Research Scientist Dresses Down Doubting Thomas on Global Warming. By Geniusofdespair

A boob in an Everglades chat room, mentioned the Miami Herald article on global warming that announced the discovery on Big Pine Key of a submerged shoreline from about 8,500 years ago. Boob said: "I wonder: Did the folks back then depend a lot of fossil fuels, too?" The ditzy barb proved to be too much for some and Research Scientist Michael S. Ross, Ph.D., took a 'polite' swipe:

The pine fragments identified by Corey Malcom and others dated to 8-10 thousand years ago. At that time, sea level was rising very rapidly due to the melting of the glaciers, but became much more stable/slowly increasing soon thereafter. In the last century the rate of increase has accelerated precipitously (by geologic standards) to nearly a foot per century, and even the most conservative estimates have it accelerating by a factor of two or, likely, more. That would flood much of the Florida Keys as well as the southeastern part of Miami-Dade within a matter of decades, and will interact in a very ugly way with the inevitable hurricane.

If it makes you feel better to think this is a natural cycle, god bless, but with the exception of evolution, I've not seen another process with as much unanimity among scientists as to driver, i.e., CO2 and other greenhouse gases, which have been increasing like a metronome for the last century, to the point where they approach levels last seen on the planet when the dinosaurs ruled. Of course there are other factors, nothing is explained by one thing; greed and speculation weren't the only cause of our recent economic woes, but they certainly helped push us off the cliff.
Ross teaches: Environmental Resource Management, South Florida Ecosystems, and Applied Field Ecology at FIU.