Abrupt and massive climate change, as represented by temperatures, has been a natural phenomenon for eons. Despite the claims of IPCC activists, pundits, celebrities, reporters, and some politicians, our current climate change is not unequivocally unprecedented and accelerating faster than previous occurrences. In fact, as the below charts depict, the current climate change is kind of wimpy compared to its ancestors.
It's important to recognize that scientists within the physical science realm concur that the climate can change abruptly with great severity, and that it has taken place with regularity over the last 10,000 years. Their proof? It's the ice cores pulled from the Greenland ice cap, which reveal incredibly large temperature changes as the graph immediately adjacent reveals. (And the Antarctic ice cores provide even more proof.)
As the experts will tell you, there is absolutely no scientific dispute regarding this historical evidence that was laid down by the climate for thousands of years.
While analyzing the ice core data, the scientists additionally determined several undisputed scientific facts:
1. Temperatures have been both hotter and colder than modern temperatures over the last 10,000 years.
2. There has been a cycle of warmer and cooler temperature swings over the last 10,000 years.
3. The modern increase in temperatures since the Little Ice Age represents #19 in the count of climate change swings over the last 10,000 years.
4. Major temperature swings of at least a 1 degree change may take anywhere from 220 years to 1000+ years before ending.
5. The recent past temperature increase has been both modest (below 1 degree) and relatively slow (750+ years) to warm since the initial plunge to the Little Ice Age levels.
These scientific facts are depicted in the visual representation of ice core data below (click on image to enlarge):
The #1 bar is this chart is that of a warming period that started around 10,000 years ago, lasting 840+ years with a temp increase of 1.23 degrees. The #2 bar represents the subsequent cooling period, which lasted some 850 years with temps cooling a huge 3 degrees. The rest of warm/cool climate change swings are represented all the way down to the present period, which is bar #19. (Each bar lists the associated temperature change and the length of the cooling/warming period, from peak to trough or vice versa.)
The modern bar (#19) is especially revealing. Since the initial plunge of the Little Ice Age temperatures about 750 years ago, the natural warming rebound has yet to even cross the 1 degree finish line that would denote this most recent climate change as a major one. Based on historical, natural precedents that the ice core evidence provides, our modern period should be expecting to reach the 1 degree mark in the near term future, regardless of any human influences - that's what nature and the climate does, naturally.
Additional historical and modern temperature charts.
One final note: the ice core data only extends to 1905. To estimate the temperature change from 1905 to 2010, 'C3' used a really useful graphing service provided by Global Warming Science. Using this invaluable service, we found 4 arctic area weather stations (above 65N) that had fairly complete temperature records from 1905. The chart below is the end result, including a linear trend for the 4 stations: 0.55 degrees per 100 years.
