Quote:
Originally Posted by Arragonis
Sorry guys but the wheels are coming off this, please carry on if you like though.  |
Sorry yourself :-) The problem here is that you don't bother to understand the fairly simple physics at work in that feedback cycle. Or perhaps the problem is more that you deliberately refuse to understand the physics at work, since that would blow your facile word games to tiny bits.
Simply put (you can find much better explanations in any good reference), there is X amount of CO2 in what we might call the geosphere (atmosphere + oceans + biosphere). That amount is virtually constant across multi-million year time scales: sometimes more is dissolved in the ocean (when orbital cycles move into a cooling phase), which in turn reenforces the cooling. Sometimes more is in the atmosphere, which adds to warming. But all this only happens within limits of cycles, dictated by orbital movements and the fixed amount of CO2. (And over longer periods, by things like the movement of continents.) It's really no different than the smaller scale annual CO2 cycle: one phase of the orbital cycle produces northern hemisphere warming, which causes CO2 uptake. The opposite phase produces cooling, and release of CO2.
But what humans are doing now - adding more CO2 to the system by burning fossil fuels - is something completely outside these normal cycles. Since it hasn't happened before (except, arguably, at the PT extinction), the only guide to the consequences is physics.