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Originally Posted by HOOT
Ya I guess I just don't understand how they can be 100% certain that these air bubbles haven't been effected by sitting in ice/rock for 1000's of years. Do we know for sure that in 4010 when they take air bubble samples for 2010 that they could show the same CO2 levels that were actually present in 2010?
I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about this stuff besides what is said on the TV, movies and the paper which seems to be conflicting at the best of times. I'm not the type to believe humans aren't messing with the Earth but I think at times it might be blown out of porportion because we don't have enough evidence. For a planet that is 4.5B years old it seems wrong to draw conclusions from 2,000 years worth of data....a percentage I wouldn't even want to try and calculate.
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I've been an advocate of using a larger timescale as well but Photon is right that our methods of measuring the carbon content of the atmosphere back hundreds of thousands of years are reliable whether it is based on core samples or proxies such as carbon deposits or other indicators. We can even make decent estimates about the carbon content and the chemistry of the atmosphere millions of years ago.
Despite our disagreements, Cole436 is right in that it is obviously easy for human activities to have a huge effect on our planet as you can see in the flucations of the hole in the Ozone layer (which has began to recede as CFCs were regulated). I just believe that argument needs to be tempered and that temperature change is an aggregate effect of many factors, one of which may only be anthropogenic and may in fact be something out of our control if it is due to natural forces such as solar activity. That doesn't mean that we should stop trying to find better environmentally solutions for society and industry.