Claim: Before human burning of fossil fuels triggered global warming, the continent’s ice was in relative balance

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: The mass balance of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet as a whole is thought to be slightly positive (lowering sea level) or near to balance.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: The largest and most long term effect of coal use is the release of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes climate change and global warming.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: But, more accurately, global warming is the mainly human-caused increase in global surface temperatures and its projected continuation, while climate change includes both global warming and its effects, such as changes in precipitation.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: The reflection of energy into space resulted in a global cooling, triggering the Pleistocene Ice Age.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: "Release of methane from a volcanic basin as a mechanism for initial Eocene global warming".

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Ice core records show that before the Holocene there was global warming after the end of the last ice age and cooling periods, but climate changes became more regional at the start of the Younger Dryas.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and secondarily the clearing of land, have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping ("greenhouse") gases in the atmosphere...There is international scientific consensus that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Network of African Science Academies: "A consensus, based on current evidence, now exists within the global scientific community that human activities are the main source of climate change and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible for driving this change."

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Cumulative anthropogenic (i.e., human-emitted) emissions of CO 2 from fossil fuel use are a major cause of global warming, and give some indication of which countries have contributed most to human-induced climate change.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Black carbon emissions also significantly contribute to Arctic ice-melt, which is critical because “nothing in climate is more aptly described as a ‘tipping point’ than the 0 °C boundary that separates frozen from liquid water—the bright, reflective snow and ice from the dark, heat-absorbing ocean.”

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: The “climate forcing due to snow/ice albedo change is of the order of 1.0 W/m at middle- and high-latitude land areas in the Northern Hemisphere and over the Arctic Ocean.” The “soot effect on snow albedo may be responsible for a quarter of observed global warming.” “Soot deposition increases surface melt on ice masses, and the meltwater spurs multiple radiative and dynamical feedback processes that accelerate ice disintegration,” according to NASA scientists James Hansen and Larissa Nazarenko.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Modern climate change is driven by the human emissions of greenhouse gas from the burning of fossil fuel driving up global mean surface temperatures.