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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
This here dumb reneck would like y'all to explain the following things
Why things were so warm around 1000ad? Nobody was creating extra greenhouse gases then.
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There are things about the climate of the world that are not known, yet. Likely, there was a source of CO2 or methane somewhere that got released, or the Earth's orbit was wobbling close to the sun in conjunction with the summer season in the northern hemisphere.
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Why did the Maunders Minimum correlate with the Little Ice Age?
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The hypothesis on that is that the albedo of the planet went way up and there was a subsequent cooling of the polar caps, leading to an ice age. Not provable until then next occurence.
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We have had 4 Ice Ages in the last 2 million years, with big warm-ups in between. Could somebody explain why the wild cycles, and why the current period is different?
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It is here that the current hypothesis of global warming has it's biggest problem. We really don't know if the current climate fluctuation is due to the CO2 content, but there is a lot of evidence that is pointing that direction. Back when I was taking my planetary science courses in the 70's there was a concern that we might be headed into a new ice age.
The irrefutable fact is that there is climate change occuring right now. The cause may very well be due to CO2 emissions. If not entirely, then certainly in part. The case that scientists are trying to make is that there is aneed to achieve a balance between econmics and environment, if for no other reason than to not accelerate the climate change that is already happening.