Maybe, I worded it badly. What I meant is that we didn't show much interest in the polar region a few hundred years ago, so we don't know with much certainty that there was no large scale melting, ever.
Does anybody happen to know the date of the first expedition to either polar region, any country. Just the first group, to go wandering the ice continents, intentional, or otherwise.
Perhaps, you assign a set number to "last few hundred years", where I was thinking we probably didn't pay much attention to ice continents, when we had all of the Americas to explore 400 years ago. Anytime before our arrival, is in the realm of a few hundred, or maybe I should have said, 'several hundred'. The cores are claimed to be over 40,000 years, some claim over 100,000 years. Could have used 'last few thousand years' just the same.
But, yes, I do get the point of your arguments, you can't refute, so you must to reduce. No big deal, not here to argue or debate, just sharing some alternate thinking on the topic. A lot of it doesn't add up to me, and seems to omit quite a few things. Like there is a lot of crap floating around in the air, most of it's natural and normal, some entirely man made. Just seem so incredibly odd to me, that CO2 is the sole focus of this climate issue. Every living thing produces CO2, even plants, it's so basic, even necessary, and yet it's going to kill us all.
Maybe it's not that we are emitting too much CO2, but interfering with the process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Perhaps there are other gases the negate or reduce the greenhouse effect of CO2, and we've been taking that ought of the atmosphere. We aren't going to know, until we experiment. I don't think the data is strong enough to take the gamble today. It's still just in the hypothesis stage, and a global experiment to test it might not be a good idea, but definitely we are not in such a crisis to need to take the chance.
The crisis of the heat, flooding, rising seas, are hundreds of years away. These thing have been going on for centuries, and people have died. It's going on right now, and likely continue on. But, we are also going to see addition deaths due to starvation, because the governments are spending a lot of time and money on a CO2 experiment. People will freeze in the winter, because the can't afford the gas or electricity to heat their homes, die because it gets too hot in the summer. The countries who can't or won't comply with whatever global regulations are applied, will suffer sanctions, and reduced subsidies, more people get to die. Global Warming might kill some people, but we most definitely will in our present course.