Greenhouse Earth - National Geographic

I'm not an expert in global warming but I have some questions and thoughts about the October issue (2007) of National Geographic. Specifically there is a poster called Greenhouse Earth. It seems some of this information should be incorporated onto the greenhouse effect web site. Some of the graphics are great. One of the most interesting thing is the bottom dashed line showing how the change in eccentricity, tilt, and wobble of the earth should have impacted global climate changed for the last 400,000 years. What is most cool about this is you can see changes in sea level, temperature, and co2 concentrations at the same time. The graph suggests suggests that we should be in a cooling period for the last 100 thousand years....which is a concern because we are in a one of the most warm periods over the last 400,000 years. Is this correct. I didn't find any citations for this. It strange that the dotted line doesn't have a label. How solid is this evidence.

According to the inset graphic called "temperature and CO2 since 1860" we are in a warming period that matches increases in CO2 that is not apparent when looking at the larger graphic. I was at a seminar and some guy was talking about how our ability to measure changes in temperature is poor so this change in about 1.5 degree and a half is questionable and may not be within the accuracy of the equipment. This makes sense to me because temperature changes so much spatially. The point that this guy made is that many of the weather monitoring stations are near cities. As the cities have gotten bigger, they have caused local warming at the weather stations because of so much heat radiation from asphalt. So what he said is that we are really in fact in a slight cooling period if you remove those questionable weather stations. Is this correct or BS.


Another thing that's interesting is that temperatures have flat lined for about the last 10,000 years which is strange because there are no other flat line peaks for the last 400,000 years. I can't figure out why this would be the case because the flat period began prior to the beginning of early agriculture (prior to the industrial revolution.

One of the coolest things I've learned here is that many of the fluctuation in CO2 did not so much as cause global temperature change as they were caused by global temperature change. In other words, it seems that a great deal of CO2 was sequestered in the oceans when it was cold and was liberated when global temperatures changed.

How good is the ice core data for CO2 and other data for temperature change that goes back 400,000 years?