The true meaning of that CO2 graph

Berkeley CA

Description

The Earth's climate keeps swinging back and forth between an ice age and a water age. We were on the way to a new ice age (hence the drop in CO2) until we started burning fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution. This caused enough warming to keep the ice age at bay, but we kept burning those fuels, so now we've overshot the mark to where we're in danger of melting the land ice of Antarctica and Greenland and raising the level of the oceans to the point of having to abandon cities situated near the shores. The graph is at such a rough scale that the increase in CO2 concentration over the last couple of centuries is not detectable. But a graph focusing only on that recent duration would clearly show the upward trend. Another graph showing the increase in temperature would closely follow the CO2 curve.