One of the great benefits of geology is that it teaches you not to overlook things and to really examine your data to make sure you understand what it is telling you. And even if you can figure out what the data *is* telling you, then you have to fit it within the processes that can get it to that condition. So one may have the absolute low-down on the data, and say that it has a high degree of correlation, but not having the process behind it will make the hypothesis fail. Wegener was right in his hypothesis of continents not being in fixed positions, but without a process he was derided for the idea. In the 1950’s the WWII submarine warfare data for the Atlanatic would show anomolies in magnetism that were exactly repeated on either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge… that led to the International Geophysical Year and the final bringing together of plate tectonics for the movement of continents and explaining anomolies that had shown up for nearly a century in every other proposed mechanism.

Uniformitarianism reigned supreme, save for these little things known as ‘extinction events’, which required a re-thinking of climate and climate change and volcanism. But even all of *that* still left anomolies as the echelon analysis (think of insurance industry actuarial tables for how many individuals in a given age cohort are left over time) for the sauropods indicated that the extinction event at 65 MYA was really drastic as by standard analysis there would still be megafauna in large numbers wandering around today. Throw in a father and son team looking at the boundry clay that no one wanted to analyze for *decades* and suddenly the evidence points to a non-uniformitarian event for the planet, but a perfectly understood and uniformitarian event for the solar system: an asteroid hit the planet. Happens all the time, although *size does matter*. Then the anomolous data starts to fit, like the single lineage of forams that got through the event while their multitudinous cousins did not. So is uniformitarianism *right*? Depends on the time scale and size scale. Global warming? On the time scale since the beginning of life on Earth, well, its pretty chilly now and the chaotic interglacial temperature change regimes all point to the fact that something will happen to suddenly bring temps down again. Not enough thermal resources to keep things warm…that is because of those deep oceans that don’t change temperature much, as opposed to those vast, balmy, shallow seas of 70 million years ago. Those were the days!

Check your long range forecast for details, and expected longevity of current plate movement.

Whoops, I should have read your global warming link above first. You had already answered most of my questions.

Wow, and thanks! You write very well. That gave me a good glimpse of the background to recent Myr scale climate. It helps put a number of things I have been reading about (particularly coal) in perspective. Have you ever met, or are you, in fact, perhaps Michael Crichton? ;-}

This thread is likely dead, but I am curious what you might think of this paper by Dr Daniel H Rothman:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/7/4167.pdf

which has a graph in Fig 4 that correlates inferred CO2 levels over 500 Myr with known cool periods.

I am inferring from this graph/paper that there is not a good correlation for long scale climate between atmospheric CO2 and warm/cool periods. In fact we seem to have been reducing atmospheric CO2 long term (I am not sure how to scale the papers CO2 ‘pressure’ to your CO2 ppm).

Also, it looks like we are in the early stages of the current warm cycle, assuming the long term geologic factors you presented don’t shift that much – and – assuming that CO2 is not a dominant climate driver. We should have 10-15Kyr remaining before the next ice age if the dominant drivers remain consistent.

Which is good for us as an ice age would be much harder to adapt to than a 2-4 degree warming, even one that increased sea level by 3-5 meters.

I did look at global warming previously, and as a geologist, find much higher correlation with plate tectonics and continental configuration than with carbon dioxide for global temperature. About 70 million years ago the continents started to move faster, due to unknown factors in the core of the planet and heat transmission. That had the effect of speeding up crustal movement, which allows the less dense continents to ride higher than the oceanic crustal material. That rise in the continents drained the large, shallow seas over much of them into their deeper basins, thus changing the stored energy system of Rock 3 from the star Sol.

This single change also started to move Antractica into a polar position, which is very rare in Earth’s history and gave it a heat sink which drastically altered the heat retention system of the planet: It got a permenent cold place to let heat escape into space. Global temperatures started to fall due to these things.

Other effects are also seen, like increased volcanic activity due to subduction of oceanic plates. Apparently more ‘hot spots’ started to appear and give the planet more volcanos that way, including some of the megacaldera makers that started to show up around that era.

At Continental plate boundaries that were colliding, seas got squeezed out and when the continental crusts hit, they got squeezed together. The Himalayas are *still* growing upwards due to the Indian sub-continent pushing into Eurasia. The Rocky Mountains were also effected by this, as seen by the embedded river systems of the Green and Colorado rivers.

A final kicker was a nice sized boloid about 10km across hitting the planet. It was not a good time to be an organism over 15 kg in size as you would not make it through that event, at 65 million years ago. Since then, having lost those lovely, warm heat retaining, shallow seas, having the thermostat pushed down by the boloid and having a nice, new heat sink, Rock 3 has experienced glacial periods with intermittent warming times, that have high variability within a cool temperature range. That is typical of interglacial periods: rapid swings in temperature, globally, but within a confined range that is generally warmer than the glaciation period, but much, much colder than the previous Cretaceous period.

Can we get back to those balmy days of 70 million years ago with only changing carbon dioxide? And methane? And water vapor? Probably not… those all reached maximums in the Carboniferous when carbond dioxide was around 7,000 ppm and calcium carbonate rock deposited via chemistry and animal activity, like with foraminfera. You see a *lot* of coal beds and calcium carbonate beds from this timeframe, both indicative of taking carbon *out* of the atmosphere. Our current 300 ppm +/- 15% is a long way from those hazy, lazy days of high methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor… all of which saw a relatively stable global temperature 14 degrees higher than it is now. Actually, once the continents aren’t moving fast and we have vast, shallow seas and low volcanic activity, that seems to be the regular temperature of the planet.

That higher energy from the core is released through these mechanisms, but it doesn’t much impact climate which is guided by these factors which are a way of releasing heat. Such pretty volcanos, though! But not worth it for the hot gasses that cool extremely quickly, hot extruded material which cools quickly and the hot particulates that cool very quickly.

Want to raise the temps? Stop the plates from moving after re-uniting Gondwanaland and getting Antarctica out of the deep freeze. And then flooding most of the continental lowlands as they slowly settle down and behave themselves. Like NOLA, but with 1 km more water added. Then you get nice, shallow seas retaining energy from the sun and higher global temps. Of course the Rockies turn into ‘coastal areas’ but well worth it for stable temps and removing glacial periods.

Bad planet!

As for us that live on the crust, the long term forecast is: sudden temperature swings, with a relatively narrow temperature band for some short duration and then sudden, long-lasting cold spells with 1.5 km high continental glaciers and the temperate zone shifting to the equator during those times. Check the 5 million year forecast to find out when this will end and the good old days return…

Of course it’s stable. That is what you get when you use ice core samples. It is also low. This is all explained in a recent paper by Jaworowski.

Was there another alternative to ice cores? Yup there was. There are 90,000 air sample data points since 1812 illustrated in a soon to be released paper by Ernst Beck. CO2 readings in the mid 500’s were common in the 1800’s. !940’s had readings in the 400’s.

The whole story of AGW is just that, a fairytale.

P.S. Here’s a rewrite of Al’s movie’s theme song.

I agree! If you’d like to continue you can shoot me mail at my name at theinvisiblecollege.com

Otherwise, have a great day and thanks for holding a sane debate as opposed to ranting