separate_wayz wrote:Eric wrote:Using 100 years of data on an Earth millions of year old is what is most hysterical. Never do I hear from these yahoos..."Based on our very limited data we tentatively predict global warming"...its been thrown down our throats as if its a fact.
I'm much more concerned about global cooling of the non-anthropogenic variety (non-man-made). Ice ages (glacial maximums) seem to appear every 100,000, with breaks (interglacials) every 10-12,000 years. We seem to be coming to the end of the Halocene interglacial and it has nothing to do with human activity. The primary causes are a confluence of three things: (1) the tilt of the earth (which varies over about 41,000 years); (2) the shape of the Earth's orbit (which changes over a period of 100,000 years); and (3) the Earth's "wobble", known as the Precesion of the Equinoxes (which gradually rotates over 26,000 years).
Glacial advances also seem to be tied closely with solar activity (like sunspots and solar flares), and we've had a remarkable slowdown in solar activity since 2006. Sunspots correlate with the sun's Great Conveyor Belt, which circulates hot plasma inside the sun over a 40 year cycle. Astronomers number each cycle -- we're currently on Solar Cycle 23. But sunspots apparently are excellent predictors of future conveyor belt activity, and the current slowdown in sunspot activity means Solar Cycle 25 (peaking in the year 2022) will be the weakest in centuries, according to NASA. The other problem to be concerned about is that solar flares help cancel out other bad stuff from space, like cosmic rays (which might contribute to cancers and cataracts).
When all these astronomical and geological events happen together in the right way, you get an ice age. We could be in for some interesting few years ahead of us .....
Funny you mention that:
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/
