"Lawrence13" wrote:

....
Still not as warm as the last
interglacial - cooling ahead.

Not likely. Even if we reduced our emissions to zero (which
realistically
isn't going to happen, short of 7 billion people succumbing to a fatal
disease), global temperature would stabilise, but not fall.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...limate-change-...

If the cooling isn't imminent then that is fantastic news, it would
mean that humans utilised all that energy to bring to the cusp of
fantastic things that weren't even dreamt a couple of hundred years
ago and in doing so we get a bonus of a far more benign climate, far
more plant food in the atmosphere and thus better food production.
Looks like a win/ win to me. I still feel though that global cooling
is our future which would be a disaster. Let's keep our fingers
crossed that humans have slightly warmed the planet, because if other
climate forcing's far outweigh that of humans 100 PPM of co2 then we
are eventually in big, big trouble. If however our paltry 100ppm has
staved of global cooling then who said there's no such thing as a free
lunch. How good is that?

Does 8°C hotter qualify as 'far more benign' than 5°C colder? I'm not so
sure. We could be heading that way in a few decades. As for 'paltry', in
just 250 years our greenhouse gas forcing has reached 2.6W/m² - it took *125
million years* for solar irradiance to increase by an equal amount... and a
globally averaged forcing from Milankovitch cycles of less than 0.25W/m² was
enough to make the difference between the depths of an ice age and the
relative warmth of an interglacial... so I would say our greenhouse gas
forcing is pretty significant.