 methane. The CO2 carbon dioxide has been the current indicator. Does this explain the current leveling of global temperatures over the past few years? Yes, in looking at current NOAA data the methane has stopped increasing for now. Why? This is just a guess on my part but when methane prices rose so that it was profitable to liquefy and sell this commodity the nations that had been venting this gas into the atmosphere stopped and for now has balanced the system. So all is right with the world right? Wrong, we have warmed up enough to start melting the permafrost regions of the Arctic. This frozen vegetation contains all of the methane and carbon dioxide since the last time it thawed. A long time ago and it covers a lot of area. Around the Earth one source says 20% of the Earth's surface. Just my opinion but it's too late, move inland or learn to breath salt water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am amazed that the urban heat island effect is cited to discount man's causal effect on the climate. Who does he think built those urban centers? Those vast herds of meat, milk, and methane producing cattle are a product of man and certainly more highly concentrated under man's protection than ever found in nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I was stationed at Fort Richardson Alaska in the mid '50s, one of my Alaskan friends remarked that the road built to Fairbanks during WW2 had to blast away part of a glacier. At that time, a little more than a decade later, that glacier ended five miles from the road. Today the alaskan Oil fields are having problems getting supplies because the permafrost the highways depend on is melting.
"None are so blind as those who will not see ..."
Re: "It took nearly 200,000 years for the earth’s natural buffers to bring the fever down."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow long did one of the previous warming periods take to cool?:
"...[O]ne of the reasons paleontologists today believe one of the reasons dinosaurs grew so large, was that they weren’t cold-blooded like today’s lizards; they were lukewarm-blooded....But another reason for their size may have been the sweltering oxygen-rich environment that came to dominate the dinosaur era; an environment triggered by volcanism....It was global warming gone wild; CO2 levels increased over 500 percent and temperatures soared. In the greenhouse conditions this created, huge tropical forests spread over many of the continents....Many scientists believe that evolving for millions of years, in this warm, oxygen-rich world, allowed the lukewarm-blooded dinosaurs to reach their enormous sizes. Huge dinosaurs may have been a biological response to a volcanically over-active planet....65 million years ago. The planet was lush. Vegetation was thick on the surface. Living things were prospering like never before."
[2007 DVD. How the Earth was Made. London: Pioneer Productions for the History Channel, 55 min., ff., 1 hr., 3 min.]
Tharter,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour analogy using a "teeter tawter" is very poor and misses the central point of greenhouse gases and the fact that C02 is only about 400 ppm. O2 and N2 make up over 99% of our atmosphere. In your analogy this is supposed to be the 1000kg masses. However, O2 and N2 are NOT greenhouse gases; therefore, they should NOT have any "mass" in your "teeter tawter" analogy.
The primary greenhouse gases are H2O, CO2, CH4, O3, N2O which make up less than 1% of the atmosphere. Remove them from our atmosphere and our global average temperature plummets from 14C to -18C (a snowball earth).
Yes and crocodiles swam in the tropical swamps around the latitude of Alaska. Good thing they had 100K years or so to slowly move poleward as the climate changed vs the 200 years or so that we will take to put the Earth in a totally different geologic era. We're changing the maekup of the atmosphere 1000x or so faster than it has ecer changed in the paleoclimate record. At least you realize that CO2 actually warms the earth, unlike some people around here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe teeter tawter is an appropriate analogy for the entire climate system. Many positive and negative feedbacks were balanced for thousands of years until mankind put their collective thumbs on the scale to tilt the system towards a warmer state. With the way some of the positive feedbacks operate, you'd also have to put the 1000kg masses on sliders to model their extremely dynamic behavior and maybe some weak springs that can bring the system back to equilibrium over the course of thousands of years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh good god, the planet was ten degrees hotter than today to begin with, back then. This is such an extreme example of apples vs. oranges that I am appalled by the tabloid alarmist headline. Monstrous numbers of volcanoes were going on, melting permafrost and the seas too, directly, releasing huge amounts of methane.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"For years scientists considered the PETM to be the supreme example of the opposite extreme: the fastest climate shift ever known, rivaling the gloomiest projections for the future."
What the heck is he talking about? The extremely steep rise out of ice ages are vertical cliffs compared to the PETM being a hill:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
And though "apparently all animals survived," now, due to a fraction of a degree warming in a century, "extinctions are on the rise" now due to warming?!
This reads like a grant proposal, basically. You know, one where you are a chemist and so everything is about "drug delivery" or a materials scientist and everything is about microprocessor advances? Here it's all about the end of the world. Yeah, dude, whatever!
He concludes with "Current global warming is on a path to vastly exceed the PETM."
Harrumph! That CO2 has shot up and T has not followed as predicted both by Hansen and the IPCC strongly indicates that current conditions contain strong negative cloud feedbacks. This was spelled out a year before Hansen's 1988 congressional testimony that started this whole mess:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v329/n6135/pdf/329138a0.pdf
I present a Global Warming Data Digest:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOceans: http://k.min.us/idAw6Y.gif
NASA: http://k.min.us/idFxzI.jpg
Thermometers: http://i.min.us/idAOoE.gif
Earth: http://k.min.us/ibtB8G.gif
Ice: http://k.min.us/ibtZec.jpg
Sault,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour analogy is not the same as tharter's in the context of the response to geickmei's premise that CO2 is only 0.039% of the atmosphere. Geickmei's idea is that how could 0.039% of something have any significant effect on climate (it's just too small)? The "teeter tawter" analogy does not provide the proper response that N2 and O2 are NOT greenhouse gases, so they have no effect. i.e. 0.039% is a meaningless number when 99% is inert.
Sault, are you saying that N2 and O2 are significant factors in AGW? Should they be put on the "teeter tawter?"
A childlike comparison of the "BALANCE of climate" with the "BALANCE of a teeter tawter" is ineffective if it does not adequately refute the denier's primary premise. What is causing the positive feedback effect in climate is CO2, not O2 and N2. CO2 causes warming which then creates further warming via water vapor, Arctic methane, ice-albedo, etc. This mean CO2 has more weight on the balance, not N2 and O2. N2 and O2 have nothing to do with the positive feedback effects.
It's no wonder why the AGW debate is being lost to the deniers.
I love the survivorship bias that deniers always display. Yeah, Europe and Japan also survived WWII (except for the millions that died). Rome is a great city today besides the fall of the Roman empire. Yes, it is possible that the Earth could get hit by a meteor and all life except microbes could die. Over the next few billion years those microbes might evolve into intelligent human-like beings more advance than us. I guess you could also call them survivors, too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a conservative, you should know better than liberals, it's the changes that kill you, not stability. Isn't that what being conservative is all about--the status quo--keeping people in power that currently have power.
@Cramer Says:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just circuit that bit of reasoning by simply pointing out that they are making a argument from incredulity. Then if they object challenge to swallow 390 PPM of arsenic.
Yes, I've seen you use that one. Then they come back and try to say CO2 is naturally occurring in air but Arsenic is not naturally occurring in water. It is difficult to win against ignorance, but keep up the good fight.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissee PabstyLoudmouth, comment 20:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=stick-with-the-science-2011-06-24#comment-20
sault,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot everyone agrees with you:
"Being smarter about how we use our resources, investing in cleaner types of energy, and studying the adaptation process now will not "save the planet," as some activists so breezily say; the planet is not in peril. What it will do is save ourselves from a lot of future hurt."
[Corey S. Powell, EDITOR IN CHIEF. 2011. The World is not ending. DISCOVER, June, p. 6]
Dr. Kump,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm only a casual observer, but I recognized about a year ago that the conditions that produced the Eocene warming were comparable to those proposed to be producing current global warming. I also found it very interesting that Northern regions during the Eocene experienced temperate climes.
However, as I understand the atmosphere and surface of the Earth are warmed very quickly by the Sun (and obstructed/absorbed infrared radiation), whereas the mixing of warmed ocean water would produce absorption of thermal energy at potentially great depths. As a result, it might be expected that warming of the ocean could require very long term thermal exposure even if the atmospheric greenhouse gases increased rapidly.
Unlike the PETM warming, which occurred over such a long period that the ocean could have warmed at nearly the same rate as the land and air (causing the release of methane hydrates at relatively low atmospheric temperatures), the current flash surface warming resulting from the current sudden increase in atmospheric co2 might not warm the oceans and might not produce the methane hydrate releases compounding warming for many thousands of years.
This potential lag in ocean warming compared to the current flash surface warming could have many ancillary effects that should be carefully considered, correct?
In the last 12,000 years there have been many periods where temperatures were warmer than now including the Medieval, Roman and Minoan Warm Periods. In the last 12,000 years there have also been periods where sea level has been higher. Temperatures are rebounding from the Little Ice Age (1350-1850). Melting glaciers are revealing human artifacts of a few thousand years ago. The Sahara desert once reached 250 miles further south than it reaches now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only time CO2 has been as little as now was 300 million years ago. The infrared absorption spectrum of CO2 occurs within the first 10 meters above ground and is almost saturated at 280ppm. More CO2 cannot absorb more IR. CO2 increases after global temperatures increase, not before. On a global scale average lag is about 800 years. Local Mauna Loa measurements show a lag of a few months.
The correlation of temperature changes to solar intensity from 1895 to 2007 is 0.85; to ocean oscillations from 1895 to 2007, 0.57; to CO2 from 1897 to 2007, 0.43, but to CO2 from 1987 to 2007, only 0.02.
BP has contributed over $500 Million to UC Berkeley, one of the Bay Area’s centers of AGW support, for its Energy Biosciences Institute. BP employees gave Obama $77,051.
Stanford University has received $225 Million from ExxonMobil, Toyota and Schlumberger for its Global Climate and Energy Project. That money will be combined with a $50 Million donation from alumnus Jay Precourt whose career as an oil engineer included such companies as Hamilton Oil and Tejas Gas Corp.
Enron admitted that the Kyota Treaty would do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries.
In the last decade AGW alarmist have received over $50 billion in funding while honest climate scientist have received $19 million.
Ideologues with no climate science background have adopted the AGW alarmist mantra to promote population control, redistribution of wealth (poverty), social justice, global governance and have admitted it the validity of AGW is not important.
Thousands of scientists have published hundreds of peer reviewed articles debunking AGW. The popular press ignores them or actively suppresses them while promoting any AGW promoter who comes around.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
The website you referenced gives a lot of references. Why did you not give any references in your comment?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease at least provide references for your first paragraph:
"In the last 12,000 years there have been many periods where temperatures were warmer than now including the Medieval, Roman and Minoan Warm Periods. In the last 12,000 years there have also been periods where sea level has been higher."
At least provide evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was globally warmer than it is now. Yes, certain regions (e.g. Greenland) were warmer then, but I haven't seen any evidence for the average temperature over entire globe.
Your CO2 statements do not make sense to me. Are you saying that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Yes, CO2 did lag warming in the past, but it also provides positive feedback. Temperature changes coming out of the last ice age were large. +9C over a 5000 year period. Our temperatures have changed +0.9C over the last 150yrs.
You said, "more CO2 cannot absorb more IR." This is false. Can you provide any evidence of this (that matters to us --> let's say <1000 ppm) besides the paper by the Hungarian, Ferenc Miskolczi:
http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
Wow, Dagosta, you know more about climatology than the people who have studied it all their adult lives and get paid to do it! I'm so glad you and your friends stopped by to tell us what BP and Glenn Beck think about this matter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the 1960s I first heard about the effect greenhouse gases had on the climate at about the same time there was a fierce debates going on about whether fluorocarbons would effect the ozone layer, and whether Tobacco was a health risk. It was clear back then that the people arguing that these were not problems were simple trying to support there own industries regardless of the science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisToday we face exactly the same situation in that there are many industries who will suffer when the emissions of greenhouse gases are finally curbed. They are fighting tooth and nail to delay that day often with the silliest of arguments. The fact is that the worlds best scientists are on the case and almost unanimously agree that we are having a serious deleterious effect on the worlds climate with the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
please stop trying to write as if you knew something, especially when every other word indicates you are a cretin
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyour attempt at making an analogy is simplistic, and that you take it seriously is laughable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyou, making someone else's guesses and expecting credit?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI did not know that ocean anoxia was associated with the PETM. The greater warming event of the Permian-Triassic extinction also had a horrible period of worldwide ocean anoxia. The ocean was anoxic to within 10 meters of the surface. The article stated that anoxia was at great depths during the PETM. I wonder how widespread it was, and at what depth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this