1500 years till the next cool phase? um.... you need another 0 there.

There's no such thing as global warming, and it's a good thing we have global warming or there might be an ice age around 3500AD.

you see, by living like there's no tomorrow, we're actually preparing for a distant future which we as a civilization are very likely to not see. also EAT YOUR WAY TO A SEXY BODY WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT

envirovore: It's been ~50F for the last week here when it's normally in the single or low double digits by now. So, I'm okay with this.
/even has his windows open right now.

According to your bio you're Rasputin, so that explains what you're doing liking the cold so much.

The blasphemy of the Global Warming is such that only one solution is acceptable. Extermination. There can only be two sides in a fight - choose carefully, lest you and I find ourselves on different sides.

They shall be my finest warriors, these men who give of themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them, and in the furnace of war forge them. They will be of iron will and steely muscle. In great armour shall I clad them and with the mightiest guns will they be armed. They will be untouched by Logic or facts, no reason will blight them. They will have talking points, name-calling and flip-flops so that no foe can best them in an argument. They are my bulwark against the Terror. They are the Defenders of the Corporations. They are my Global Warming Deniers and they shall know no fear.

Slaxl: envirovore: It's been ~50F for the last week here when it's normally in the single or low double digits by now. So, I'm okay with this.
/even has his windows open right now.

According to your bio you're Rasputin, so that explains what you're doing liking the cold so much.

Oh wait, that was a tilde, I thought it was a minus, my bad. However that doesn't change the fact that you're the lover of the Russian queen.

Within dark and forgotten places hide the enemies of the Corporations. You have been chosen to enter such places and, protected by the best arguments the Global Warming Deniers can provide, cleanse it. Take with you weapons, a valiant heart and the Job Creator's blessing, and engage the enemy where it makes its lair. Acknowledge facts as they approach, but do not succumb to their logic, for your purpose is great. You have proved yourselves to be worthy of the status you now hold. Every one of you standing here, all of whom have declared allegiance to the Corporations and take his will as your guide, have shown your courage and have been rewarded for it. Those that stand before me, I charge you now, go forth and vanquish the foe.

vpb: There's no such thing as global warming, and it's a good thing we have global warming or there might be an ice age around 3500AD.

Also quoth the lead author of the study, in TFA: "But it's missing the point, because where we're going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate. The rate of change with CO2 is basically unprecedented, and there are huge consequences if we can't cope with that."

But I'm sure the usual suspects will be along shortly to explain how they were just concerned about the temperature in the year 3600.

big pig peaches: I thought global warming was supposed to cause an ice-age. Too much fresh water in the "altantic engine" or something.

If you get an enormous meltwater pulse from ice sheet collpase you can slowdown or stall the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which causes cooling in the North Atlantic. However, in order to get that much ice to melt in the NH in the first place, you have have a lot of warming. The net effect would be a slightly cooler North Atlantic relative to the other, much hotter areas of the globe, but the North Atlantic would still be warmer relative to the no warming scenario.

The whole "shutting down the AMOC = a new ice age" meme is an unfortunate mix of bad media reporting and provisional scientific results that were subsequently revised.

There isn't much risk of the AMOC stalling out anytime this century under even very aggressive warming.

Electrify: Don't ice ages occur after an extended period of increased warming?

Let's clarify terminology.

"Ice age" can refer to any period wherein we have significant glaciation at the poles. Under that definition, we're still in an ice age.

What most people mean when they say "ice age" is more correctly termed "glacial maxima", where glaciation is greatly increased and we had large ice sheets extending down into the continental US, for example. For the last several million years, we've had cyclical glacial maxima and interglacial (warm) periods, driven by changes in the Earth's orbit.

When we're melting out of a glacial maximum and warming towards an interglacial, we can see a brief return to cold climate in regions like the North Atlantic as huge meltwater pulses (from ice sheet melt) stall out the AMOC. These are not actual ice ages/glacial maxima. They're much more limited in terms of area of effect and duration.

During the coldest part of the last glaciation, CO2 levels were 180 ppm. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, they were 280 ppm. If the estimates are correct and 240-270 ppm are required to trigger glacier advances, we were in no real danger of glaciation in the near future. This was the position of most climatologists in the 1970s when the media made a flap about "global cooling" research, led by the maverick scientist, Royal Astronomer, Fred Hoyle. At that time there had been a multi-decadal cool spell which strengthened the convictions of a handful of contrarians like Hoyle, the author of the book Ice.

A new glaciation is not a high probability contingency with or without human impacts, although it is a high cost contingency and both probability and cost have to be considered to determine risk.

Recent studies suggest that scientists are underestimating the risk to species diversity and the ecology of climate change because they under-estimate the costs of some species of plants, animals, etc., not being able to adapt. We assume, rather naively, that species will be able to move to higher latitudes and higher altitudes to adapt to climate change, but there are barriers to some species, and the whole ecosystem can be disrupted if some gears and cogs fall out of the machine, so to speak. Also, with species on the move, it is anybody's guess how new combinations will work. One thing that is certain is that we will be getting new ecologies, new biomes, new communities, some of them made up of the survivors of the old communities and refugees. Both the degradation of the old communities and the refugees are wild cards which make the future uncertain and thus risky for humans as well as other living things. The real risk for our economies and the ecologies of the world is likely to be on the down side.

In turn, the unexpected consequences of mixing and matching new communities with new soils, new climate patterns and new water resources, etc., means that risk is higher than we think and our expectations are going to fall much short of reality.

For a long time (since the mid-nineteenth century), climatogists have believed the world is warming and that warming is a good thing. Being Europeans or at the limit North Americans, they were more concerned about the northern limits of crop planting in places like Russia, Scandinavia, the UK and Canada. Guy Stewart Callendar, the English scientist who proposed the Callendar Effect (the link between CO2 and rising temperatures) believed this in the 1920s. The scientists were once as naive as the denialists in expecting that a warmer world would mean crop and tree lines would march northward and living creatures would simply move. But as more and more data, knowledge and understanding have accumulated, climatologists (and biologists and geologists) have learned how complex and dynamic the world really is.

The more you know about how the world works, the harder it is to say what the risks are. Chaos theory came out of meteorology, remember. We face all sorts of complexity and complications on the way to adaptation. Nothing is totally given. The Devil, as the old proverb says, is in the details.

Gunderson: [28.media.tumblr.com image 466x700]

More global warming, please!

yes sir, thank you sir

olddinosaur: The earth heats and cools in 400-year phases

[citation needed]

Please point out this 400 year "cycle" in the temperature record over the last 800,000 years[1]. Or, for that matter, what effect this supposed "cycle" should have been having over the instrumental record and what its drivers supposedly are[2].

[1] Köhler, P., et al. (2010): What caused Earth's temperature variations during the last 800,000 years? Data-based evidence on radiative forcing and constraints on climate sensitivity. Quaternary Science Reviews, 29/1-2, 129-145, doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.09.026.
[2] Lean, J.L., and D.H. Rind (2008): How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006. Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L18701, doi:10.1029/2008GL034864.

Tommy Moo: the people who are claiming ridiculous things like "all life on planet earth will go extinct if the temperature increases by 3 degrees" aren't helping

Who?