beware climate alarmists, page-2

I'd like to debunk this here and now because this sort of misinformation is totally counter-productive, IMHO.

This guy says: "Climate alarmists declare that man's energy use is increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate warming (one degree Fahrenheit over the last century). They further project that Earth's temperature will increase dramatically in the near future and lead to world catastrophe.

Worldwide warming of this magnitude would be a radical and unlikely deviation from the previous century and has little scientific merit. Temperature proxy measurements going back hundreds of thousands of years through many ice ages and warm periods indicate atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to be a result of temperature change and not a cause."

Here's my take after some research. I did this research some time ago because I wanted to form my own view after reading some of the misinformation like the above being ciculated around...

The earth orbits the sun in an eccentric, elliptical orbit. These eccentricities have cycles of the order of 28,000 years and 41,000 years. The result of these eccentricities is heating and cooling of the earth in approximately 100,000 and 50,000 year cycles. These cycles are called Milankovitch cycles. They correspond to glacial (ice age) and interglacial (warm age) periods. As the planet starts to warm up after an ice age, due to a Milankovitch warming cycle, the oceans start to expire ('breath out') large amounts of CO2 (the oceans are vast repositories of dissolved CO2 and this is apparently a normal response to the oceans warming up). The vastness of the oceans means they take hundreds of years to start heating up so the CO2 expiration lags behind the rising atmospheric temperature. As the CO2 concentration increases in the earth's atmosphere a positive feedback loop is created and the atmospheric temperature increases even further until the next Milankovitch cycle ice age. The end result is an observed lag of about 800 years or so between when the temperature starts to rise and the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.

(These facts can be easily checked at sites like Wikipedia or in the relevant reference books if you don't trust Wikipedia.)

This explains why CO2 has not driven climate change over geological time periods.

The difference now is that human beings are pumping large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, so it is now the man-made CO2 that is driving climate change.

It is unfortunate that people like Gary M. Hoover who is supposedly a "physicist and a consultant with research and operational experience in atmospheric energy absorption, nuclear reactor operations and exploration geophysics" are spreading this dangerous misinformation. I suspect if we delved deeper we would see that he is on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.