| Munkeh111 said: I like the fact that it has become the new buzzword to chuck around, and saying we are going to fight global warming is now seen as something that you should be aiming to do... Anyway, most of the time, in the long history of the earth, there have been no polar ice caps I believe, so to me it does make that much sense that we are causing it. There are also several arguements against the whole CO2 thing, such as if it were true, the upper layers of the atmosphere would be heating up quicker than the surface and I don't believe that is true |
Actually it is much worse than that ...
On a geological time scale ice-ages are actually the "normal" state for the Earth, and the warm temperatures that humans require for their existence are only available for short periods for a large portion of the Earth. Most of the warm periods (similar to the one we live in) only exist for about 10,000 years and the current one has lasted for more than 10,000 years. The end of the interglacial periods typically takes a couple of centuries, but in the past there has been periods where the temperature has dropped more than 5 degrees in as little as 20 years.
To put this into perspective, if you assume that the earth is a homeostatic-system and that all positive and negative feedbacks from the increase in CO2 cancel eachother out every time you double atmospheric CO2 you should see a 1 degree increase in temperature. In order to match the potential temperature change of the end of an interglacial-period we would have to increase CO2 production by 32 times in 20 years.
