Looks good to me! I will try to critique the chart from the perspective of someone like Kenny, but educated.
If I showed you the stock market price over the past 100 years, how easy is it to compare trends over the past 4 days versus the previous 100 years? This scale would be similar to judging temperatures over the past 100 years based on looking at 1,000,000 years. Furthermore, these million year charts show (more-or-less) moving averages of temperatures. It's a low-frequency etch and may not necessary depict large, relatively quick spikes and/or dives in temperature. Thus, it's tough to compare the last 100 years on million year charts. We "could" be spiking faster and higher than any moment in the past, we're not sure if it has or hasn't happened.
Now as a global warming skeptic, these charts do provide 2 big questions that proponents of man-made global warming have trouble answering:
1) Charts that overlay CO2 over long periods of time show the CO2 lags temperature. In other words, temperature and CO2 are correlated, however temperature rises first, then CO2.
2) If CO2 does impact global temperatures, then why were there never any run away greenhouse scenarios in the past? Something trumped CO2 and stopped the warming periods in the past.
Proponents of man-made global warming usually fall into the 'this time it's different' argument, and it's weak, IMO. |
