The Earth is 4.54 billion years old and humans have only been on it or about 200,000 years. So in that 0.04% of the time that we've been here, how do we know what the Earth's "normal" climate is suppose to be?
by 
Payton Parker
ANSWERS: 12
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That's the problem... Earth has no NORMAL temperature. And any human alive who thinks that they will be able to control the natural cycles of Mother Nature by way of cooling the Earth is out of his mind. It is GOING TO HAPPEN. Humans will eventually be wiped from the Earth and some other creature will have it's time until the conditions change beyond what they are able to adapt to. that is the way it is and the sooner we accept that the better off we will be. Don't get me wrong: while she is allowing us to live here, there is no harm in keeping the place cleaned up and comfy for us. I'm all for recycling and reducing pollution, but lets not pretend that we are AT ALL powerful in the way of controlling what Mama Nature has in store for us.
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Too difficult for you to understand. Would it be better if I say 'cause god told me so'?
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Chanda it's nice to see somebody else pointing out the obvious. This planet has ice ages and there are fossil records in the high Arctic of tropical plants and dinosaurs. The normal climate for earth varies locally between to cold and "probable" to hot. I've been saying this since Global warming became news, most people prefer emotional hysteria to the boring facts. I doubt an outside agent will destroy the human race, I'd bet we do our selves in through stupidity.
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That's a very astute question. And even in the last 300 years the temp has changed. The fact is that the temp does shift quite a lot. That doesn't mean we shouldn't study it and try avoid causing more drastic shifts though. +5
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drilling ice and rock core samples allows scientists to evaluate many aspects of the atmosphere including CO2 and plant life over many thousands of years. Yes, it really is that dramatic an increase. By burning coal and petroleum, we are releasing the CO2 that was stored cumulatively for a million years all at once. http://www.earthsky.org/teachers/article/ancient-ice-indicates-recent-and-rapid-co2-rise
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Geological records. A lot can be deduced from, for example, fossil corals. However, it does not matter what is "normal", it matters what we are used to. Even if the climate we have become used to is "abnormal", we want it to stay that way as long as possible. It used to be "normal" for 50% of children to die before the age of five - that is not a normal I want to return to.
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We can get a pretty accurate picture of climate variations from the recent past back to 800,000 years ago. Entrapped air bubbles in the ice also show what atmospheric conditions were over that time. We have to turn to fossil and geologic evidence to look back past that. Given all that, we could come up with a "normal" temperature but as others have eloquently pointed out, that would be quite meaningless. What we are interested in is not upsetting the current climate by human activity. The past record shows that CO2 levels in the atmosphere and temperature swings are related. We're currently adding 7 billion metric tons of CO2 per year to our atmosphere. Yet strangely, the temperature in the last year has suddenly dropped rapidly. Scientists are not yet certain of why. Looking back at temperature swings, it is very likely just a short-term anomaly.
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My Environmental Geology Professor used to love this question. He said, "somehow people forget that we get most of our knowledge about the earth's history for the study of the earth's crust." We know exactly what the ice ages have been like over the last few million years. We know how long and how intense they have been. We trust NASA about space, our galaxy, and the universe, don't we? We trust Paleontologists about dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers, don't we? The experts are who we rely on for everything that "we" don't know. Why should that be any different with the Earth's climate? And when 97% of Climatologists believe global warming is happening and humans play a large role, why be in denial? Because in the end, who knows more, us or them (the experts)? http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
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ur Q brings up another issue every species has faced and almost or has become extinct, after 200K yrs it may be our time. Maybe we can't do anything about global warming and are doomed
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It should ease to ME!!!
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We know that because of the studies that were done to the earth... Also, in our 200,000 of existence, we made it pretty clear that we always f@ck up things eventually... So, by evolving, we started to need more and more raw materials from earth itself... This all started to happen when we developed the industry... Now, you put a man, who doesn't have a clue of the enviromental health or about the greenhouse effect, because it was 1850 and people weren't that smart back then, and you get a world heading for a radical change... Man existed for 200,000 and so years, and it took him only 20 to 30 years to mess up the world... and the climate...
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And that my friend is the question that puts the lie to the whole global warming hoax. Good for you for taking one moment to think it through. +3
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