>... if you take glacial cores from the dead of the Antarctic, you have a record of the earth's climate that reaches back to about 600,000 years.
I'd be surprised if any glacier anyplace on the planet is 600,000 years old for two reasons. First, there are the natural inter-glacial periods that melt the glaciers. The last ice age was much more recent than 600,000 years ago, more like 10,000 years instead. And second, to qualify as a glacier it has to move. In 600,000 years even the slowest glacier would have completely run its course to its terminus, either into the ocean or a river valley, and replaced itself several times. There shouldn't be any 600,000 year old ice left on the surface of the Earth. Besides, your glacier would have to be several miles deep to get 600,000 slices thick enough to separate each one from the layers on either side. Sorry, I don't buy it.
>... And if you count the isotopes of the atoms, you can even measure the average temperature of that year(s).
I honestly don't see how you could prove that without a time machine. Anything that occured before we started keeping temperature records is all guesswork and the average temperature differences over that same time period are small enough to be buried by the changes caused by any number of natural phenomena (El nino, solar flares and sun spots, meteor impact, volcanic ash in the atmosphere, etc...).
>And scientists have proven that with heightened levels of CO2 there was a rise in temperature.
I haven't heard of such definitive studies, but that would only be true if CO2 and temperature were linked AND the link was that CO2 caused the temperture increases and not the other way around. Even worse, an apparent connection between CO2 and temperature could be coincidental - both variables could be related to some other factor and have no direct effect on each other. Logically, I don't see how sciencists can rule out that possibility without exhaustively eliminating all other possible contributing factors, (which is essentially impossible).
If you believe that heightened CO2 causes a rise in temperature and those rises in CO2 are captured in Antarctic ice, then what do you think caused the repeated increases in CO2 which have occurred throughout pre-history long before man was even an agricultural species let alone an industrial species? I'm not trying to be argumentative or put you on the spot, I'm really curious.
Finally, anything, including man, that greatly perturbs the number and distribution of O2 producing plants could effect the relative concentrations of CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere much more than your styrofoam cup or your SUV. Plants don't need us to survive but we do need them. And it doesn't matter if the temperature and weather are unchangingly perfect if you can't breathe. I'd worry about that long before I worried about cars and factories.
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