What If We Burned All The World's Fossil Fuels?

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Great, you can make all the claims you want about your accreditation, I'll go by what you've stated, which is not science, it's a 40 year outdated synopsis of the Ice Age. So I'll just ask you some questions and you can throw the noose around your own neck.

You claim you're a scientist, and since scientists base their work on evidence, do you have any evidence the ice sheets are expanding and thus we're currently still in the ice age as you claim?

You claim life thrives under warm conditions. That's a pretty big broad claim, how do you explain the 100 million year Cryogenian period where bacteria proliferated under a fully frozen Earth?

You claim we're in an interstadial period (interglacial if it's the 1970's), yet all the stadial/interstadial periods we can measure occurred when the Earth had glaciers extending 40+ degrees from the poles. As far as research has determined the absolute glacial minimum (lowest the ice sheets retreated) of the last ice-age occurred 1.87 million years ago, and the ice sheets only retreated to modern day Minnesota in N.America and the Jutland in Europe, which is still 45 degrees from the north pole. Currently all northern ice sheets are within 5 degrees of the pole. So the question is: can we even still consider ourselves in an ice-age if 90% of the ice from the last MINIMUM has melted, or 95% of the last maximum?

The stadial/interstadial periods do last ~100,000 to ~10,000. Do you even know why that is? **Hint, hint, it has nothing to do with climate science, or geology. If you know the answer to that question, you can answer the following question: If we're at the most extreme part of a Milankovitch phase (which there's evidence we are), that means the Earth is at it's farthest eccentricity and maximum tilt, that would dictate the Earth should be getting colder, why then is it getting warmer?

And as an amusing follow up: Venus used to be like Earth, with a climate very similar, albeit with no evidence of water. How then, did Venus turn into a ~450 C hellhole? If you're truly a physicist, and one that actually paid attention in class you'd know there's only one plausible explanation.

In the period between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, Earth’s climate was warmer than today. But how much warmer was it and what did the warming do to global sea levels? – as we face global warming in the future, the answer to these questions is becoming very important. New research from the NEEM ice core drilling project in Greenland shows that the period was warmer than previously thought. The international research project is led by researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute and the very important results are published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen with an ice core from the Greenland ice cap. The ice cores from the NEEM project are kept in a freezer at the Niels Bohr Institute.

In the last million years the Earth’s climate has alternated between ice ages lasting about 100,000 years and interglacial periods of 10,000 to 15,000 years. The new results from the NEEM ice core drilling project in northwest Greenland, led by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen show that the climate in Greenland was around 8 degrees C warmer than today during the last interglacial period, the Eemian period, 130,000 to 115,000 thousand years ago.

Greenland ice cores reveal warm climate of the past

During the warm Eemian period there was increased melting at the edge of the ice sheet and the dynamic flow of the entire ice mass caused the ice sheet to lose mass and it was reduced in height. The ice mass was shrinking at a very high rate of 6 cm per year. But despite the warm temperatures, the ice sheet did not disappear and the research team estimates that the volume of the ice sheet was not reduced by more than 25 percent during the warmest 6,000 years of the Eemian.

During the latter half of the 20th century, the Earth warmed significantly. But if this was due to carbon dioxide then why has the carbon dioxide level measured at Mauna Loma Observatory in Hawaii risen from 367 ppm (parts per million) in 1998 to 406 ppm in 2017 or approximately a 10.6% increase while at the same time the lower atmosphere global temperature using the most accurate measurements (UAH satellite temperature dataset) basically flatlined over that time period. This is almost a 20 year period. Why has global warming paused?

When you look at the present Interglacial called the Holocene, the temperatures were higher near the beginning of the interglacial, long before man had any appreciable effect on carbon dioxide levels.

In Greenland, during the Early Holocene maximum (between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago) sedimentary chironomid assemblages indicate peak July temperatures 4.0 to 7.0 °C warmer than modern [1952-2014]. This was at a time when CO2 concentrations hovered around 260 ppm.

And then if you go back to the previous interglacial, the Eemian, chaoborus and chironomids in LIG [the last interglacial] sediments indicate July temperatures at least 5.5 to 8.5 °C warmer than modern.

Pronounced summer warming in northwest Greenland during the Holocene and Last Interglacial

As a scientist you should have a better grasp of how a feedback loop operates, namely that's it's not an instant effect, therefore the point is moot. As you yourself alluded in your first post, changes to the Earth's climate take lots of time, generations was your exact term. Why are we now limiting it to a small 20 year snapshot when we have data that goes back 2.7 million years? Seems a bit SELECTIVE doesn't it?


Yes, this is the aforementioned interstadial, that's a natural earth cycle based on the Earth's wobble, tilt, and eccentricity. The same warming can be seen every 100k years with ice-core oxygenation samples. There's no disagreement there, so I don't even see what the point is. And it still doesn't explain the 1.6 C increase in temperatures we've seen since the age of industrialization. If we were in a normal ice age phase we'd have entered a stadial (freezing phase) by now, but the temperature is still going up.



From the same synopsis:
Translation: it's a very small data set we're working with, which means it could be fraught with errors, proceed at your own risk.

This Canadian program also contains some crucial information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFfuHmrW2gc

Presently the atmosphere of Venus has around 965,000 parts per million (by volume) of Carbon Dioxide and the Earth has around 406 parts per million as of 2017. The are really at opposite ends of the spectrum. Therefore a better question is why does Venus have an atmosphere so dense in carbon dioxide?

Now I suspect that you are not going to say that animal and plant life existed on the planet in the distant past and produced fossil fuels and then intelligent life evolved on Venus and figured out how to harness these fossil fuels into energy and thereby releasing carbon dioxide as a byproduct into the atmosphere.

So Aristophanes, what has caused the carbon dioxide levels to explode on Venus?

One of the theories to explain the variation of temperature and climate on Earth is the Milankovitch theory. [The term is named for Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. In the 1920s, he hypothesized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit resulted in cyclical variation in the solar radiation reaching the Earth, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced climatic patterns on Earth.] I am not a strong proponent of this theory primarily because it fails to explain the very rapid transitions between glacial and interglacial states (and between interglacial and glacial states).

In the Cambrian Period which began around 500 million years ago, life exploded on Earth. According to Wikipedia "The Cambrian marked a profound change in life on Earth; prior to the Cambrian, the majority of living organisms on the whole were small, unicellular and simple; the Precambrian Charnia being exceptional. Complex, multicellular organisms gradually became more common in the millions of years immediately preceding the Cambrian, but it was not until this period that mineralized—hence readily fossilized—organisms became common. The rapid diversification of lifeforms in the Cambrian, known as the Cambrian explosion, produced the first representatives of all modern animal phyla. Phylogenetic analysis has supported the view that during the Cambrian radiation, metazoa (animals) evolved monophyletically from a single common ancestor: flagellated colonial protists similar to modern choanoflagellates."

So the period that you are referring to precedes this explosion of life on the planet.

Cryogenian Period, was the second of three periods of the Neoproterozoic Era of geologic time, extending from approximately 720 million to approximately 635 million years ago. There are Two competing hypotheses—“Snowball Earth” (which posits that Earth’s surface was completely covered in ice) and “Slushball Earth” (which posits that at least some portion of the planet was covered by a thin icy film that solar radiation could penetrate)—have arisen to explain how life could survive and evolve in such a harsh setting. In the Snowball Earth hypothesis, life is thought to have survived near hydrothermal vents, in meltwater ponds near volcanoes, or in shallow marine areas where light for photosynthesis penetrated through cracks in the ice. According to the Slushball Earth hypothesis, photosynthetic organisms thrived in small areas of open water or in areas covered by slushy transparent ice.
Cryogenian Period

Aristophanes, I don't mind discussion the global warming theory with you. But is that how you prevail in scientific discussion by employing "ad hominem" attacks and intimidation?

During the discussion I have provided several links where the information I cited can be found. I haven't seen much from you on reference links.

Actually that is not quite true. We do not have temperature data that goes back 2.7 million years. Early thermometers came into use in the 1700's [Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was the German physicist who invented the alcohol thermometer in 1709, and the mercury thermometer in 1714. In 1724, he introduced the standard temperature scale that bears his name - Fahrenheit Scale - that was used to record changes in temperature in an accurate fashion.] And accurate satellite measurements [UAH dataset] only extends back to around 1979. Generally we have a perception of temperature using a variety of proxy methods. Sometimes combining a variety of different proxy methods can refine these estimates.

In discussing the global warming pause, I am not limiting the timeframe. Several years ago when I began discussing the pause with proponents of the man-made global warming theory. They defined weather as something that was short term in nature but to discuss climate one needed to look at a longer picture - 5 years. But it was funny that whenever there was a heatwave or drought somewhere in the world, it was due to global warming but if there was a major snowfall or extreme cold event, that is was nothing more than simple weather. As time went on and the pause continued and surpassed the 10 year mark, then the discussion was based on weather being short term, less than 10 years, and climate greater than 10 years. Then as the pause continued to 15 years, the measuring yardstick to differentiate weather from climatic events became 15 years. Well now we are nearing the 20 year mark. So my main point is that we have witnessed a 10.6 percent increase in CO2 but rising temperatures have for the most part leveled off.

That could have almost been something I would have written.

I'd have called it the Quarternary Glaciation, but both are accepted terms. Nobody really knows how long it will last -- it could be tens of millions of years or even longer. Ice ages are long term affairs.

I never did understand why so many people are compelled to assume the worst and to make up whatever they need to make it even worse.

A warmer planet is a productive planet. When we cool off, we are going to see starvation on levels that are nearly unimagineable.

What is it when we are in favor of global warming?

A warmer Earth is a more productive Earth. It can support more life.

The disaster is a cooler Earth. Even during the relatively small temperature declines of the Little Ice Age, the lower temperatures had profound effects on the productivity of the Earth.

a warmer earth is also a more violent earth. one picks one's poison, I suppose.

Why would it be more violent if warmer? I suspect that the violence will escalate greatly once the Earth cools down for the next glaciation as people fight over the inevitable rapidly dwindling resources.