This is an example of a positive feedback.Another thing that happened during past climate changes was that when the warming occurred, more ice melted, as I talked about in the last topic.And of course, when the ice melts, more dark surfaces are exposed, leading to more warming.This is yet another example of a positive feedback.The really important thing to remember about these past climate change is that they occurred very, very slowly.The Earth warmed or cooled just a few degrees over thousands or perhaps millions of years.And that's very different to what's been going on recently.One of the previous warmest period on Earth was called the mediaeval warm period, because it occurred between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1300.But it didn't occur everywhere, it occurred in just some parts of the northern hemisphere.But during that time the Vikings took advantage of the fact that Greenland was warm enough to farm, and moved there.But during these periods, there weren't a whole lot of people standing around with thermometers measuring temperature.So you might be asking, how do we know all this?One of the most powerful tools that we have to look at the past, at least over the last 400,000 years, is this.These ice cores are like time machines.And they reveal all sorts of things about the Earth's history.Ice cores removed from polar ice sheets or glaciers provide a rich treasure trove of climate information.As the ice built up in these regions in the past, it tracked all sorts of things like dust, ash from fires and volcanoes, radioactive particles, and bubbles of air.Careful sampling and analysis at different parts of the core can be used to construct a picture of the past, just as excavation of fossils and rocks of different ages can tell us about past life on Earth.For example, the air inside the bubbles can be analysed to give us a picture of the atmosphere thousands of years ago.And what's more, analysis of a component of the ice called deuterium content can give us information about the Earth's temperature at the same time.But we don't just use ice cores to give us a picture of the past.Trees like these can also be very useful.Trees grow faster during warmer times.They grow faster in spring and summer than they doing in winter, and they grow faster in warmer years than they do in cooler years.These differences in growth rates are reflected in the width of these growth rings.By measuring the relative width of the growth rings right through the tree trunk, we can tell a lot about the types of conditions those trees grew in.So now we have a picture of what's been happening to the Earth's climate and the atmosphere over many, many thousands of years.Take a look at this graph, which puts it all together.The blue line shows CO2 going up and down over time.