If current Global warming is man's fault who's fault was the Global warming that ended the ice ages?

Question

I cannot remember how many times the globe has warmed and cooled prior to man's existance - so why now blame what before was a natural phenomena on man?

someof you have written that man has speeded gloabl warming up, I do not know how we could guage whether it was quicker of slower that the ice ages of millions of years ago. No records exist.

Answer 1

Great quiestion....

It isn't man's fault, it happens in roughly 15,000-29,000 year cycles.

What is our fault is that we are accelerating the process, but all that means is that we are probably shaving off a 1000 years off the process: it will happen anyway.

In nature there is a very famous term called a 'tipping point' one thing that happens that gets the whole snowball rolling: whether that is a meteor, a volcano (the most likely answer is the massive volcano that lives under the ice at the South Pole: the scientists can't get at it but are pooping themselves about that one)...or whatever, one big thing will happen.

All man is doing is moving the earth through the cycle quicker, we still await the 'tipping point' before the next cataclismic event happens....

Answer 2

one of the more acceptable theories regarding the occurrence of the ice age is connected to hypotheses regarding the extinction of the dinosaurs. one of these theories state that the dinosaurs became extinct because a large meteor or asteroid crashed into the earth.

now, why would something like that make the dinosaurs go extinct? i mean, one meteor can't possibly hit every dinosaur there were at once (or if it could, the sheer size of it should have disintegrated the earth).

the accepted answer is that the impact of the meteor caused a large amount of debris and dust to rise into the atmosphere, clouding the sun's rays for quite some time. this resulted in altered climates, and thus the ice age. in this paradigm, the meteor wasn't really what killed the dinosaurs, but their lack of adaptability to a sudden large-scale shift in climate.

if this was the case, then global warming as we know it isn't at fault with the passing of the ice age. the debris and dust that caused the ice age would just have naturally settled after some time, and the sun's rays would eventually (and naturally) bring the earth's climate back to normal again.

Answer 3

I don't know how many people really believe that it is all man's fault, but that is incorrect. We know that there are trends and as we follow those trends we are beginning to see within the last few centuries that the trends are becoming more sever. No one has been able to place a specific amount of blame on any one substance, but they have been able to identify the substances that lead us to that trend and have outlawed in the US many types of freon and other very destructive chemicals. The earth has been able to dampen the effects of the changes that man places upon it to a certain extent by melting polar ice caps and by warming up so more plants can grow to take care of some of the CO2, but we are creating these destructive elements too fast. When we do hit another bad spot in the earths cycle our contributions will make it even worse.

Answer 4

Ice ages may have occurred from catastrophic events on earth, like a meteor or volcanic eruption or maybe changes of the sun's energy reaching the earth. The latest news of the cause of ice ages are outlined here: http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050330_earth_tilt.html

Global warming is a little different, but indirectly related.There are ways of knowing the earth's ancient climate with regards to average temperatures using chemical analysis of ice cores from the poles. We are now in a state of the highest know average temperatures of the earth known to science. It is predicted that CO2 concentrations correlate perfectly with average temperature. The CO2, and greenhouse gases are rising at alarmingly accelerated rates and average temperature are predicted to rise. This will cause dangerous changes to human populations throughout the planet.

Of course, humans have been on earth for at least 3 million years. Now the population of humans is about 6.5 billion. There is no doubt that humans are influencing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Humans are responsible for the current peak in the earths average temperature. Although the earth has a natural global climate change, current climate changes are seriously a result of the human population.

Answer 5

From wikipedia:

Pre-human global warming

The Earth has experienced natural global warming and cooling many times in the past, and can offer useful insights into present processes. It is thought by some geologists that a rapid buildup of greenhouse gases caused the Earth to experience global warming in the early Jurassic period, with average temperatures rising by 5 °C (9.0 °F). Research by the Open University published in Geology (32: 157–160, 2004 [63]) indicates that this caused the rate of rock weathering to increase by 400%. As such weathering locks away carbon in calcite and dolomite, carbon dioxide levels dropped back to normal over roughly the next 150,000 years.

Sudden releases of methane from clathrate compounds (the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis), have been hypothesized as a cause for other past global warming events, including the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. However, warming at the end of the last glacial period is thought not to be due to methane release [64]. Instead natural variations in the Earth's orbit are believed to have triggered the retreat of ice sheets by changing the amount of solar radiation received at high latitude and led to deglaciation.

The greenhouse effect is also invoked to explain how the Earth made it out of the Snowball Earth period 600 million years ago. During this period all silicate rocks were covered by ice, thereby preventing them from combining with atmospheric carbon dioxide. The atmospheric carbon dioxide level gradually increased until it reached level that could have been as much as 350 times current levels. At this point temperatures were raised enough to melt the ice, even though the reflective ice surfaces had been reflecting most sunlight back into space. Increased amounts of rainfall would quickly wash the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and thick layers of abiotic carbonate sediment have been found on top of the glacial rocks from this period.

Using paleoclimate data for the last 500 million years Veizer et al. (2000, Nature 408, pp. 698-701) concluded that long-term temperature variations are only weakly related to carbon dioxide variations. Most paleoclimatologists believe this is because other factors, such as continental drift and mountain building have larger effects in determining very long term climate. However, Shaviv and Veizer (2003, [65]) proposed that the biggest long-term influence on temperature is actually the solar system's motion around the galaxy, and the ways in which this influences the atmosphere by altering the flux of cosmic rays received by the Earth. Afterwards, they argued that over geologic times a change in carbon dioxide concentrations comparable to doubling pre-industrial levels, only results in about 0.75 °C (1.3 °F) warming rather than the usual 1.5-4.5 °C (2.7–8.1 °F) reported by climate models [66]. They acknowledge (Shaviv and Veizer 2004) however that this conclusion may only be valid on multi-million year time scales when glacial and geological feedback have had a chance to establish themselves.

Paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman has argued (e.g. Scientific American, March 2005) that human influence on the global climate actually began around 8,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. In his opinion, this prevented carbon dioxide (and later methane) levels falling as rapidly as they would have done otherwise. Ruddiman argues that without this effect, the Earth would be entering, or already have entered, a new ice age. However other work in this area (Nature 2004) argues that the present interglacial is most analogous to the interglacial 400,000 years ago that lasted approximately 28,000 years, in which case there is no need to invoke the spread of agriculture for having delayed the next ice age.

The wikipedia article below is an excellent overview of the global warming issue and is well worth reading in its entirety.

Answer 6

that is true that the earth warms and cools naturally, exactly why I do not know, but geographical history shows some evident of this, how i dont know, just read/heard it somewhere.
BUT, because of the explosion of co2 emissions within the last hundred years the global temperture as been rising faster than NORMAL. the co2 emissions are speeding the process of this natural effect and of course anytime when you disturb nature on a grand scale nothing good comes from it.

Answer 7

You can see in the graph in the source below that CO2 levels have gone up in the last 100 years way more than any natural peaks for the last 400,000 years. That is our fault.

Answer 8

I'm no scientist.
But I guess it originated from outer space substance like the meteor...or super volcano....
I believe it's nature-made... :)

Answer 9

warming is a natural occurrence but we as dumb/ greedy humans want to speed it up and bring it to levels that may be irreversible

Answer 10

All the civilizations that were here before us.