[skoob]

Right, lets just "cope" with climate change the same way we did 425,000 years ago. By dying, I guess?

What's wierd is that despite that fact that's you've done your best to make AGW look like a non-issue, the chart for the 100 last years looks extremely worrying.

[ctdonath]

Fact is there's a 125,000 year cycle. We're at the high of one, due for a long drop. When I bring out this long term data, funny how many people shriek at it - but there it is, and the "warmers" won't produce any graphs covering the same (or longer) periods.

Yes, the data is limited. BUT - I hunted it down, put it together, gave it what I considered fair context, and there it is. Don't like it? counter with your own half-million year graph, not snide religious insults.

[tstactplsignore]

It's almost as if the very scientists who collected, analyzed, and are most familiar with the 125,000 year cycle are also the ones who are very worried about the current trends.

The simple point is that CO2 levels are likely higher now than in the last 20 million years[1], and the current rate of temperature change is likely faster now than any time in the last 65 million years [2]. The prehistorical cycles are large, but they are also slow- we're acting on unprecedentedly fast timescales now. How you can be so arrogant is beyond me. Do you think that climatologists, the very people who produced our complete understanding of our Earth's past, are merely unaware of prehistorical cycles? Perhaps they're "ignoring" it? (...while continuing to publish about and do research on them). Do you think you're more clever than scientists, who somehow haven't noticed that there are long term climate cycles in their published results, despite still managing to write extensively about them? It must be a bizarre mindset which leads to your arrogance.

1. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climat...

2. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6145/486

[ctdonath]

Arrogant? All I did was graph long term data and present it, observing that people freak when it shows something other than what their doctrine insists.

Sure I expect those scientists are familiar with the timeframe I present. Then why don't they present it? Why no comments on the non-warming of the last decade? If 20M years of CO2 data, then why no graphs showing correlation with temps? (BTW, CO2 lags temp.) How about that massive arctic ice sheet growing now growing well beyond normal reach? And ya gotta admit the frequency of global warming conferences getting snowed out is just funny.

[cromulent]

How about "that massive arctic ice sheet growing now growing well beyond normal reach"? What do you mean?

Reports I have seen show that although the ice did not drop to last year's record low (instead regressing towards the mean as you would expect), it was still well below the average for the last 30 years and the trend is towards reduced ice.

Are you suggesting that this year's result means the trend has reversed?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/18/arctic-se...

[Daishiman]

> Arrogant? All I did was graph long term data and present it, observing that people freak when it shows something other than what their doctrine insists.

You're arrogant because you believe that a single graph disproves or even begins to question the work of hundreds of doctoral and post-doctoral theses and thousands of man-years of research by people much smarter and informed than what you may find in this thread.

And while there are certainly many fields of human endavour with questionable analysis, climate science is not one of them.

[jmackinn]

Tried to check your sources, and for the first could not find anything talking about CO2 levels going back 20 million years, and the second links to a non existent article.

[cromulent]

When you say the "warmers won't produce any graphs covering the same periods", I think you are wrong. They do.

Here's an example.

http://www.whrc.org/resources/primer_fundamentals.html

[grey-area]

It's really important to consider the well established cycles in climate, not because they are proof that human changes don't exist, but to put our change in context.

Anthropogenic climate change is IMHO indisputably real and startlingly fast in geological terms, BUT it is dwarfed by the natural variations in climate over the long term and may even (if we don't overdo it) have saved us from another ice age in the long term. I'm not sure anyone understands what the climate is doing enough in order to make concrete predictions or to know what the interaction of our global warming with the long term cycle's cooling will do. It's great that attention is becoming more and more focused on this topic, but we don't need dire predictions and polarisation which have taken place - it is counterproductive.

It startles me how people pick sides and start using labels like denier and apologist on this topic - surely there is room for debate on what we should do about climate change? Do we have to be either for or against AGW and therefore for or against mitigating it? Isn't it reasonable to suggest looking at AGW in context, and also to show that humanity is going to have to deal with far greater swings over the long term in climate than just a few degrees?

If anything I'd say this long-term chart indicates we have to redouble our efforts to understand climate change, and if we can't control it, work on ways to mitigate its effects, because even if we control our own short term effects, long term the earth will move from ice age to tropical and we'll have to adapt.