A Geologist Looks At Global Warming

Commenter A. Jacksonian posted the following in the comments to Not Enough CO2. He has some nice easy to understand charts and graphs at the link below.

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One of the great things about being a geologist is being able to actually get that 'long term perspective'. So, when you want a long-term perspective on climate and weather you do NOT go to meteorologists... you go to geologists. Thus, my view on global warming which still stands. Without taking the larger, geological context of things like the speed of plate tectonics, orogeny (mountain building) and the sudden loss of inland seas, no one can make any basis for discriminating between relatively short term variations in a chaotic inter-glacial period that has typically seen fast and steep temperature variations, larger global effects and the effects of mankind. CO2 levels are at a historic LOW and there is no correlation between CO2 and global temperatures except at the very low end. And even *that* does not take into account break-up of the last supercontinent and the loss of inland seas due to the continents moving faster and riding higher on the mantle.

The Earth has even had sudden, intense, glacial periods that ended just as abruptly with NO change in CO2 that was appreciable and the picking up the exact same warm period right after the glacial period.

And let us not forget that Mars is also undergoing a warming spell... so insolation also plays a part in all of this...

But that is what you get when you ask climatologists to speculate on a mere 100 years worth of data and not on 4.2 billion years worth. It is not their field.

Cross Posted at Classical Values