An illustration that CO2 won't roast the Earth in a runaway tipping point…

Being a software engineer, the La Brea Tar Pits have an almost mythical meaning to us. (Look up the book The Mythical Man-Month, the cover image is of the tar pits in action.) I have made my pilgrimage there. Wasn’t too hard, I was in Santa Monica on business.
Ric, I have found another kin. You have read ‘The Mythical Man Month’. Brilliant Book. I was a lot of things in my career including Senior Project Manager and Software Engineering Instructor and the MMM was my bible. I was severely criticised on one occasion by a feminist loon when I used one of the inter-chapter quotes “If it takes one woman 9 months to have baby how long does it take 9 women” She really blew.

David L. Hagen says: @ur momisugly August 8, 2013 at 3:59 pm
…. Developing world farmers need all the help they can get from higher CO2 and higherer precipitation to better feed their families.
Why are “climate scientists” inverting the evidence with systemically biased unvalidated models?
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(I agree with the farmers needing the help of CO2.)
Why are “climate scientists” inverting the evidence? Because they are paid to do so. If they don’t go along with the political agenda they get the boot.

…. Zbigniew Jaworowski, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Environmental Program, and current chair of the Scientific Committee of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw…..
Dr. Jaworowski has devoted much of his professional life to the study of the composition of the atmosphere, as part of his work to understand the consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear-weapons testing and nuclear reactor accidents….
…After taking numerous ice samples over the course of a dozen field trips to glaciers in six continents, and studying how contaminants travel through ice over time, he came to realize how fraught with error ice-core samples were in reconstructing the atmosphere. The Chernobyl accident, whose contaminants he studied in the 1990s in a Scandinavian glacier, provided the most illumination.
“This ice contained extremely high radioactivity of cesium-137 from the Chernobyl fallout, more than a thousand times higher than that found in any glacier from nuclear-weapons fallout, and more than 100 times higher than found elsewhere from the Chernobyl fallout,” he explained. “This unique contamination of glacier ice revealed how particulate contaminants migrated, and also made sense of other discoveries I made during my other glacier expeditions. It convinced me that ice is not a closed system, suitable for an exact reconstruction of the composition of the past atmosphere.”
Because of the high importance of this realization, in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be “immoral” if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.
The refusal did not come as a surprise. Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article published by the Norwegian Polar Institute, Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute’s director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that “this is not the way one gets research projects.” Once published, the institute came under fire, especially since the report soon sold out and was reprinted. Said one prominent critic, “this paper puts the Norsk Polarinstitutt in disrepute.” Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski’s science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.…
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6

The whole scam is political and has been from the very beginning. It was never about determining what factors control climate but providing ‘a scientific basis’ for controlling people. The IPCC even comes right out and says so.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/

Pascal Lamy Director-General of the World Trade Organization gives the reasons.

…In the same way, climate change negotiations are not just about the global environment but global economics as well — the way that technology, costs and growth are to be distributed and shared.….
Can we balance the need for a sustainable planet with the need to provide billions with decent living standards? Can we do that without questioning radically the Western way of life?….
The reality is that, so far, we have largely failed to articulate a clear and compelling vision of why a new global order matters — and where the world should be headed. Half a century ago, those who designed the post-war system — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) — were deeply influenced by the shared lessons of history….
All had lived through the chaos of the 1930s — when turning inwards led to economic depression, nationalism and war. All, including the defeated powers, agreed that the road to peace lay with building a new international order — and an approach to international relations that questioned the Westphalian, sacrosanct principle of sovereignty….
http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=9174

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ~ H. L. Mencken
CAGW is an excellent illustration of this statement.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Uh-oh, the CO₂ level is dropping fast. Won’t be much longer until the plants shut down, then all life expires except a few small critters not using oxygen-based respiration….
…insane people want to capture it from power plant exhaust, so they can creatively dispose of it deep underground where they hope it will be gone forever. Don’t they understand this clearly-presented evidence? Why do they want to exterminate virtually all life on Earth? ARE THEY MAD?
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My feeling exactly! But try telling the Tree Huggers that.
Ain’t propaganda and brainwashing great. /sarc

Interesting. We are at the low end of CO2 concentration now.

Dirk H
Plants adapted, not the world. There is a spurious point being raised: no humans or their activities were affected back in the Cambrian. That is the issue now.
Margaret

The way I read that chart is that the biosphere as figured out how to exploit the overabundance of atmospheric CO2 to it’s advantage and is at the limit.

Anthony
I rather think the LOL is on you. My point, any AGW realist’s point, is that the changes now will adversely affect human populations. Of course trilobites didn’t build cities and I thought you would spot that joke for what it was. The dissimulation, though, is clear – it doesn’t matter to those people likely to be affected by climate change what the level of CO2 was in the Ordovician, it matters how it changes now and what the effects of that change will be. I thought my main point was clear – there are humans around now and they have built cities by the sea.

REPLY: “the changes now will adversely affect human populations” Riiight, humans, like trilobites, are incapable of adapting to different a climate. Check. Point out a place on this climate map of the Earth where people have not settled and adapted to the climate there. (Hint: there’s only one place, can you guess it?)
Your logic is about as good as Bill Mckibben’s, i.e. emotionally based.- Anthony

Margaret Hardman says:
August 9, 2013 at 5:12 am
“Dirk H
Plants adapted, not the world.”
The world.
The atmosphere has been made by plants.
I don’t want to sound like Lovelock but the Earth is a homeostatic system with life as part of the governing loop.

@Margaret Hardman
The earth is just around the corner to move from this short 12,000-year interglacial period into another 90,000-year glaciation period. This seesawing has occurred with relative regularity for the last 2.6 million years. There is really nothing going on at the present time to suggest this will change in the future. This brings about a good news-bad news scenario for our coastal cities.
First, the good news: all of our coastal cities will be saved from flooding as sea levels will lower considerably.
Second, the bad news: most of our coastal cities north of the 40th parallel will be under at least 2000 metres of an ice sheet near the end of this glaciation period.

very good post, charts are incredible

For me the most informative graph of CO2 and palaeo temps over the last 600 million years is this one.
The blue dots are the data. The lines are for political corectness and the reader can asssess for themselves their correspondence to reality.
In general this figure supports statements here that we are close to the low, not the high, end of the range of CO2 levels safe for the biosphere.

JimS says we are in for renewed glaciation. Ox AO says the current interglacial is about to end. We’ve got plenty of time, in the order of 20,000 years to worry about that. Since you and others don’t get my point, I am currently looking across the Bay of Naples at Vesuvius. When it erupted in 79ad, thousands died. A similar eruption today would kill tens of thousands. Our modern world is predicated on a continuation of what we have now. Many changes will be good, many neutral and many bad. No one here denies that climates change. Ameliorating those changes is not a bad idea. It doesn’t matter what causes them, if the climate changes too rapidly, there will be human suffering. End of story. Now do you get t?