Was man made global warming responcible for the last ice age melting?

Question

Was man made global warming responcible for the last ice age melting?

Answer 1

Yeah... them liberal sapians were blowing there hot air way long ago....

Answer 2

No. Ice ages, and inter-glacial periods, are triggered by small changes in Earth's orbit called "Milankovitch cycles" by astronomers, or "orbital forcing" by climatologists.

Since Earth's orbit can be computed for thousands of years into the past and future, we know that orbital forcing peaked 6000 years ago, during the Holocene Maximum, and has been slowly cooling the planet since then.

Here's the peer-reviewed science:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/ab...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/ab...

This means that the natural cycle of ice ages has nothing to do with the current warming.

Answer 3

Of course have you not seen the Flintstones? The size of the meat made it so the pits of fire had to be huge to cook them so no one got sick and all the smoke from stopping those heavy cars with feet and rocks super heated the air causing the ice to melt.

Answer 4

You don't follow the facts too closely do you?   No one (with any credibility) is claiming climate change is completely man made, just that we are speeding it up with our various activities.    Don't even bother thinking of climate change if you are just going to spew garbage without reading up on the subject at all from reliable sources on either side of the argument.

Answer 5

No.

And man is also innocent of 60% to 70% of forest fires in the Southwest, which are ignited by lightning (humans are guilty of causing the rest).

So what?  Just because something naturally occurred in the past, doesn't mean humans can't be causing it now. There weren't +6 billion humans burning fossil fuels during the last ice age.

Answer 6

LOL Of course not.  How could man have caused global warming back then?  The elevated CO2 emissions associated with global warming are a result of industrialization -- factories and cars.

Answer 7

I have heard one of the top alarmist on Answers (he was top before Dr. Jello) Byderrule (or something like that) claim that human agriculture was responsible.  It is about as ridiculous a claim as anything that could dreamed up.  In other words, don't put it past them, at least not all of them.

Answer 8

commenting on rick w's answer, solar activity isnt just the top contributor to controlling climate, its the reason we have a climate at all. without the sun, were just a big rock.

Answer 9

Why should I care?  That happened a long time ago.  I just care if were causing global warming today and into the future.  The actual evidence on the ground indicates that we are.

Answer 10

No way that man was responsible for that ice age, we didn't put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to even make a dent.

Global warming is the result of cyclical climate changes with the Earth, not by humans putting too much CO2 into the atmosphere.

There's a big debate raging: either you believe we're speeding climate change up, or you believe that the Earth goes through natural cyclical changes. The fact is, there simply is not enough information to make the determination that man is affecting the climate at all, because we can't accurately predict what the climate would have done without our intervention.

New evidence even suggests climate is mainly controlled by solar activity.

Answer 11

Some are trying their best to make that claim:

http://ccr.meteor.wisc.edu/research/pale...