Yes, that sort of continent configuration has kept us in an icehouse period as compared with the hothouse period of the Cretaceous, but there is a lot of room for variation on top of that. The difference between a glacial period and an interglacial period is substantial. So there can be enough change based on other things.
And looking at for instance the Vostok cores, it appears like the very fastest changes in this period are barely at the rate of what we’re expecting and starting to see now. Not to mention that we didn’t have agriculture-based civilizations trying to live through the others; indeed, we only know that people were able to survive them, not how much damage they might have done to sedentary communities.
So I don’t see any reason why these old changes pertain to how much we should worry about the current rapid change, and what it is expected to do and in some cases already doing. So it’s a red herring. And as far as the next glacial period goes, if it is anything like the last one the change will be so much slower than what we’re doing now that forestalling it would be trivial in comparison, especially since we now know how to warm the planet.
As far as more reliably controlling climate goes, I agree, it would be very nice to be able to do. If you actually thought it was so complex that you won’t even trust the one control we do understand now, though, I have no idea why you’d put faith in our ability to use better ones any time soon.
…that graph you included shows a shorter time scale. And when Watt does show a longer time scale, he does exactly what my chart showed: cherry-pick a single decrease within an over-all increase, with no effort to show it isn’t the result of picking extreme years - a sort of disingenuity that is routine for him, by the way.
And if you actually look at the longer time scale like you just suggested, without cutting it up, you would notice the trend over the whole century is an increase. The only way you get any cooling is if you’re willing to move back to a shorter time scale, in which case you notice the escalator after 1970. So no, the over-all cooling you’re describing does not even follow from your own source.
I did (not quite sure why the link wasn’t working) and while I suppose there weren’t questions per se, he does give some tasks that could be expected of actual global warming skeptics. The reason we trust Einstein, you know, is that he had a pretty developed model, and it turned out to give good results.
But who’s analogous to him in this case? Like I said, I’ve never seen anyone try to explain the climate, or model the effects of increased carbon dioxide, that didn’t end up with AGW. Has there been any alternative? Bueller?
Yeah, your claim that this is all about group politics is just more unsubstantiated words in other people’s mouths, and possibly more projection at that.
Because I’m defending work because I do understand it, if only in part. Not enough to duplicate in full, to be sure, but enough to see what principles it is based on, and see how little criticisms of it actually manage to address. And I’m happy to tear down people, not when they disagree with the popular point of view, but when they dismiss it based on disingenuous arguments.
I don’t need a mouse when I have the actual literature to look at; I don’t need to do all the work first hand when I can tell that only one theory has anything to substantiate it. Like I said, I would happily look at a competing model, but nobody has offered any. Instead I get cherry-picked trendlines with no reason for their limits, and I understand more than enough to know why those deserve my contempt.
I do the same thing with evolution, even though I don’t quite understand all the genetics and population statistics involved. But were you really just talking about ME? The reference to cults was that the “global warming cultists don’t want to publish all their data”; you expect me to believe that’s not supposed to refer to researchers? You could at least be honest about what you’re saying.
