I was actually a big fan of Gore’s big video (An Inconvenient Truth) until revisiting the issue after a Dish link. I looked at the Wikipedia page to try to understand things better, and despite the truth of the infamous CO2 graph (with the parodied mechanical riser), it seems there is more going on than just gases and temperature.
The whole story seems to be:
in the last million years (1Ma), multiple variables of the earth’s orbit correlate with a complex cycle (or cycles) usually known as Milankovitch cycles, that affect temperature AND CO2 AND other measurements (how all of this is measured would be interesting). The temperature changes due to the Milankovitch cycles are longterm (over 10-15k years, around 5deg. C).
Unresolved issues:
-the broadest scientific question to me seems to be why the model doesn’t incorporate an explanation about what happened at 1Ma
-it’d be nice to see more consensus and/or information on the last 1Ma in the wikipedia article, but this seems beyond me. I left a teaser comment in the talk page on the Milankovitch cycle, I’ll see if it gets answered.
Some of the graphs only go back 400ka
Unresolved questions: what happened between 1Ma and before to cause the cycles?
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