So not only do we not understand, sometimes it seems deliberately, the natural processes that produce climate variation, we don't even fully understand the history of the variations.
...we not understand, sometimes it seems deliberately, the natural processes that produce climate variation....
We also often simply ignore them--like ice cores taken from opposite ends of the Earth, reaching back 400,000 years that indicate increases in atmospheric CO2 occur after planetary warming, not before it.
And things like orbital mechanics. Fun fact: our northern hemisphere summers occur when Earth is farthest away from the sun and winters when we're closest. Earth's rotational axis is, currently tilted mostly away from the sun. Second fun fact: our rotational axis precesses on the relatively short cycle of every 26,000 years.
Fun speculation: what will northern hemisphere summers and winters be like when they occur when we're closest to the sun in summer, and our axis is tilted toward it; our winters when we're farthest from the sun, though still tilted toward it (I'm neglecting the further mitigating/potentiating effects of most of the planet's oceans being in the southern hemisphere. I'm also eliding the fact that "farthest" and "closest" aren't all that different from each other; the major factor is our axial tilt)? That'll happen in a time frame not too different from our current time since the last Ice Age started winding down.
So not only do we not understand, sometimes it seems deliberately, the natural processes that produce climate variation, we don't even fully understand the history of the variations.
ReplyDelete...we not understand, sometimes it seems deliberately, the natural processes that produce climate variation....
ReplyDeleteWe also often simply ignore them--like ice cores taken from opposite ends of the Earth, reaching back 400,000 years that indicate increases in atmospheric CO2 occur after planetary warming, not before it.
And things like orbital mechanics. Fun fact: our northern hemisphere summers occur when Earth is farthest away from the sun and winters when we're closest. Earth's rotational axis is, currently tilted mostly away from the sun. Second fun fact: our rotational axis precesses on the relatively short cycle of every 26,000 years.
Fun speculation: what will northern hemisphere summers and winters be like when they occur when we're closest to the sun in summer, and our axis is tilted toward it; our winters when we're farthest from the sun, though still tilted toward it (I'm neglecting the further mitigating/potentiating effects of most of the planet's oceans being in the southern hemisphere. I'm also eliding the fact that "farthest" and "closest" aren't all that different from each other; the major factor is our axial tilt)? That'll happen in a time frame not too different from our current time since the last Ice Age started winding down.
Eric Hines