The average temperature of our planet gets warmer for a few hundred years, then it gets cooler for a few hundred years.
That’s what Antarctica and Greenland ice core studies tell us.
A full cycle seems to average about 1000 to 2000 years (or 1500 years +/- 500 years).
The ice cores tell us there are peaks and troughs of CO2 and temperature … but the temperature peaks happen 500 to 1000 years before the CO2 peaks !
It appears that oceans warm from natural causes first, possibly changes in incoming solar energy.
As the oceans warm they release some of their dissolved CO2 (just like a soda pop in a glass releases CO2, and goes flat, as it sits on a kitchen counter getting warm).
There has been a mild warming trend since the 1700s -- about one degree C. (+/- one degree) of warming -- no one would have noticed this on their own.
All real-time average temperature measurements (since 1880) were made DURING that warming trend.
As a result, we should EXPECT to see "new highs" -- that's what a warming trend is … and the new highs should continue until the warming trend ends, and a new cooling trend begins.
Whether our planet is warming or cooling really depends on the start and end points of the measurements:
Three sources of average temperature estimates;
(1) Non-global rough estimates based on proxies for climate, such as ice cores,
(2) Non-global rough estimates from averaging surface thermometers, from 1880 to 1978, and
(3) Reasonable global estimates from NOAA weather satellites since 1979
We are cooling starting from when our planet first formed.
We are warming starting from the ice age peak glaciation about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
We were warming from 1976 to 1998 … then cooling since 1998 (there have been no years hotter than 1998 so far, based on satellite data, which is more accurate than surface data).
The leftists are so busy “adjusting” surface temperature data to show more global warming, that they have created a big gap between their "adjusted" surface data and satellite data in the past five years.
The gap can only be explained by their bogus adjustments, because weather balloons confirm the satellite data are correct.
The global warmunists have skeptics' attention focused on meaningless arguments about tenths of a degree Centigrade, and whether 2015 was the warmest year on record, or 1998 was.
It was cool from 1300 through the 1700s.
We should all be HAPPY that trend ended and we've had a slight warming trend since then.
The slight warming since 1800 is good news, and anyone with sense would want more warming.
No reputable scientist ever found CO2 to be the “climate controller” before 1975.
Warmunists claim 4.5 billion years with only natural causes of climate change suddenly ended in 1975, and then by some miracle they never explain, CO2 became the “climate controller” !
The warmunists pretend there was no flat trend in the average temperature since the early 2000s, as CO2 levels rose a lot … by repeatedly "adjusting" temperature data from prior years to make that "inconvenient" temperature trend go away!