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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People read that an ice age is coming and expect it to start next Tuesday, and when it doesn’t they think science itself is wrong. And this disparity in time frames is what makes current warming so terrifying.

Ice ages occur when the earth COOLS by around 4-6 degrees C below holocene averages. This takes a looooong time to happen. Like tens of thousands of years. Without our input, the planet was on track to slooooowly cool over the next 50,000 years.  That’s around 5 times longer than the recent Holocene epoch during which human civilization flowered.

But anthropogenic activities disrupted this process.  We are now on track to HEAT the planet by close to 4 degrees C within a couple of hundred years. That’s insanely fast. Natural systems simply cannot adapt to that.[/quote]

Exactly.  The glib comments like “climate changes all the time” drive me nuts when they leave out any mention of the magnitude and time scale involved.  Normally climate changes on slow geological time scales of thousands of years.  What we are dealing with is a clear shift that corellates perfectly in the data with the Industrial Age.  It does not relate or compare to natural events like forest fires, volcanoes or other things because we humans have literally pulled the equivalent of millions of years worth of compressed, concentrated biomass out of the ground and burned it, putting massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.  And all of that is causing heat to concentrate, in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and so on.

Anyone trying to deny this, to shrug it off, is not an honest broker.[/quote]

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