Popular Science archive made public – your chance to help me find something important

There is a very interesting article about the relationship between sunspots and the “wind-disturbances of the earth’s atmosphere” (read: cyclones 😉
4th item, page 366, Jan. 1878 issue (http://books.google.com/books?id=miwDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover)
~17.5% increase in casualities on UK vessels, when they compared maxiumum/minimum solar spots periods (mostly due to extreme weather?), “connections between sunspots area and annual rainfall”… One has to wonder how come they were able to publish thoses observations back then without the help of supercomputers and satellites…
…oh wait – there was no CRU at the time to interfere with the publishing and “correct the data” lol

David L (03:22:19) :
Brian Williams says:
March 19, 2010 at 11:14 am
There’s one thing that everyone seems to be missing (or I am deluded): all of the fossil fuels we burn contain carbon sequestered from the atmosphere of the time. Therefore, it’s impossible to release more co2 than has existed in the past. If you go back to the time when the first vegetation was laid down that is now oil or coal, surely all of that sequestered carbon must have been in the atmosphere, but the planet wasn’t burning up then, was it?
Can someone explain what I am missing here?
I attended a climate talk at a scientific conference a few years ago and asked this very question of the speaker. She had no answer.

When you look at a chart illustrating the Earth’s experience with temperature, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and atmospheric oxygen during the Phanerozoic Eon in which those fossil fuels were deposited; you can see how the temperature tended to stay flat at about 25C +2/-5C, ~12C greater than present, except whenever an ice age occurred.
During the Andean-Saharan Ice Age, the temperature plunged from 25C to 10C, and the carbon dioxide increased from ~4,200ppm to ~4,400ppm. During the Karoo Ice Age, the temperature plunged from 25C to 10C and warmed again to 26C, while the carbon dioxide decreased from ~4,000ppm to ~300ppm before following the increase in temperature with a later increase of carbon dioxide to ~1,800-1,900ppm. During the presently occuring ice age, the temperature decreased from the normal 25-26C to about 12C at present, and the carbon dioxide decreased from ~2,400ppm to the present ~280-380ppm. There was also a Jurassic-Cretaceous event during which the temperature decreased in a plunge to ~16C and then increased back to a normal 25C without a correlating change in carbon dioxide, which simply continued its decreases unaffected by the major temperature changes.
The Earth’s primordial or first atmosphere was composed of about the same gaseous materials as the Solar nebula and the Sun. This first atmosphere was overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen and helium. Since the Earth’s geomagnetic iron core and the geomagnetic field had not yet formed, the Earth lost the vast majority of its atmosphere as major impact events and Solar winds stripped gaseous atmosphere having nearly five Lunar masses from the Earth’s gravitational control. The remaining atmospheric mass including methane, ammonia, nitrogen, water vapor, and nitrogen was transformed into the Earth’s second atmosphere as temperatures began to decrease below 2,000K and the hydrosphere condensed out of the atmosphere to add to the lithosphere and create a new hydrosphere.
After the massive percentage of water vapor condensed out of the first atmosphere, the second atmosphere came to be dominated by carbon dioxide which made up around 80% or 800,000ppm of it. There was virtually no oxygen in the second atmosphere. What little oxygen was liberated by the geochemical processes tended to be immediately oxidized by and compunded with the exposed rocks. Chemical weathering with the rocks, absorption by the hydrosphere, and biochemical processes began to greatly decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide levels far below the early 800,000ppm level. It was the development of aerobic life forms during the Proterozoic Eon which transformed the second atmosphere into the third atmosphere.
The third atmosphere was created by aerobic life forms by removing most of the remaining carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replacing it in part with oxygen. By the time of the Phanaerozoic Eon, the carbon dioxide levels had fallen to the 7,000-8,000ppm range, while temperatures had increased from less than 10C during the Huronian Ice Age and the Cryogenian Period to 25C in the Cambrian Period.
Since the fossil fuels were deposited, the Sun’s luminosity has increased by more than 10%, yet the Earth remained nearly steady at a temperature of about 25C except during the occurences of the glacial periods of the ice ages.
Temperatures of 10C occurred during the ice ages no matter how high and low the carbon dioxide levels were or whether the levels were increasing or decreasing as the tempertures increased and decreased. It remains to be explained how a change of 100ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can change the temperature by 1C to 4C virtually instantaneously in the present geologic time period when past increases and decreases of 1,000ppm had no discernible effect whatsoever upon the Earth’s 25C temperature norm.