.did we help push that along some what?....I don't think anyone will ever agree on that....
Anyone who does a little research (beyond confirmation bias websites) and is even a little bit scientifically literate, will conclude that humans have had an effect and have pushed it along at least somewhat. There's no way to know exactly to what degree, though.
It is an indisputable fact that greenhouse gasses have a warming effect on a closed ecosystem. That is confirmed by both observation and experiment. If A occurs (increase in greehouse gasses) then B will happen (heat retention and warming). Always. There has never been an observation or experiment that showed anything else.
As for whether or not human can have or have had an effect, that's where a little research and scientific literacy will help, but all you need is a little knowledge and reasonable thinking to be able to at least form a working hypothesis.
For example, we now know that lead in any amount within the human body is harmful. even the smallest amounts have a detrimental effect on brain and nervous system functions. Larger amount will make you insane and will kill you. We also know that lead is a mined mineral and is not naturally found evenly strewn about in the environment. But it has certain industrial uses, so we use it in industry. Back in the 1940s and 1950s a geochemist named Clair Patterson (a man from Mitchellville, IA) was doing research on better ways to determine the age of the Earth (and thus far, is appears he nailed it). He was developing and using the highly accurate
uranium-lead dating method of
lead-dating to determine the age of certain rocks, specifically the Canyon Diablo meteorite that formed Meteor Crater in Arizona. Scientists can examine certain formation in rock stratum (crust layers) to determine the age of certain geological events, but those can go back only so far and do not tell us the age of the Earth. However, we know the bulk of the matter in the solar system (sun, planets, asteroids) would all be the same age. If you can precisely determine the age of materials that are largely unchanged sine their formations, you have a much more accurate estimation of just how old the Earth and everything else in the solar system is.
To do this, you need a ridiculously hyper-accurate count of lead in zircon particles from the meteor from Meteor Crater (and then confirmed with equally accurate of other meteorites), which Patterson obtained, and to work in conjunction with similar results collected by George Tilton on uranium counts; and with the established half-life of uranium's radioactive decay to lead, this would be used to estimate the age of the Earth. Patterson found that his results were contaminated by lead from the ambient environment, compared to Tilton's results (lead doesn't have an effect on uranium counts). Patterson cleaned and scrubbed everything in the lab but still had lead contamination, seemingly from everywhere. He eventually constructed the first ultra-high cleanroom to remove all traces of environmental lead. With these clean results, Patterson was able to estimate the age of the Earth to 4.5 billion years.
But where is all this environmental lead coming from, he wondered. Lead does not naturally occur at Earth's surface, but has been readily mined by humans going back at least to the Roman Empire, and we've known since at least the Roman Empire that lead is poisonous to humans. "Must-be-mined," "poisonous-to-humans", and "is-everywhere-in-the-environment" doesn't make much sense. Patterson then went on a quest and examined the levels of lead in the common surface environment, and in deeper parts of the oceans, and then in the Greenland and Antarctic ice, showing that lead had only been brought to the surface in recent times. Interior Antarctica is among the most remote places on Earth and was thought to be beyond the reach of human impacts when Amundsen and Scott raced to the South Pole in 1911. But detailed measurements from an extensive array of ice cores showed unequivocally that substantial toxic heavy metal lead pollution was already well established at the South Pole and throughout Antarctica by 1889, a full 22 years before Amundsen and Scott arrived.
The timing and magnitude of changes in lead deposition (and in certain other isotopes traceable only to a single source) across Antarctica strongly suggest that this single emission source in southern Australia was responsible for the introduction of lead pollution into Antarctica at the end of the 19th century, which is when the industrial revolution began in Australia. The same timing and magnitude occurred in the norther hemispheric ice cores, only the magnitude was even greater, and it peaked in the 1970s, the difference being of course more people and more industry. The ice cores even show the precise date when lead was added to gasoline, with a corresponding massive leap in the levels in the ice.
Patterson had to fight for many years against corporate-funded "scientific research" that showed lead was perfectly safe and harmless in general, and particular for use in gasoline. Patterson would continue to campaign against the use of lead, with real, actual science and a little common sense exposing the truth, and ultimately resulting in government-mandated restrictions on the use of lead. It is this same type of work by scientists today that is used to help alert mankind to other fateful issues that can be identified by the study of nature. The human effect of Climate Change is just one of the examples of that, and it should not be dismissed out of hand because of corporate-funded "scientific research" that shows greenhouse gasses have zero effect on the environment. By the same token, it is equally absurd to think that Climate Change is 100% caused by humans. We know that humans can have an effect on the environment, but what we don't know, and what science cannot as yet tell us, it to precisely what degree that may be.
So if you've reads this far, and can understand how lead got into the environment by industrial and automobile emissions, how we literally laid down a thin layer of lead the world over just from the minuscule amount of lead in leaded gasoline emissions, and without having a scientific degree or a high literacy of science can see how that happened in a very not-natural way, and knowing the science of the effects of greenhouse gasses on a closed environment is indisputable, it doesn't take much of a leap of scientifically ignorant faith to realize that industrial emission of greenhouse gasses on a global scale wouldn't have
at least some sort of an effect on the environment.
The more you know about chemistry, the better you can measure the cause and effect of greenhouse gasses in a closed environment. You can begin to calculate (at least with rough estimates) what the effect might be of this or that amount of greenhouse gasses introduced into an existing environment. But there are also too many variables at play (everything from the efficiency of the planet to scrub and store greenhouse molecules to the position of the solar system within our arm the spiral galaxy) to be able to really point confidently to an exact percentage of it that is caused solely bu human activity. It's safe to say that humans are certainly playing a major role in it, though.
