The current ice age, the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, started about 2.58 million years ago during the late Pliocene, when the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacial advances, interglacial periods, and glacial retreats.
When I came to Marshalltown 40 years ago I wrote to people that we expect 6 days of greater than 100F and six days of below zero. Our temperatures have moderated since then. We have not exceeded 100F six times in the last decade.
I have here eight temperature charts from Wikipedia. These are for periods of the last:
1. 40 years. It shows temp changing from from world average to +0.5C.
2. 150 years since end of last mini-ice age (during US Civil War) a period of modern instruments.
3. 2,000 years of well recorded history
4. 12,000 years since modern man settled in farming villages.
5. half million years – since before cave men.
6. 5 million with chimp-like predecessor of simian apes and men
7. 500 million which takes us to planetary scale
8. Is a logarithmic composite
During this period to temperature of earth varied plus or minus 6C -- for an average millennia.
For any one spot, on one cool night or hot day would have been one or two hundred degrees above or below these averages.
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System is comprised of 75% hot hydrogen plasma that provides the heat necessary for life on its planet, our Earth. When the hydrogen is exhausted, in approximately 5.4 billion years, heat output will increase. The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova : instead it will enter a red giant phase and expand to engulf the current orbits of the inner planets, possibly including Earth. Now that is global warming.
Closer to home,
From origins as sublime as the solar system to as mundane as a hamburger, the subject of temperature is somewhat involved. Sale of carbon credits, which is a way to punish productive/industrialized nations with monetary transfers to undeveloped/pastoral nations is silly in the greater scheme of things. An audit headline, "Germany Spends $110 Billion to Delay Global Warming by 37 Hours..." One might as well stop the tides as King Canute tired and proved, "heaven, earth, and sea obey but eternal laws."
Mankinds advancement cooresponds to these trials in cold and the survivors expanded in the warms. From an earth/man prespective the warm periods of growth are considered good. Except, uncontrolled growth can lead to extinction. It has in the past.
As the world continues out of the last ice age, bio-expansion of a friendlier place, albeit with a rise of sea levels, we would be better serviced by world governments in transporting dwellers in lowlands such as Bangladesh or Florida to newly green Greenland, the Dakotas and Canada or to bountiful Siberia where our forefathers once hunted elk and mammoths. That may not be sufficent for survival of mankind; other species of man have died out ; we participated in the demise of most large mammals; so that mankind needs to stop the unrestrained spread of that particular envionmental pollutent called homo sapian. Or will technology bail-out Mr. Malthus one more time?
URL : http://www.manorweb.com/creative/2013/climatechange.html
