This is, in a way, an addendum to my previous post. I include it just to say something for those concerned about the consequences of the excessive heat generated by the braking effect necessary for turning around a planetary climate system which was about to enter (in perhaps a thousand to a million years or so) an ice-ball state marking the end of life for the distant descendants of most creatures currently inhabiting it (who are, let me add, in no danger whatsoever from life-ending events grounded in nature), and from which the planet may never have escaped. Yes, while it is difficult for humans to conceive such long-term future outcomes (yet easily succumbing to false ideas of imminent climate catastrophe), nothing happens or even can happen, of any significance (which is yet another point worthy of mention) in terms of the natural progression of the gradual changes between one state to another. Of course with the rare exception of external cosmic intervention.
The possibility of an Ice-ball Earth is a once seemingly inevitable fate we appear, for now at least, to be avoiding (if we can disregard the possible effects of some future odd, unexpected, but significant cosmic intrusion into our ‘space’ space), although nothing can be certain, when viewed from our limited perspective, until it actually happens.
I am of course being somewhat allegorical in speaking about the climate braking effect of planet Earth since I really have no idea the amount of heat that could be created by that. But it is a general rule in physical systems that heavy moving bodies, when needing to reverse direction, the operation of braking and turning (as in the case of tracked locomotives, or heavy road trucks) do produce considerable amounts of heat in the process. I’m not sure if this holds for climate systems, where there are no moving parts other than basic changes of state from solid to liquid to gases or vice versa. So, where I use the term ‘friction’ in this context, please know this is what I mean. Although I do feel that in this situation there must be some heat either produced or transferred to something else in these cases.
But with regard to the ‘excessive heat’ I mentioned, derived from the friction generated as a result of the slowing to a stop and the turning around of a planet sized and many faceted system state, to another opposing state (planetary cooling to planetary warming), first let me say there is nothing to be concerned about, the effect of rapid temperature rise is most likely temporary, and secondly this is now (barring aforementioned cosmic intrusions), an almost guaranteed accomplished project of climate turnaround – even while still under way and awaiting perhaps still long-term completion. Heat generated by change of one state to another, opposite state, on a planet scale? Hmm, yes I know, it is something of a conceptual proposal, which no-one (that I know of) seems to have yet considered as a cause of the current warming trend in a known cooling environment. Preferring to accept self-blame (silly ninnies) for some crime they/we have not committed.
If I am right, and personally, within the light in which I now view this fairly sudden increase in temperature over recent years (which is still only a little over 1°C), I can see only one other relevant causal factor – that it is simply a continuation of the current and normal but (in geophysical terms) rapid 5-6°C leap in temperature from base level to its expected normal conclusion. [Which gives it a possible 1°C to go, before falling again.] It is most certainly not a CO2 thing. It may be a methane or partly methane thing, since that gas has often been around in massive releases at periods of much higher heat than we have today – and which, when the methane dispersed as CO2, led to cooling periods of climate. And we do have elevated levels of methane today. I believe the recent rise in temperature we see today is as a result of a mixture of these things and as such it will be temporary. And if this is, as it appears to be, beginning around 300,000 years ago, a stopping of the planetary cooling and now, following a couple hundred thousand years of ‘bottoming out’, a gradual warming of the planet to some safer level of sustenance of life – at least for another few tens of millions of years.
I have no intention of claiming that I understand exactly how this all works, but I do now have a sense of relief that this is what appears to be happening, if we care to look at it holistically and with all the relevant information available to us – not just based on the limited views of elements of modern science and the inconveniently convenient prognoses of those who may have much to gain from proffering any differing view.
Not Something Else 
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