Yet, there's no indication that we are going into an ice age
Yes, there is. This first graph goes back 22,000 years. Note that it begins with temperatures going down for about 4,000 years, then they rise for about 10,000 years and then very slowly fall till the sudden increase beginning with the Industrial Revolution. Note the change in the time scale at the right end.
The University of Arizona team created maps of global temperatures for each 200-year interval since the last ice age. A University of Arizona-led effort to reconstruct Earth's climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change and how far out of
scitechdaily.com
Here is a graph - going now in the other direction - for the last 400,000 years. Note that it contains five major spikes. Those are the warm interglacials. The cold periods between then are the much cooler glacial periods. Note at the present, at the far left end of this graph, we are at the top of one of those spikes. And note that you can see a slight decline in the last segment of temperature data.
Technically, we are already IN an Ice Age: the Pleistocene ice age, and have been for about 2.5 million years. What we are seeing in this last graph are the glacial and interglacial periods within the ice age. But almost everyone thinks of those glacial periods as the ice ages for obvious reasons. So then, given the pattern we see in this last graph - and it actually carried on just like that for close to a million years, what do you think is coming up for us. We were at the warm interglacial peak and temperatures were just beginning to slide downwards. Rather obviously, we were just about to slide right down to the next glacial period and it looks rather overdue to me, but what do I know. What happened, though, is that global warming overwhelmed the gradual cooling that was taking place. We are getting warmer DESPITE the fact that we had been sliding into a glacial period.
or the sea levels are rising any faster.
Any faster? The issue is that it is rising at all and there are very clear "indications" that is taking place: tidal gauge and satellite data, balanced against localized uplift and subsidence, changes in basin volume and other arcanities tell a very clear story. Sea level is rising both from thermal expansion and from the melting of land-based ice.
See, there are other gases that cause more harm than CO2 could ever do. SO2 for one. Methane for another.
You left out H2S, CO, methyl isocyanate, ammonia, phosgene, methyl bromide and all the heavy metal gases. ; - ) This is the the third time I've had to say this, but the problem with CO2 is NOT its toxicity; it is its participation in the greenhouse effect.
CO2 is necessary for plant growth which is necessary for animal growth and so on.
The world got along swimmingly for 3 million years (including 2,800,000 years before the appearance of homo sapiens) with CO2 never getting above 300 ppm. Humanity has NEVER faced CO2 levels anywhere near their current value.
What is interesting is that if CO2 levels get below 175ppm, the green goes away and we are left baron with dessert. It's been really close in the past.
It has not.
