My question is inspired by this thread that touches on the “Medieval Warm Period”. Is the earth currently in another natural ‘warm period’? If it is so how do I, or scientists for that matter, tell the difference between natural warming and the harmful global warming caused by mankind effecting the environment detrimentally? If it is not a natural warm, again how do I tell the difference?
I don’t know if this should be here or in Great Debates, and will leave it up to the wisdom of the mods where it ends up.
It could be, or it might not be. The global climate is an infinitely complicated beast, and the problem is we’ve only been keeping detailed meteorological records of the whole world for a scant few decades.
We know that there have been warm periods and ice ages, but those phenomena occur over thousands of years, and we just don’t have the statistical data to make any kind of significant predictions or comparisons.
A factual answer to this one is going to be hard to come by. In any event, ice cores have been taken from deep in the Greenland ice cap and the trapped gasses in them analyzed. These experiments definitely show that there has been an increase in the amount of the greenhouse gasses, mainly CO[sub]2[/sub] since the inductrial revolution began and that it is accelerating.
The likely outcome is that, if it is really the operation of humanity that is causing the warming, nothing will be done until there is a crisis and then the wrong thing is just as likely as the right. Pessimistic? Sure, but it seems to be what the record shows.
Even if the warming is mainly the result of a natural cycle of warming and cooling why aggravate it with excess man-made emissions? Would a change in our ways of conducting industry cause dislocations? Sure. But so would a runaway greenhouse effect. And Ronald Reagan’s depression that helped end the inflation also caused a lot of dislocation, but he gets great kudos for it.