Article Tags: Comment, You could not make it up
This very silly report in the Times gives an insight how “cause and effect” have been mixed up so that CO2 drives the climate. I have extracted the following to show the struggle in making the analysis fit the facts i.e. the “effect is the cause”: These people call themselves scientists! Oh boy, oh boy, have they got it wrong!
…..The British Isles are among the regions most strongly affected by ice ages. Over the past 700,000 years they have been deserted and resettled by humans about a dozen times, according to researchers at London’s Natural History Museum. Humans last returned only 11,500 years ago.
Another puzzle is why ice ages started, but this is closer to resolution with massive changes in atmospheric CO2 levels being the main suspect. Last year scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, used ocean sediments to plot CO2 levels over the past 20m years. They found that, at the start of that period, volcanic eruptions raised the levels of CO2 in the air to about 400 parts per million, pushing global temperatures up to several degrees higher than they are now. As CO2 levels fell to between 180ppm and 280ppm, the world cooled and the ice ages set in.
Could Europe and North America once again be threatened by an ice age? In theory yes, but humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions have probably deferred such a freeze for many millenniums. CO2 levels are already close to those of 20m years ago and could be significantly higher within a few decades. Most climate scientists predict a global temperature increase of several degrees within the next century.
Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey commented yesterday: “The work by Larry Edwards and colleagues to put a precise date on the end of ice ages as seen in the Chinese caves is a great advance, because it lets us get a first look at the absolute timing of the different events at the end of ice ages. It gives very strong support to the idea that the orbital changes really do ‘pace’ the so-called ‘glacial terminations’.”
There were still questions to be asked about the effects that changing levels of sunshine have on ice sheets, he said, but “we have made great strides in understanding this problem”. He added: “I think we can be very sure that, with CO2 levels already 30% higher than at any time in the previous 800,000 years, there is no chance of a new ice age any time soon.