What’s a few degrees of warming over a century?

Cheat Seeking Missiles links via Greenie Watch to Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson writes:

Toward the end of the last big glaciation, some 12,000 years ago, Earth began to warm, and quite rapidly, but then abruptly plunged back into bitter cold for a thousand years or so. … At the end of this thousand- year onslaught, average temperatures leapt again, by as much as seven degrees in 20 years, which doesn’t sound terribly dramatic, but is equivalent to changing the climate of Scandinavia for that of the Mediterranean in just two decades.

These violent temperature fluctuations of the relatively recent past remain unexplained by climatologists. Yet, they presume to project the warming that has occured since the lowest point of the last little ice age a few hundred years ago foward into the indefinite future and attribute it all to man’s activities.

Should we be worried about burning fossil fuels? Well, the pollution that causes is nasty and needs to be reduced, but the CO₂ it produces is simply returning it back from whence it came, the Earth’s atmosphere. A coal fired power plant is simply recycling carbon.