Is it true that the earth's climate has been warmer in the past?

Question

Well i'm not so sure but is it true that the earth's climate has been warmer in the past. If so then how come all the animals have survived? and no completely out of control disaster? Doesn't global warming say even the slightest change in tempretures would give way to an apocalyptic event?

Answer 1

Yes the Global Warming nuts can calculate so accurate but they can not say that it started. It is a LIE propagated by the Left and Gore. I can not under stand why the young people buy it. It will eliminate the working people from owning cars and much more.

Answer 2

I would like to tell you that we are in a period of a mass extinction.  Species are currently going extinct at rates comparable to mass extinctions in geologic history.  We are in the 6th mass extinction period in the earths history according to biologists and geologists.

Answer 3

yes!

Answer 4

It has been warmer, for other multi-century periods, when CO2 levels were lower, as well as when CO2 levels were higher.

It has also been almost as warm, for multi-century periods, when CO2 levels were lower.

And during those non-CO2 driven warm periods, you're right, while there were problems (drought in the Southwestern US and Africa), the type of catastrophes predicted did not happen - no "runaway warming" from melting permafrost, etc....  

Past warming periods that were CO2 driven and did have significant effects on a majority of species involved massive increases in CO2 - to levels 12-15 times today's concentration.    Not a 27% increase.

CO2 does trap heat but it's a weak heat-trapper and the amount we've added is tiny relative to the atmosphere.

A poster below notes "gradual flooding" of coastal areas - - right, the sea levels have been rising, since the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago (when the first Americans came here across a land bridge that no longer exists), at the rate of less than a millimeter per year.    

Gradual, indeed!

Answer 5

It's good to be skeptical... about what you hear from every side of the issue.  Examine the "skeptical" side even halfheartedly and you'll probably find what I did, that their claims tend to be unsupported by evidence, and upon further research they quickly unravel like a cheap sweater.

Yes, there have been several major warming episodes that involved several degrees of warming, and they correspond with extinctions of 50% or more of all species on the planet.  So much for the people who say "the climate has been warmer in the past", as if that was a good thing.

By the way, many of those extinctions also corresponded with increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so it's bizarre that people blindly accept the simplistic and faulty logic that past warmings must somehow disprove the anthropogenic cause of the current one or indicate that it won't be harmful.

Look up the Permian-Triassic Extinction as one example.  

Climate Model Links Warmer Temperatures to Permian Extinction

http://www.physorg.com/news6003.html

Permian–Triassic Extinction, Clathrate Gun Hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_G...

Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for

mass extinction

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/aboutus/staf...

Permian–Triassic extinction event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Tri...

It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with up to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct. Because approximately 25 percent of species survived the event, the recovery of life on earth took significantly longer than after other extinction events. This event has been described as the "mother of all mass extinctions".

This time up to 58% of all species on the planet are expected to die:

http://www.killerinourmidst.com/methane%...

A careful examination of a large number of species in numerous parts of the planet projects that a stunning portion of them will be "committed to extinction" in just 50 years, with only modest global warming (Thomas, 2004).

Evidence such as that found associated with the Permian Triassic Extinction is why the 50,000-member American Geophysical Union issued a statement of concern on global warming, and recently re-released a strengthened one.

One key point to consider in examining the "warm periods have happened in the past" statement is to note how many human societies have survived such a change.  Humans weren't even around during those changes, and even the relatively minor changes we have survived required an extreme mobility that isn't going to be an option now that we have 6.6 billion of us who will all be looking for some place of refuge and enough food to eat.

As for the current scenario, we've had one degree of warming, but up to 10 degrees are coming by 2100 (and there's no proposal on the table at all to stop CO2 emission increase or warming after that timeframe, since developing nations ahve 50% of emissions now and have offered to accept no controls or limits).  So we see minor trends like global wheat crop failures and Malaria starting to appear in the New Guinea highlands (where the mosquitos couldn't survive in the past), but the bulk of the effects are still to come, along with the bulk of the warming.  One reason for the concern ahead of the warming is that CO2 remains a heating influence in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, and it may take decades to slow our growth rate in emissions (and we have little prospect of stopping CO2 emission growth or reversing emissions towards decline until we stop or reverse population growth).  China and India alone have several hundred new coal-fired power plants coming on line over the next few years, which will overpower Kyoto conservation measures several times over.

Long before we see mass species extinctions, we'll see our fragile food production threatened, which could result in global turmoil as early as 2020:

http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/articles/...

"Pentagon officials warn that abrupt climate change over the next 20 years could throw the world into a state of anarchy -- dwarfing the current threat of terrorism.  In this doomsday scenario, large-scale droughts, famine brought on by food shortages and reduced energy supplies could cause riots around the globe that could culminate in nuclear warfare."

The report wasn't penned by members of the "Chicken Little sky-is-falling crowd" (as Republican leaders like to call global- warming activists), but by Peter Schwartz, former head of planning for Shell Oil and sometime CIA consultant, and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, a California think tank.

http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2004/02/2...

As for ice sheets...

It was determined last year that Greenland is melting much faster than scientists (including last year's IPCC report) predicted:

"Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in 'imminent peril.'"

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserve...

"Ground-based surface temperature data shows that the rate of warming in the Arctic from 1981 to 2001 is eight times larger than the rate of Arctic warming over the last 100 years. There have also been some remarkable seasonal changes. Arctic spring, summer, and autumn have each warmed, lengthening the seasons when sea ice melts from 10 to 17 days per decade."

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/eart...

New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears - Spiegel Online

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk...

"...the Pine Island Glacier has shrunk by an average of 3.8 centimeters annually over the past 4,700 years. But the Smith and Pope glaciers have only lost 2.3 centimeters of their thickness annually during the past 14,500 years. Satellite measurements taken between 1992 and 1996, though, show a loss of 1.6 meters in thickness per year on the Pine Island Glacier -- a figure that represents 42 times the average melt of the past 4,700 years."

And the result on sea level rise:

"Global averaged sea level continued to rise through 2006 and 2007. Modern satellite measurements reveal that since 1993, sea-level has been rising at an average rate of about 3 mm per year, substantially faster than the average for the 20th century of about 1.7 mm per year, estimated from coastal sea-level measurements. These coastal measurements indicate that the 2006/2007 global averaged sea level is about 200 mm higher than in 1870 and that since 1870 there has been a significant increase in the rate of the sea-level rise."

It is fascinating to see the unsupported and illogical arguments that can gain traction among people grasping for something reasonable-sounding to cling to to base their denial on, no matter how shallow the support and how faulty the reasoning is.

Despite the reality of global warming however, it is still prudent to be wary of the U.N.'s agenda in forming the IPCC.

"The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions hasn't gone into effect yet and already three countries are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.

China is the dominant player. The country is on track to add 562 coal-fired plants - nearly half the world total of plants expected to come online in the next eight years."

http://www.rense.com/general61/jyoto.htm

For example, you will not find the U.N. or its IPCC organization advocating the cheapest and most effective way to reduce global warming, reducing black soot pollution, because that comes mainly from developing nations:

Reducing Black Carbon, or Soot, May Be Fastest Strategy

for Slowing Climate Change

http://www.igsd.org/docs/BC%20Briefing%2...

Apparently it is politically incorrect to ask developing nations to stop threatening life on this planet, so we'll take inadequate and costly measures in developed nations instead.  The whole phony debate about the science simply serves as a diversion from appropriate scrutiny on the inadequate and pointless nature of all current proposed treaties and taxes, and the constitutionality of the government's planned military response to protect the rich against the riots of everyone else as food supplies become inadequate.

So yeah, the climate has been wamer in the past, often due to CO2.  Many fields of science (other than climatologists) tell us that as we bring about those conditions today, it could result in the extinction or severe culling of the planet's human polulation.

Answer 6

Sure.

The problem is that our modern society, with massive coastal development and intensive agriculture, is VERY sensitive to climate change.  It would cost us a huge amount of money to fix the problems.  We're no longer nomads who could just pack up the tent and move.  Bottom line:

"We humans have built a remarkable socioeconomic system during perhaps the only time when it could be built, when climate was sufficiently stable to allow us to develop the agricultural infrastructure required to maintain an advanced society."

It won't be an apocalyptic Hollywood movie style disaster. Gradually coastal areas will flood and agriculture will be damaged. But it will be very bad. Rich countries will cope, but it will take huge amounts of money. In poor countries many people will die of starvation, but not all of them.

Answer 7

Yes. The earth's orbit around the sun is NOT a perfect circle..sometimes the earth is closer to the sun, and sometimes it is further away. The sun itself also has a wobbly orbit of it's own. You may not be old enough to remember, but during the 80's and early 90's, the talk was global freezing, not global warming!

Answer 8

yes ,it is cyclical and we have no way to control it.global warming is a scam. http://globalwarmingheartland.org

Answer 9

Yes-- check out this web site and click on the various "ages" on the left-- the Paleocene epic for example:

http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

got to pay--- but-- enough there to read  http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=snow...

I like this one because BOTH sides can use it to argue--

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...

Answer 10

Yes and it's a natural phenomena that the cycle is now going to our era

Answer 11

yes, ten yrs ago it was warmer than it is now and before the little ice age it was much much warmer, and as we're now cooling i don't think we need to worry about warming

Answer 12

yeah for sure.... not only in the past but in the present too.... the global warming is increasing day by day....nowadays we hear that many people are coming forward for this cause and spreading awareness abt it.....

Answer 13

Yes, it has been warmer in the past.

All the animals didn't survive, but lots of them did.

Why no completely out of control disaster in the past? Well, because except for some beaver dams, animals have no infrastructure.  Humans do, we depend on the climate not changing radically on the lifetime of that infrastructure. We have the entire economy of the planet invested in things being more or less the way they are.  If you think there are no crazy droughts, you haven't been paying attention, much of the southern third of the United States has been in drought for years now.  California has had devastating fires in 2003 and 2007 with more people evacuated last year than in any other natural disaster.  It is the largest agricultural state in the US, where does America look for food when there is no water for the crops?  Look at Katrina, or the midwest, or Myanmar, etc.  No particular weather event should be blamed on GW, but extreme weather events seem to be on the upswing.

You want tropical disease outbreaks? What about West Nile Virus?

It seems to me that you're asking for global apocalypse to occur before you'll believe in global warming.  Don't you find anything wrong with that attitude?