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POPSYet More Climate Change Myths Continued... Comparisons of temperature indicators such as tree-ring records from around the northern hemisphere suggest there were several widespread cold intervals between 1580 and 1850. Yet while there is some evidence of cold intervals in parts of the southern hemisphere during this time, they do not appear to coincide with those in the northern hemisphere. Such findings suggest the Little Ice Age may have been more of a regional phenomenon than a global one. I hope that this adds a little more balance to what seems to have become an argument over politics in recent years than one of scientific investigation.
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POPSMore Climate Change Myths
Continued... Basic physics tells us that gases with this property trap heat radiating from the Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat. What is more, CO2 is just one of several greenhouses gases, and greenhouse gases are just one of many factors affecting the climate. There is no reason to expect a perfect correlation between CO2 levels and temperature in the past: if there is a big change in another climate "forcing", the correlation will be obscured. So why has Earth regularly switched between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods in the past million years? It has long been thought that this is due to variations in Earth's orbit. However, the correlation is not perfect and the heating or cooling effect of these orbital variations is small. It has also long been recognised that they cannot fully explain the dramatic temperature switches between ice ages and interglacials.
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