You are quite right: there are a lot of factors in the climate debate, which is to say, I think, that the science is not “settled,” as we are so often told. And you are right that we don’t know what the effect of added CO2 will be.

However, based on our geological history, including the fact that for most of the 600 million years that complex life has existed on earth CO2 levels and temperatures have been higher and sometimes much higher than today’s, I can see no reason to believe this CO2 increase will be disastrous, and it is just as likely to be beneficial given CO2’s role as a plant fertilizer.

Ultimately, though, we don’t know. It would be nice if consensus climate science would be willing to admit this so we could have the honest scientific debate that consensus climate science tries so hard to avoid. And while I know that climatologists are aware of geological history, it would also be nice if they put more weight on the geological evidence, which does not, at least in my view, support the catastrophist position.

That said, I appreciate you taking the time to write.

Paul

A scenario where gigatonnes of GHGs are pumped into the atmosphere is not a common occurrence in the geological record. But a lot of times when climate did change (and especially when major mass extinctions occurred), changes in the atmosphere’s composition appear to have preceded it.

I wrote, at the start of the article, that 26 per cent of geologists polled believe in anthropogenic warming, so one in four geologists does, while 45 per cent think warming is caused by both humans and nature, a view with which I have to agree (I think the human contribution is relatively small, perhaps 10-15 per cent, if that).

Sciaky’s experience is, however, his experience, and I think what he’s saying is that none of this friends believe warming is “man-made,” i.e., entirely caused by humanity, as the IPCC believes. So he presumably doesn’t have any friends in the 26 per cent of geologists who are full believers in AGW which, given the uniformity of views one finds in academic departments (I know this from experience), isn’t too surprising. In other words, three out of four geologists polled rejected the extreme AGW hypothesis. I wasn’t claiming, nor was Sciaky, that all geologists disagree with the hypothesis.

I think the geologists’ majority point of view can be criticized on other grounds, and if you’d care to do so, I’ll be happy to print it in the blog.

Paul

Now, please give me a more substantive criticism of the geologists’ point of view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

Curiously, the temperature graph preferred by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the famous “hockey stick,” smooths out the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age to create an impression that twentieth-century warming is “the warmest in 1,000 years” (Figure 2). Faced with the flaws in this graph, the IPCC has since dropped it and now claims the climate is the coldest in 400 years, which isn’t that impressive given that we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age.

Is coldest the correct word in the last sentence? “…is the coldest in 400 years…” Shouldn’t that be warmest?

Needless to say we were supportive and helped her in her research. I also reached out to my great-uncle who is Professor Emeritus (Geology) at Mississippi State University that is published and I trust implicitly. He responded with much of the same mentioned above, he didn’t dispute that there is evidence that the earth’s climate is warming - but we must put it in a larger context. I think today’s society is so short-sighted and accustomed to instant gratification that they can’t tolerate a bigger picture. What’s so sad, is the people getting financial reward for their “alarmism” will take credit when the earth corrects itself.

I’m afraid if we don’t start making waves and letting legislatures/governments/alarmists know that we are intelligent enough to research this - and not take their word for it, we are in for trouble.

I hope more geologists and scientists start banding together to tell these groups they don’t support their all or nothing approach!

And, unlike many others, i HAVE noticed that geologists’ views HAVE NOT been taken into account (or have been, but very lightly).

Geologists tend, by their nature, to consider time differently than bioloists or atmospheric physicists. By training, geologists think in millions of years, not hundreds or tens. No wonder then that they consider longer time scales and look back way beyond the brief time that humans have existed.