Global Warming vs. Natural Climate Patterns?

Question

The Milankovitch cycles can predict future climate patterns over the long term. The changes are gradual, over thousands of years.

Even though the warming in the last couple decades is only by a degree or so, it is still WAY too fast to be accounted for by natural climate patterns alone.

My question is, why on earth does anyone still think the slight warming we have experienced is due to natural weather patterns?

Most of you are completely ignoring the Milankovitch cycles which PROVE that the current warming trend is NOT natural.

Answer 1

People think that the current global warming is due to natural factors because they want to believe it, pure and simple. All the scientific evidence proves otherwise:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6290228.stm
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

But global warming deniers don't have any respect for scientific evidence. They'll repeat the same old debunked lies and myths because they want to believe that humans are not causing global warming.

Basically, they're irrational people, and irrational people will find a way to believe what they want to believe. You see the evidence right here - 'climatologists are all in on one big hoax', 'Greenland used to be green', 'the data is unreliable', 'global warming data is selective'. They'll believe anything as long as it leads to the conclusion that humans aren't causing global warming.

Answer 2

Interglacial periods still demonstrate minor variations independent of Milankovitch cycles. The most recent period of mild glaciation, the Little Ice Age, was one such variation, as was the warming period just prior.

We are only talking 0.7 C temperature increase in the last 150 years since the end of the Little Ice Age. This is NOT a Milankovitch-induced variation. If it were, it'd be a lot more than a fraction of a degree. But that does not mean it is unnatural.

Revisit your information regarding these cycles, I'm sure that you'll find that the theories leave a lot of room for other cyclic and non-cyclic variations in between the major cycles that run in the tens of thousands of degrees.

Answer 3

THANK YOU!!! you are one of the few people i have heard talk about Milankovitch cycles intelligently....thank you thank you thank you..... i have been preaching for so long that we are coming out of a warmer interglacial period and SHOULD BE COOLING, so any sign of warming no matter if it is small or large is an area of concern.....i am with you on this one if you know milankovitch cycles you can see what is going on and thats what we need to show people....

I think the response to these cycles is so low because this is the main arguement of the deniers...after the IPCC report came out no one can deny that it is happening so they resorted to "ok its happening but its not us its natural" BS!!!!....now that we start to explain the real "unnatural" aspect of it we are proving what we have been saying the whole time....the deniers put so much stock in saying it was natural, ignorance and arrogance are keeping them from admitting they are wrong....

thank you for bringing this into the forum....you get a star!

Answer 4

First of all, there is no way to prove that this "way too fast" warming has never happened before. You may say that GENERALLY this is not the case, but you cannot say it never happened. Scientists researching weather patterns millions of years ago cannot refine their results the a precision to a few decades, any more than scientists can be more precise than saying the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. What is that an accuracy of?.....a few MILLION years???? Overall historical weather patterns may be "gradual" to the extent that we can find evidence of them. But we cannot know about very short-term changes like the one we are seeing now. Scientists cannot prove that this "global warming" is man-made....no matter how strongly they may suspect it.

Answer 5

The Milankovitch cycles can not "prove" (a very unscientific word) anything, since it is a theory.
Study the philosophy of science (there is a brief intro on wiki that is decent) then consider the wording you have chosen.

Answer 6

If the accuracy to the response of the hypothesis could be validated and not a consensus (agreement), then there would be no non-consensus. I would like to use scientific terms, but the debate on global warming is more along the lines of "Is there WMD's in Irag". Did you agree with Bush? He used the same logic. CONSENSUS !

Q. How can temperatures be measured to 1/10th of a degree?
A. They weren't. That type of measurement accuracy was capable until the advent of the transistor.

Q How many location contribute to temp measurement?
A Prior to 1860 - "0"
by 1970 - 4000
current - unknown with most being calculate by algorithm which change every 5 years

Q How is each measurement system for each time period validated?

A They are not.

My answer to your question is " If you think, you have to question the very premise of the global warming argument"

Answer 7

"The Milankovitch theory of climate change is not perfectly worked out; in particular, the largest observed response is at the 100,000 year timescale, but the forcing is apparently small at this scale, in regard to the ice ages. Various feedbacks (from carbon dioxide, or from ice sheet dynamics) are invoked to explain this discrepancy"

Answer 8

We _know_ that the slight warming recently begun is a part of the natural climate cycle because of the myriad ice cores that provide evidence of such cycles for thousands of years past.
We _know_ because in recorded history, Greenland was .....green!.... _AND_ being farmed.

We _know_ because.......


HUMANS CANNOT CONTROL THE WEATHER!

Addendum: Gee, I just looked at the Milankovitch cycle chart and THERE IS NO MEAN CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE INDICATED!
The cycles cycle on a regular basis and we are headed for the peak of one of the warming periods.

Answer 9

Global Warming believers narrow their data to just the last 100 years. Over this time yes, there has been a slight warming trend. The alarmist then tie this slight warming trend to the industrial era, making industrialization the cause of any so-called warming.

But why just 100 years? That's less than a blink of an eye in the time frame of the planet. Go back to 1800, and you will find that the temps today are sightly cooler then they were back then.

Remember your history when hundreds of British solders died from the heat during a march on Baltimore during the war of 1812? Without that stroke of luck we could have been a British colony once again.

Global warming forces 'scientist' to select the data they need to fit their pre conceived theory.

Answer 10

As T-Monster says, it's mostly in the time frame: decades or centuries versus tens of thousands or millions of years. You also have the rate of extinctions going on, loss of habitat, etc. Those things have happened before, but only over much longer time spans. The Permian extinction was the closest of anything in geologic history to what is happening now, and it took 9000 years.