Current Events — HabitableZone

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Hansen's latest paper
TB — (archived)

Here.

It's some deep wading, at least for me.

While the connection between temperature and CO2 etc. is heavily documented, and clear from every other analysis of prehistoric data I've seen, I'm not finding anything that shows clearly that the CO2 level changes forced the temperature changes, not the other way around.

I may simply be missing it in the paper--I'm still plowing through it--but the fact remains that there are many external influences that can alter Earth's temperature over historic cycles. I can't think of anything that would suddenly spontaneously cause CO2 or CH3 to jump drastically up or down all by themselves, dragging the temperature along with them.

If it was all about the CO2, there wouldn't BE cycles. Once the CO2 was up, why wouldn't it stay there? Or slowly change over long periods of time? The cycles we see are horribly abrubt by geological time frames.

I readily concede that there is likely to be a feedback that would release more CO2 or CH3 as temperature rises (melting methane ice for example), but that doesn't explain what starts it, or even more importantly, why it suddenly decides to drop again like a rock.

This leaves another interesting question: What would climate be doing right now if there weren't any human emissions going on?

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