...I posted this as an alternative view to the notion of global warming in the 20th C as it's been popularized in the media. I believe that while the human race has done unprecedented damage to the environment in which we live; to discount preceding events in natural history is asinine. It's human arrogance to assume that natural occurrences are not equal to or greater in scope than what's going on today.
The chart itself reminds me of comment by Tesla "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration". The historical climatic events definitively show a frequency that cannot be discounted, and cannot be seen if the entire data sample is taken only from the last 100 years.
I agree 100% with everything you said there. Of course, i have to be a windbag
Just have some free time on my hand...sorry.
I've written about this in other threads as well, but there are so many things that just don't make sense with the man-made global warming thing (and a lot of other doomsday memes).
Scientists have never been able to make any kind of predictive model that matches past history and future CO2 (as supposedly the prime greenhouse gas) levels with temperature/climate changes because after Mann, et al and the famous "hockey stick", every one was convinced that any temperature increase was man-made (one of the biggest and most expensive hoaxes ever and people still believe it). Even discounting what some scientists say about CO2 not being the culprit (look it up), the output of CO2 from the ocean itself makes the output of man-made CO2 look like the a human pissing into the Mississippi River. And the Sun's warming cycle just happened to coincide with the most recent rise in temperatures - as the sun warms, so do the oceans, which expand and release huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, more than man could ever think of producing given our current industrial/technological stage. And suddenly models that take that into account are much more accurate than trying to find a man-made culprit.
And there are so many other, more likely scenarios to end the world, at least as we know it (or good portions thereof). I mentioned a meteor previously, one that is big enough to cause an extinction event. Even a smaller one, landing off the eastern US coast, could kill millions and millions of people. Forget the tidal waves - methane gas pockets are huge at the bottom of certain parts of the ocean. A huge strike that hits the ocean floor and punches through into one of the big methane pockets will release so much gas that it will smother all life for hundreds of miles around, it being heavier than air and unbreathable. And of course, let's not forget Yosemite - a super volcano that has blown in the past and is due to blow - some say it is about 40,000 years past its regular cycle of roughly 600,000 years. Definitely end of life as we know it, not just a North America kind of thing but world-wide and at the very least a certain real Ice Age trigger if not worse.
As GPop said, we have indeed "done unprecedented damage to the environment in which we live", as far as on a human or animal scale goes (to date - wait until we start playing around with asteroids in Earth/Moon orbit or anti-matter energy generation!). But nature is much more powerful, we just never seem to understand that lesson. We might tweak things a little here and there, on a more temporary basis, but the world is NOT as fragile as so many people seem to paint it. They talk in absolutes without realizing that it takes huge, catastrophic events, to make any kind of really, really big changes. Like run-away greenhouse and the sort-of fantasy that maybe once Venus was Earth-like until its sentient population caused its atmosphere to run-away.
We should absolutely try to minimize our impact on the planet, but I think the one-celled and simpler organisms that first evolved on this planet were pretty pissed that their reducing atmosphere (unbreathable by today's standards for most fauna at least, in fact quite poisonous) got turned into an oxygen-rich atmosphere (which was poisonous to those first lifeforms, in exchange. They did help to create an atmosphere poisonous to them, but it took a LONG time. We're smarter, we can keep ourselves from doing that (I I believe we have - we're still breathing fairly well for the moment). But there are so many other things that are bigger than us.
It is pure hubris to think we have that great of effect at this point in our existence.
And another funny thing about CO2 levels - I don't remember the actual numbers, but some 70 million or so years ago, before the extinction event that took out our saurian competition and turned them into birds, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were quantum levels above what they are now and there was no runaway greenhouse. In the Little Ice Age crops didn't grow so well, at least because of the cold. In the dinosaur times, plants were extremely prevalent. It was important in the food chain to ensure that those bigger predators had enough food in the form of big plant eaters who had to be sustained by a LOT of plants. Higher CO2 levels mean better-growing plants. I'm sure everyone remembers the fact that plants actually intake CO2 and output oxygen...more CO2 means more energy in the biosphere.
So I mention all of that to kind of give the idea that I find it very hard to believe that humans have very much to do with the world's climate as a whole. If there are currently particles in the air that are reflecting sunlight and keeping temperatures lower than they would be (ah hah! could this be something else to try to "prove" that we really should be heating up, but now we realize there's yet something else keeping it from happening, but any minute now, any minute now...) and they all fall out of the air and we suddenly roast, that would suck.
About as bad as dying in an asteroid strike, smothering in unbreathable atmosphere, burning in lava, etc, etc, etc.
But whatever the manner, I just don't think it's man-made, and that there is much we could do about it anyway.
Real disaster could come to people like us, right now, in the form of a global economic collapse that kept food from reaching a city of millions of people with no room to grow their own food on a big enough scale to keep even a fraction of that population alive. Much more real to me than extinction events. And if much more likely to be fixable by humans themselves, although some human-built engines are too difficult to stop as well.
But also as GPop said (paraphrased and augmented perhaps), surviving something like that would be like winning the lottery. Maybe not the big one, but certainly a few hundred grand. I don't know anyone that's ever won that big.
