IAlthough the natural cycle is taking place, the change that have occurred in the last century would normally take 1000s of years without individual intervention. You only have to look at the coral reefs to see the effect it is having on our eco systems.
That's in the "It stands to reason . . . " category. I'll explain -
I'm an economist and the workings of economic systems are extremely complex and few are properly understood. We can sort of get the broad brushstrokes, but calculating precise outcomes is (at present) impossible.
The same applies to many things that mankind only partially understands. The causes of cancer springs to mind. Climate is another. Cancer of the lung in one person has a different cause and a different genetic make-up to lung cancer in another. Every economist that works for a supermarket chain knows that the elasticity of demand will vary for a single product from shop to shop - raise the price of sausages in a poor town and sales may halve; raise the price in a rich town and sales may only dip slightly.
BUT Raise the price of sausages in one rich town and you may get a 20% drop in sales numbers, raise the price in another town that is equally as rich and you will almost always get a completely different result. It is not unknown for sales to
increase (the so-called 'snob-effect').
Our weather is driven almost entirely by the Northern jet stream - if it is North of us, we get warm weather, if it is South of us, we get cold weather and as it crosses over, it nearly always rains. As it is flipping back and forth, it rains a lot in the UK! Yet the effect of the various jet streams has only been taken into full account in the past five or so years. Prior to that, even the Met Office assumed it could issue long-range weather forecasts, about half of which were wrong - the same as if you just guessed!
Prior to that, exact models of our weather patterns were made in the 60s and when meteorologists found that in those instances where across Europe we had the exact same weather maps as in some period early, there was a tendency for the weather to turn out the same for a while. So rather bravely, the Met Office started issuing 30-day weather forecasts.
Some were dead right, but about half were completely wrong - the same as if you'd guessed!
I remember the BBC weather man back in the 60s saying "If you have the same weather map, it stands to reason that you will have the same weather!"
Nothing could have been further from the truth! To predict the weather, you would need to have a complete map of every jet stream across Planet Earth, together with all minor turbulences, temperatures and deviations - and we do not have that even today!
Climate change is rather like the eruption of a volcano - the slow build up of pressures leads to sudden change - we know it will happen, we just can't tell you exactly when and by how much.
The Planet has been warming up, just as Milankovitch predicted, but the question now is (as the old song goes) "Where do we go from here?"
The Jurassic era came to an end when Pangaea broke up and a stable climate, 17 degrees warmer than today, plummeted into a series of ice-ages, triggered by a giant comet - but that fall was inevitable.
There is a massive store of methane gas in the Northern hemisphere that was trapped there since the last Ice Age. As the Planet warms up, its release could bring about a new post-ice-age era of stable temperatures far higher than the ones we have today, probably combined with a far wetter climate - which in turn could lead to far more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes.
Greater wetness would also lead to more violent changes in air pressures, which could trigger other events, such as earthquakes.
Or as I tell those new to the science of economics - I can predict anything and everything - except the future. Nobody can predict that!
