What about the Younger Dryas period? What caused that?
Do you really not know the answer to this question? Did you ask google? Google knows, because millions of scientists all agree on the obvious answer.
I wish climate deniers would do the bare minimum of fact checking before trying to use their own misunderstandings to convince people to believe in easily disproven theories. As it turns out, Earth's climate is not some incomprehensibly complex mystery machine. Greenhouse gas emissions really have changed the planet's energy balance. The oceans and the atmosphere really are connected. Temperatures really are rising at unprecedented rates.
Why do people keep arguing that we don't know things that we do know? Do they think it supports denialism to sow false doubt in the science? Because that seems like the weakest possible argument, in that every semi-literate person can refute it.
Actually I am not a CD, but you cannot state that climate has not change extremely rapidly in the past, it is not factually accurate.
Millions of scientists agree on the cause of the Younger Dryas? That would be news to me, as far as I understood it is still highly debated.
From NOAA:
Scientists have
hypothesized that, just prior to the Younger Dryas, meltwater fluxes were rerouted from the Mississippi River to the St. Lawrence River. Geochemical evidence from ocean sediment cores supports this idea (Carlson et al. 2007 (link is external)),
From Columbia University:
This is a
touchy subject that is currently the focus of much research.
One explanation is the one involving a thermohaline circulation (THC) shutdown, triggered by a catastrophic discharge of freshwater from Lake Agassiz (figure 2). The consequence is a rapid reduction in northward ocean heat transports, leading to an abrupt cooling over Northern Europe and North America.
A problem with this hypothesis is the timing of meltwater pulses that are supposed to have triggered the THC shutdown: it was found that a second meltwater pulse, albeit slightly smaller than the first one, occurred at the end of the YD (Fairbanks, 1989): why didn't it also trigger a similar chain of consequences in the climate system?
An alternate explanation (Clement et al., 2001) invokes the abrupt cessation in the El Nino -Southern Oscillation in response to changes in the orbital parameters of the Earth, although how such a change would impact regions away from the Tropics remains to be explained.
The respective merits of both hypotheses have been laid out by Broecker (2003). The issue is far from being settled, and actively researched at Lamont and elsewhere.
Please tell me how millions of scientists agree on the "obvious" answer!