Why is the climate changing. (Page 6) ghostgeek: Now as to people making predictions: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” [ http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/ ] So why is anyone worrying about population growth when most everyone should have starved to death by now? ghostgeek: Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” Er ... did that happen? I don't think so. ghostgeek: Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” [ http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/ ] Does the bit about demographers agreeing almost unanimously sound a tad familiar ( think climate scientists )? ghostgeek: Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990. [ http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/ ] Yep, these scientists keep making predictions and keep being proved wrong. ghostgeek: And here's something we should all be glad didn't happen: Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” [ http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/ ] ghostgeek: Just one more post before it's off to pastures new: The main evidence proving that CO2 does not control the climate, but at most can play a second fiddle by just amplifying the variations already present, is that of lags. In all cases where there is a good enough resolution, one finds that the CO2 lags behind the temperature by typically several hundred to a thousand years. Namely, the basic climate driver which controls the temperature cannot be that of CO2. That driver, whatever it is, affects the climate equilibrium, and the temperature changes accordingly. Once the oceans adjust (on time scale of decades to centuries), the CO2 equilibrium changes as well. The changed CO2 can further affect the temperature, but the CO2 / temperature correlation cannot be used to say almost anything about the strength of this link. [ http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth ]  kittybobo34: Ghost,, The regular cycle of 100,000 year ice age and 15,000 year warm spell has been going on for millions of years. Its been plotted against the tilt, wobble and orbital path our planet takes occasionally (pushed and pulled by the other planets) We should be going into an ice age, but because of the extra co2 temps are going in the other direction. Those early predictions of famine didn't take into account GM'd foods that produce 2x more and are drought tolerant, and bug resistant. We can only guess where all this co2 is taking us, but based on past geology, the planet has been in this state several times. It usually seems to settle into a new equilibrium with an average daily temp of around 130 f or roughly 55 c, with coniferous forests growing at the poles. kittybobo34: Squirrel, that is what geology and paleontology is all about, The fossils of plants and animals, insects, all tell you what sort of climate was there and when. Ocean cores also tell you what the climate was like in the micro fossils  The flying Squirrel: But isnt that what you say Oil is Fossil fuels , How many Fossils and dead plant material at 60. 000 feet then  (Edited by The flying Squirrel) kittybobo34: Oil and coal are dead plant material from the Carboniferous age , (the first greenhouse earth) The oceans went stagnant leaving tons of layers of algae sinking to the bottom. The coal is mostly forests that layered because there was no bacteria that could eat Lignin at the time. (lignin is the woody material that plants came up with to stand tall) (Edited by kittybobo34) ghostgeek: It seems we're also revolving around the galactic centre, which movement might also affect climate: The period of oscillation in and out of the plane of the galaxy (up and down) is about 70 million years. This means that we pass through the Galactic midplane about every 35 million years which some people have compared with the period between mass extinctions on Earth to come up with yet another doomsday theory. In fact it is true that the number of cosmic rays which hit the Earth will increase during the (about a) hundred thousand years we are closer to the Galactic plane. There have also been some plausible theories about the overall temperature of the Earth increasing (with the relevent climatic changes that implies). ... We pass through a major spiral arm about every 100 million years, taking about 10 million years to go through. During the transit, there would be a higher rate of 'nearby' supernova and possibly other so called 'environmental stresses' which could alter the climate of the Earth. [ http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/55-our-solar-system/the-sun/the-sun-in-the-milky-way/207-how-often-does-the-sun-pass-through-a-spiral-arm-in-the-milky-way-intermediate ] ghostgeek: Interesting what you find if you look: One mechanism which can give rise to a notable solar/climate link was suggested by the late Edward Ney of the U. of Minnesota, in 1959. He suggested that any climatic sensitivity to the density of tropospheric ions would immediately link solar activity to climate. This is because the solar wind modulates the flux of high-energy particles coming from outside the solar system. These particles, the cosmic rays, are the dominant source of ionization in the troposphere. Thus, a more active sun which accelerates a stronger solar wind, would imply that as cosmic rays diffuse from the outskirts of the solar system to its center, they lose more energy. Consequently, a lower tropospheric ionization rate results. Over the 11-yr solar cycle and the long term variations in solar activity, these variations amount to typically a 10% change in this ionization rate. Moreover, it now appears that there is a climatic variable sensitive to the amount of tropospheric ionization - clouds. [ http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages ] kittybobo34: Our cycle of ice ages and warm periods fit exactly the orbital wavering of our planet. This report is tedious but it accurately explains the whole situation. ghostgeek: If this is true, then one should expect climatic variations while we roam the galaxy. This is because the density of cosmic ray sources in the galaxy is not uniform. In fact, it is concentrated in the galactic spiral arms (it arises from supernovae, which in our galaxy are predominantly the end product of massive stars, which in turn form and die primarily in spiral arms). Thus, each time we cross a galactic arm, we should expect a colder climate. Current data for the spiral arm passages gives a crossing once every 135 ± 25 Million years. A record of the long term variations of the galactic cosmic ray flux can be extracted from Iron meteorites. It was found in the present work that the cosmic ray flux varied periodically (with flux variations greater than a factor of 2.5) with an average period of 143 ± 10 Million years. This is consistent with the expected spiral arm crossing period and with the picture that the cosmic ray flux should be variable. The agreement is also with the correct phase. But this is not all. The Sikhote Alin iron meteorite - An Iron meteorite, a large sample of which can be used to reconstruct the past cosmic ray flux variations. The reconstructed signal reveals a 145 Myr periodicity shown below. This particular one is part of the Sikhote Alin meteorite that fell over Siberia in the middle of the 20th century, it broke off its parent body about 300 Million years ago. The main result of this research, is that the variations of the flux, as predicted from the galactic model and as observed from the Iron meteorites is in sync with the occurrence of ice-age epochs on Earth. The agreement is both in period and in phase: The observed period of the occurrence of ice-age epochs on Earth is 145 ± 7 Myr (compared with 143 ± 10 Myrs for the Cosmic ray flux variations), The mid point of the ice-age epochs is predicted to lag by 31 ± 8 Myr and observed to lag by 33 ± 20 Myr. [ http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages ] kittybobo34: The Galaxy has little to do with our local solar system climate. I can see possible extra comets at times from the Ort cloud, but nothing that would cause ice ages and warm periiods. Its 4 light years to the nearest star, ghostgeek: Well, here is something else to consider: A second agreement is in the long term activity: On one hand there were no ice-age epochs observed on Earth between 1 and 2 billion years ago. On the other hand, it appears that the star formation rate in the Milky way was about 1/2 of its average between 1 billion and 2 billion year ago, while it was higher in the past 1 billion years, and between 2 to 3 billion years ago. [ http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages ] kittybobo34: That would be true about star formation, the raw material for the early stars was mostly hydrogen and the density of the galaxy was higher, thus forming massive giant stars that explode early sending out massive amounts of heavier elements. Our own sun forming 5 billion years ago picked up on some of that as is evident in our planetary iron core with radioactive center. The whole process is slowing down, smaller stars, farther apart. Small stars last much much longer, but ours will eventually turn into a red giant . kittybobo34: PS,, not many know that as our sun ages it will get hotter until it collapses in on itself and becomes a red Giant. ghostgeek: Now for a very long post: The record temperatures in Britain last weekend made global warming feel all too real. Atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels usually gets the blame, and, consequently, alternative, "clean" energy sources such as wind farms, solar panels and fuel cells are the new vogue. But is carbon dioxide really the culprit? Or might the global-warming theory be based on hot air? A small but significant number of scientists are now suggesting that carbon dioxide may not be such a major player, and that in fact the ups and downs in the Earth's climate could be linked to the exploding of far-away stars. Such a controversial theory requires some explaining. When a massive star reaches its supernova state, it explodes and releases high-energy particles called cosmic rays. Some of these cosmic rays enter the Earth's atmosphere. Two specialists in this field - Nir Shaviv from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Jan Veizer from the University of Ottawa in Canada - claim to have found evidence that vari-ations in cosmic rays could be influencing Earth's climate. Our solar system rotates around the Milky Way, passing in and out of the four spiral arms of stars belonging to the galaxy. When the solar system is inside a spiral arm it receives a high cosmic ray flux (CRF) because it is surrounded by many exploding stars. "The spiral arms move slower than the stars and this creates a stellar 'traffic jam'," explains Shaviv. "Almost all star formation takes place in these stellar traffic jams and so massive stars, which live short lives, get stuck in the jam and die on the spiral arms too." What Shaviv and Veizer have noticed is that cold periods in the Earth's climate tend to occur at the same time as high CRF relating to the Earth passing through a spiral arm of the Milky Way. "Approximately every 150 million years the Earth has entered a spiral arm of the Milky Way, and there has been a corresponding cold period with more ice at the poles and many ice ages," Shaviv says. [ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/blame-it-on-the-supernova-100121.html ] ghostgeek: People might not like it but there is more than one theory doing the circuits that claims to explain global warming. kittybobo34: Life itself has been acting as a balance to the sun in a sort of feed back loop. More sunlight means more plants reducing co2 and lowering temperature. less sun allows the ocean to absorb less co2 , thus insulating the atmosphere a little better. The cycle of ice ages and warm periods really got set into a pattern as the continents drifted into the position they are in now, with Antarctica & Greenland holding vast quantities of ice and effecting global sea currents that average the temperatures. kittybobo34: There is a theory that global warming actually may trigger an ice age by changing the ocean currents. We shall see . ghostgeek: I'm not sure I want to see if that theory works out, seeing as I hate the cold. Still, it's nice to see that there's more than one theory being kited. | Science Chat Room 3 People Chatting Similar Conversations |