This is stuff we learned in grade school. Al Gore needs a refresher.
Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet’s climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?
Climate change is not the fault of man. It’s Mother Nature’s way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.
We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.
All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.
……What’s the real cause of the Earth’s norm–a climate that rocks back and forth from steamy tropical heat to icy freeze? A climate that deposits fossilized seashells on mountaintops and makes dry land into seas and swamps?
The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons–the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there’s more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble–its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.
But the wobbles in our trip around the sun are just a start. The sun is a traveler, too. It circles the black hole at the galaxy’s core every 226 million years. And it takes its tiny flock of planets with it. That means us. The result?
The journey around the galactic core is fraught with dangers. For example, every 143 million years we pass through a spiral arm of the galaxy, an arm that tosses tsunamis of cosmic rays our way. Those rays produce massive climate change. Then there’s the innocent-sounding stuff astronomers call galactic “fluff,” massive clouds of cosmic dust lurking in our solar system’s path that also cause dramatic climate change.
Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004574599981936018834.html
The earth’s orbit, rotation, and tilt are just part of what cycles the weather. The surface of the planet goes through a multitude of changes with cold/warm fronts, the flow, speed, and direction of wind, and humidity; a number of variables we cannot control. There are still idiots who insist, in spite of all the geological evidence and natural rotation and cycle of our planet in relation to the sun, that any perceived “climate change” is all our “fault”.
Hell, if all it took was a little “man-made” manipulation, then bring on the warming trend. I’m sick to death of freezing temperatures and snow up to my ass in the winter time.