Greta wrote: ↑Sun Mar 11, 2018 10:03 pm
Of course humans have altered the climate. If you alter the atmosphere then you alter climate.
Carbon appears in various guises. Much of it is locked away in life forms or deep in the ground. Now more large life forms are dying, and large organisms are especially effective carbon stores and, famously, carbon that was locked underground is not being released into the air in the form of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
What we need to remember is it's easy for any phenomenon with global reach - and humans are that - to alter the climate. They are not altering the whole Earth - which is mostly core and mantle - only the surface and thin atmospheric layer. It doesn't much matter to most of the planet beneath but it makes a big difference to organisms on the surface.
The very long time periods for things to happen is the cause of contention, but the issue is just chemistry and physics in action. This allows fossil fuel companies, worried about their infrastructure being rendered obsolete, to foster doubt on the science in the media, just as was done by tobacco companies for decades. It's an old trick when modern finding threaten old profits.
More carbon in the atmosphere means higher temperatures which means longer droughts, stronger storms and hotter and longer heat waves.
I agree with everything you have said Greta. I think people are rather daft if they think that releasing millions perhaps billions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere within a couple of hundred of years is not going to affect the climate.
In addition, since you mentioned the mantle,
I would like to point out that a warmer climate, warmer seas could also cause a very slight expansion in the Earth's crust and therefore, it is plausible that this will trigger more earthquakes, volcano activity etc..
To flip things, global warming I think will cause an ice age. As the salinity of the seas reduces, the thermohaline circulation slows, (WIKI:- freshwater decreases ocean water salinity, and through this process prevents colder waters sinking. This mechanism possibly caused the cold ocean surface temperature anomaly currently observed near Greenland (Cold blob (North Atlantic)).
The British Isles and Europe are only able to stay 'warmish' during winter due to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) - as more fresh water pumps into the sea - basically screwing this. the ice age shall begin...
But the Earth doesn't give a shit about us...it's been fluctuating to these extremes for over a billion years, it's us that should give a shit about us.