Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
Global Temperatures over Time

Yes, we are in a period of global warming.

Yes, we are substantially warmer and trending warmer than an any point in the Common Era of human history (CE, formerly AD).

Yes, the degree of warming being experienced can have a notable, even profound, impact on our daily existence and not all that far in the future.

No, it is not the hottest it has ever been. We have yet to reach the temperature spike experienced 110 thousand years ago by our prehistoric ancestors.
The Eemian is a time with one of the strongest orbital forcing over the Arctic region (Milankovitch cycle) for the last million years which means that Greenland is experiencing a significant warming. Thus a strong feedback occurred with decreasing sea ice and albedo, which further amplify the warming. In addition, there was significant change in ocean circulation resulting from this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05314-1
https://skepticalscience.com/LIG2-1906.html

This is actually not the case for the current warming since insolation over the Arctic region peaked during the Holocene Climate Optimum and is decreasing for millennia:
https://twitter.com/dan613/status/12...524096/photo/1
https://twitter.com/dan613/status/12...323073/photo/2

Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
Our global temperature is substantially lower than it was 5+ million years past. (To be fair, the sediment records on this have huge variance swings in any short term segment, and it should be acknowledged that global cooling appears to have stopped and/or slightly reversed in the past 500k years).

We have MUCH better and more complete data of the last 50 years than of the preceding 100, than of the preceding 1000. These shorter time-frame tools do correlate strongly with an anthropomorphic explanation of the current warming trend, but we lack near equivalent data from the deep past that could establish anthropomorphic causality without demur by explaining how this warming is different than preceding ones as to cause. This is the source, ultimately, of those arguing rationally that the anthropomorphic explanation is flawed. It does not, of course, explain the larger number of climate-change detractors who are shouting 'anti-capitalist-conspiracy-theory' from the depths of their own ignorance.

Sadly, we can only drag the mid-point of the intelligence bell curve upwards, not eliminate the negative standard deviation side of the curve.
Just a point about the causality of the current warming, this is not something we know from palaeoclimatology or by any comparison with the past. This is something we can observe physically. We see the greenhouse effect rising and we see the trigger being the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

First direct observation of carbon dioxide's increasing greenhouse effect
https://phys.org/news/2015-02-carbon...se-effect.html

Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997
https://www.researchgate.net/publica..._1970_and_1997

Radiative forcing ‐ measured at Earth's surface ‐ corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley....9/2003GL018765

Global atmospheric downward longwave radiation over land surface under all‐sky conditions from 1973 to 2008
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley....9/2009JD011800

Simple measurements demonstrate that CO2 is a greenhouse gas contrary to claim in online blogs
https://climatefeedback.org/claimrev...-gas-tim-ball/

Analysis: Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis...-due-to-humans