It emphasizes the morphing of this impending climate predicament alarmists are frightened of.
Science has learned a great deal about the climate and anthropogenic global warming. Nothing has morphed into anything else.
STAGE 1 : It's called global warming, but we get extremes cold as well. So that causes a problem
Global warming did not produce extreme colds
in global temperatures. Weather has been affected a great deal, however. One of those changes is that decreasing
difference between tempratures at the equator and at the poles. The result of that are Rossby Waves; sinusoidal ripples in the Jet Stream that bring warm tropical air to the American northwest and Arctic air (which is still colder than, say, Columbus, Ohio) into the American northwest. But the impact of this change on the average global temperature is ZERO-ZILCH-ZIP.
STAGE 2 : So it morphs to climate change, but the earth has altered it's climate for billions of years, and it will continue to do so. So that causes a problem.
Again, nothing has morphed. And the fact that the Earth's climate has been changing since the planet formed is completely irrelevant. What is happening now is NOT natural. There have been many points in time during Earth's history when CO2 in the atmosphere, brought out of solution in the world's oceans or from massive volcanism, has increased the planet's temperature or caused it to warm more than Milankovitch could do by itself. But even when it came from massive volcanism, the rate at which CO2 and temperature rose was a fraction of what is happening today. THAT is significant because that pace does not allow time for the natural adaptations that occurred in the past to occur today.
STAGE 3 : So it morphs to, "Speed of climate change". But how do you compare little daily graphs of today to climate readings from ice cores, trapped pollen and air in amber etc.. that can only paint a picture with hundreds and thousands of years between each reading?
It's a great deal better than hundreds of thousands of years between readings. You have seen the graphs. They are reproducibly accurate. As Todd loves to point out, the resolution beyond a few hundred thousand years will not allow us to see if any point in time has experienced the same warming we see today. But Todd intentionally overlooks the fact that under the best of circumstances, the warming pulse of AGW will not last 174 years (1850 - 2024) but four or five hundred years, a span of time that CAN be discerned in proxy temperature data going back several million years. And then there are the natural mechanisms that might produce the CO2 and temperatures increases we have seen and both make it warm and then immediately return to normal temperatures
What will "speed of climate change" morph into to come up with STAGE 4? And what will STAGE 4 be called / described as?
There will be no stage 4 because there were no stages 1, 2 or 3.
If the speed of co2 change is at it quickest in the last forty odd million years, then what caused it to be quicker before then?
The very few instances in the past in which it changed faster than it is today were all massive catastrophes associated with mass extinctions. Ironic, eh? Volcanoes that erupted for a thousand centuries. Asteroid strikes. Massive changes in ocean chemistry worldwide. There is nothing normal or healthy or troublefree that resembles what we are doing to our planet right now.
At what level of co2, temperature, and sea level height do you feel is required to make mankind extinct?
A 15% CO2, or a temperature anomaly of 20C or an uninterrupted global ocean could do that, but no one is predicting anything like such an event. Your question is completely pointless.
What are these levels (bearing in mind you now know the level of co2 in the Triassic and Cambrian periods)?
There are good estimates. We've all seen the graphs. What's your point? Because, again, you're ignoring the RATE at which CO2 and temperature are changing. Back in the Triassic and Cambrian, what has taken us 50 years happened over 50,000.