In this video I present the world’s and even scientific history’s most important and incredible empirical experiment regarding the Earth’s climate and how the Earth interacts with the Sun.
Even though I have demonstrated the 100% theoretical disproof of climate alarm and climate physics in exposing that modern climate theory and political scientific alarmism is based in literal flat Earth theory pseudoscience which invents this fake version of a “greenhouse effect” where the climate creates itself, I still see people asking for empirical disproofs for support.
The point here though people is that the theoretical debunk demonstrates that all interpretations of climate data are filtered through a false & pseudoscientific paradigm which by the necessity of logic renders these alarmist and even most main-stream interpretations entirely false. The entire edifice of climate research rests within a basis of flat Earth theory, hence, all empirical data interpreted through becomes corrupted by flat Earth theory physics in very important and consequential foundational ways.
Further, even though the theoretical disproof is easy to understand, I still have PhD’s in physics and climatology insisting that flat Earth theory with its attendant physics is entirely valid, and they claim that flat Earth theory is “basic geometry”.
And so with that, I present to you the current world’s most important empirical demonstration of the falsehood of climate science and climate alarmism, and even of the modern peer-review scientific method itself.
Climate of Sophistry 
Love it!
Just make them shorter… say 5 mins, and they will go viral.
I guess they really do need to be taken by the hand like kids !
I’m overweight – rotund even. It’s a very cold night and I turn on my 2000 W radiant heater.
It’s so cold I need to get close. Thus according to climate science I am warmed at 1/4 incident radiant power over the whole of my body.
And yet the back feels no warmth at all whilst I need to back away as the front is too exposed.
How can this be ?
Haha great example Rosco.
“It’s so cold I need to get close. Thus according to climate science I am warmed at 1/4 incident radiant power over the whole of my body.”
If you can’t take the cold get off of the incident radiant power 1/4 non-rotating spit, Rosco.
“And yet the back feels no warmth at all whilst I need to back away as the front is too exposed.”
What you need is back radiation, Rosco. I’ll send you some air with 0.04% CO2, no extra cost (I know a guy who knows a guy). That should do the trick. Tell him it’s OK, Joe. %^(
GTBOH
Donations to Al Gore, Pig Spit Lane, Much Hotter Springs, Arkansas.
“What you need is back radiation, Rosco.”
Lost it. Nicely placed pun!
Obviously, the people who produce the child education website at NASA have a different point of view:
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/greenhouse-effect/
I’m always amazed at how irresponsible this is.
So sad. That site and its description of the GHE is a complete lie.
Joe, as I have pointed out (average person has one testicle) and you have pointed out many times, some averages make sense and some don’t.
If climate alarmists wish to raise concerns about the rise in the global mean surface temperatures then shouldn’t they do so on other weather features. What would it look like?
Global mean precipitation – light drizzle with a spot of sleet
Global mean hurricanes, typhoons, tropical storms, tornadoes, cyclones – a zephyr
Global mean drought – lots of water in known places
Global mean ice/sea ice loss – Incredible amount of ice and sea ice. I have 3 fridge/freezers
Global mean floods – Feels like its raining all over the world. Now and then.
Global mean heatwave – Well, 14 – 15 Celsius, 57 – 59 Fahrenheit. Cold front. No sex on the beach.
Global mean extreme weather – OK, but wear a vest.
Luckily, Joe, you can contact me by phone as I happen to have the average phone number in my directory +44 1234 567890. What are the chances? :-s
Great video by the way and the best website on real atmospheric physics by far. Only one that uses real science, real maths, real physics, real chemistry, real everything.
Btw, sorry about your ears, Joe. 😦
Robert
““Folks, I don’t trust children. They’re here to replace us.””
-Stephen Colbert
Haha nice one Robert.
Cheers leitmotif!
Although I am not getting the ears reference…
If you shine a torch (flashlight) head on at less powerful torch does back radiation make both torches brighter? Strong torch raises brightness of weaker torch which in turn returns raises energy to stronger torch and so on? Is this torch magic land? The more you glow the more I glow?
If you shine a torch (flashlight) head on at a torch of the same power is there equilibrium so no torch gets brighter? Is there an exchange of internal energy? Are the two torches exchanging photons but neither of them gets brighter? Or are they both reflecting internal energy? Or is there a standing wave a la Maxwell and nothing happens?
Try shining a light (maybe a narrow beamed lamp) onto a white sheet of paper. Reflect the light on the paper by a small mirror back on to the light spot on the paper. Does the light spot get brighter?
Joe, ears reference. It’s a British thing. It goes way back to Morcambe and Wise, the top comedy duo in the 70s and 80s. They did a wee bit in the US as well.. At the London Palladium Eric Morcambe used to look down into the orchestra pit at Jack Parnell, the conductor, who wore a huge pair of earphones and said, “Sorry about your your ears, Jack” as if it was some sort of prescription from the doctor for an ear problem. Probably non-pc now but funny at the time.
Your earphones are bigger, btw. 😀
leitmotif says:
“Try shining a light (maybe a narrow beamed lamp) onto a white sheet of paper. Reflect the light on the paper by a small mirror back on to the light spot on the paper. Does the light spot get brighter?”
An analogy like this sparked a firestorm of insulting emails from the WUWT crowd several years ago. I kinda started it by writing the solution to this problem from a text book on thermodynamics on PSI.
What the answer essentially says is placing a shell around a sphere reduces the external emissions to ~1/2 as the shell radius approaches the sphere radius – the standard consideration for a radiation shield. As R >>>r the emissions approach 1.
However that outraged the WUWT crowd causing apoplexy, especially in one Robert Brown who produced the typical answer where the shell caused the sphere to double it’s original output.
Anyway the answer from the text is derived from 1st principles and is routinely cited as the effect of a radiation shield.
This lead to Roy Spencer chiming in about back radiation and Anthony Watts conducting an experiment where he reflected the radiation from a light back onto itself and “proved” back radiation to the satisfaction of all and sundry including Roy Spencer.
Of course the claim was complete nonsense as the initial radiation came from the filament and a glass mirror cannot reflect IR to any significant efficiency and the glass of the bulb is definitely emitting only IR at the temperature it acquires. At 200°C almost all of the emissions are at wavelengths longer than the values at which there is almost total absorption of glass so the mirror reflected none of this.
All he was doing was heating the glass “lens” of the bulb with nearly double the initial energy from the filament by reflecting it back – at ~3000 K the emission spectrum consists of wavelengths almost entirely below 4 microns and hence reflected by a glass mirror.
It wasn’t any sort of demonstration of back radiation – it was more like two suns heating a surface.
It was actually funny.
It is possible to cause an increase in temperature by 2 different sources of radiation which should be obvious but both must originate from sources where the emission temperature significantly exceeds the temperature of the object irradiated. This of course does not apply to the standard model of the greenhouse effect where the back radiation from the atmosphere has equal heating power of the incident solar radiation.
How anyone can believe that is beyond my comprehension when it is so obvious. The solar radiation can be concentrated to start fires – back radiation – if it even exists – cannot.
Yah…backradiation cannot be concentrated to light fires, and it is supposedly twice as intense as the Sun already!!!!! Clown world.
The other interesting thing about the standard model atmosphere is that it has no mention of radiation – only gas parameters calculating temperatures.
In an equation the idea is that change in one thing causes a change in something on the other side of the equals sign.
In an atmosphere does an increase in temperature induce an increase in pressure or is the reverse more likely ?
I don’t visit PSI much but I found this comment on Joe’s article in another article’s comments :-
Jerry Krause on PSI wrote
Joe Postma (https://principia-scientific.org/how-to-calculate-the-average-projection-factor-onto-a-hemisphere/) just wrote: “The problem in question is how one calculates the average projection factor of the incident solar radiation onto the hemisphere of the Earth which sunlight falls upon.”
He evidently does not understand that average anything, except climatic factors, is nonsense.
I also saw one post by Spencer accusing Joe of somehow advocating that the Earth is twice the distance from the Sun by Joe’s logic yet Joe has routinely been stating for years that their stupid divide by four insolation is the equivalent of relocating Earth to an orbital radius twice its current value.
These people are so stupid they cannot even comprehend basic English or they simply lie – I guess these are the only choices for climate acolytes.
Is that what Spencer wrote!? That’s what I’ve been saying is implied in THEIR flat earth model!
These sick, lying, sick bastards…
I’ve stolen the picture of “back radiation”. That sucker is going up on my Facebook page. Totally cracked me up!!
“What you need is back radiation, Rosco.”
Hahaha .. thanks a lot Rosco !!! .. are you coming to clean the coffee off of my monitor now?
leitmotif should help you with that .. you guys started this and my monitor is now covered in coffee.
And Robert .. you’re killing me with the “back radiation” stuff .. you need to give Rosco and leitmotif a hand cleaning both my monitors now! … you guys are killing me … ROFL …
squid,
I think I missed another golden opportunity. Instead of the generic anatomical figure in my graphic, I should have used a photo of rotund Al Gore, with arrows indicating his exhaled CO2 hot-air prognostications of doom.
Alas, hindsight, like back radiation, is pretty useless for altering the practical course of events, as they unfold in forward-moving, real-time reality.
I made a copy of Spencer’s quote on his blog
I also saw David Appell calling someone who made a valiod point clueless then immediately Roy Spencer agreed that the guy had made a valid point.
Appell then cited this graph claiming it proves a greenhouse effect because the bite taken out of the emissions graph coincides with the peak emissions from Earth and therefore CO2 is a major problem.
I’ve heard this argument put by many other notable luminaries of climate alarm including Australia’s famous cartoonist John Cook from the University of Queensland.
But to make such a statement shows how little these clowns understand.
The statement may be true for plotting Planck’s law in terms of wave number as the variable but it is completely untrue for a plot in terms of wavelength.
Also look at the emissions from ~1000/cm wave number. The emission value is ~300 mW/m2/cm and multiplied by 1000 gives a value of 300,000 mW/m^2.
Go to the 500/cm point and note that although the value is 380 when you multiply this by 500 you get 190,000 mW/m2 – significantly less – nearly half but this is right next to the peak emission point !!!.
Go to the 1200/cm point and multiply the 200 x 1200 and you get 240,000 mW/m2 – again significantly higher than right next to the peak emission point.
If you had the exact same graph in wavelength terms all the values would be exactly the same because switching to wave number or any other variable used in Planck’s law is just a mathematical transformation – the values are preserved even though the peak emission point changes – it is irrelevant.
I don’t have the same graph in wavelength and there is information re the COMET graph but the point is clear – you cannot claim that because CO2 absorbs at the point of peak emission it means anything at all.
This is a graphic in terms of wavelength.
Notice the CO2 absorption band is shifted well away from the peak emission wavelength of ~9.6 micron for ~303 K and is on the fringe of the curve. The “bite” in this curve is due to Ozone at some 25 kilometres above the surface where it has approximately zero relevance.
Alarmists always show the wave number graph and claim it is something to fear when people who know about radiation science understand the peak emission band switches as you change variable and therefore has zero relevance.
I really don’t think people like David Appell, and all of the other self expressed cynical “know it all” trolls understand even this basic fact about radiation emissions.
I wonder if Roy Spencer does ?
Thanks for that snapshot Rosco. Isn’t it obvious he’s purposefully misrepresenting.
It has to be total misrepresentation.
Looks like I stuffed up my maths again. Gotta stop doing that. Ignore the calculations about emissions at various wave number – 1000 is 1000 peaks in 1 cm equals 10 micron so the calculations are wrong.
Doesn’t change the facts about the shift in peak due to variable change and their prime argument that the graph means CO2 is absorbing at peak emissions is irrelevant.
The CO2 band is at 14-16 in the Comet graph and the Ozone is at ~10.
Rosco,
“Appell then cited this graph claiming it proves a greenhouse effect because the bite taken out of the emissions graph coincides with the peak emissions from Earth and therefore CO2 is a major problem.”
Tell Appell that if he takes a bite out of a cake (representing energy content), and then regurgitates back onto the cake, there is no more to the cake then there was orginally.
The sun can make a cake every second, he bites, he pukes, and there is no more cake than what the sun provided in the first place. Cake in = Cake out. No extra cake.
I love cake, and do wish backcake existed, but I’m 33yo and know better.
I come over, I’ll have something I wanna talk about, not have time to look up where to say it so I’m gonna put this here.
One time when I was moving furniture I said a photon was a fur ball.
I do not go to places for things to be less clear because I arrived there. That’s fuckin’ forbidden.
That’s for shit eating baboons who can be told a cold light blocking nitrogen bath’s a heater
and that ”…Yaw yewsin fiar dun made thuh sky git hot’chaW!” Well – anyway that bothered me
because people can’t be going around being told
a photon is a fur ball.
This is how this is. Watch #1 then watch # 3.
This is why photons act the way they do.
There are three of these, #1 shows you. # 2, shows you many galaxies with # 1 overlaid on it.
# 3 is the one that makes you know how a photon, isn’t a furball.
# 1 https://youtu.be/9EPlyiW-xGI
# 2 https://youtu.be/2NogyJ0k8Kw
# 3: This one is important in understanding how electromagnetic fundamental force creates photonic concentrations
that have spin and a polarity. https://youtu.be/lpI6ikj1G-s
No cold bath ever was or ever will be a heater to the slightest degree.
No cold light blocking oxygen-enriched Nitrogen atmospheric bath, ever made the objects immersed in it warmer through deprivation of that light not arriving and subsequent cold Nitrogen conduction washing off prodigious amounts of the energy that DID get to that rock.
Anyone who even suggests it might have been reasonable if one were very, very intoxicated should be beaten with a stout cane until it is unable to move on it’s own and must be stimulated to crawl from the room with shoe tips to the hips and legs, punctuated by more clubbings with the cane.
NO cold bath is a heater.
NO OBJECT has or will EVER be made WARMER through presence of a cold bath,
than if the cold bath were not there: and,
the light not reaching rocks in the bath
returning to warm it so 100% of total available warming spectra
raise the energy load in the rock.
NEVER admit it sounds sensible to even consider
that ANY cold bath EVER heat the object it chills.
The moment you do this you admit you are as mentally ill as the therm-0-billious science blighting maggot who dared suggest it could be true.
This last few paragraphs about climate are because this is a climate place and I like to stay on topic.
The topic: teaching science not fraud, is ALWAYS: there’s no such thing as a cold bath
that’s a god damned heater.
Not Once
Not Ever.
No matter WHO ”dun sed’JaW!”
Always remember: when a fraud barking magical gassiness dun made a cold bath a heater bleating shit-eating cucksheep tells you that ”evur time thay dun bin moar uh thim gaises, (thim’s what’s dun stopped 23% of thim lights frum a gittin in tha erth) dun wint up in tha sky, so less light dun wint in,
IT DUN MADE MOAR COME OWT,
evur TIME,”
you ask him ”HOW much MORE COMES OUT, every time the magicalness of the gaissiness, dun let LESS WiNT iN?” And you defy that m*th*F*ck*r to change the subject.
DEMAND he TELL you how much more light those thermometers show, coming in and out, pinging around Earth,
every time those Green House gases
cause another percent LESS, to REACH it,
to ‘ping in and out of it
in thim backerdistical ways thim magical gaissinesses, has got;
what cain’t jest regulur fellurs, understand.”
Cawse thay ain’t signtsie fellurs with bow ties, and thay own playse two part at werk an evurthang.
Start carrying a simple sword cane. I’m not suggesting you unsheath it, that would be uncouth.
Wrap it tightly in several layers of pvc electrical tape, black in color, so at the very first MENTION
that maybe a magical gaissiness, dun made more energy come out, cause it dun made less go in, you can simply club the animal to the ground without fear of busting your cane cover.
Should the miscreant insist you may have to stab it through the ear in order to let the evil spirits out but that of course is understandable if the repugnant science blighting maggot refuses to confess that a devil had taken possession of it, and told it “go out and tell everyone a cold bath’s a heater. Especially children.”
Remember that if you don’t instantly render it incapable of trying to do so, the fraud barking cockroach will shortly be attempting to operate machinery, such as automobiles or bicycles.
It’s obviously delusional with eruptions of “Thim cold baths is heedurs, I tell yaW!” and someone needs to notify mental health authorities it was claiming it, in public.
They’ll understand and respond by taking it away; ostensibly to have holes drilled in it’s feckless sociopathological head, to release the evil spirits which have overcome it’s sensibilities.
Isn’t CO2 absorption at a particular wave number a resonance phenomenon? — it just indicates some sort of subatomic rhythm? And how would a resonance phenomenon, in any way, show any sort of “trapping”? There’s no “trapping” — it’s TAPPING, like a dancer, … and a particular wavelength and a particular atomic configuration makes this dance possible?
Photon hits — molecule jiggles up to higher energy — molecule goes back to ground state — this causes a distinct signature at a distinct place. No trapping. Tapping — up, then down, then up, then down, …
Right? Wrong? Almost right? Not even close?
@danvas
I LOVE it when I meet new smart people. *Thank you* for comprehending what PhD’s in physics and climate seem unable to.
They literally start with a model where the Sun can’t create the climate. Then they invent a scheme where the climate creates itself. Sad! lol
Now a comment about this:
The fact that Joe then used it to compute the Earth-sun distance proves he thinks it’s the solar constant, …
[“The fact that” is an assertion of a false attribution to Joe — Joe never used anything to compute the Earth-sun distance — he showed how people who use the divide-by-four travesty are, in effect, the ones forced to claim double Earth distance as a fact of their own absurd reasoning. Joe did not state double Earth-sun distance as any fact. The fact Joe DID state was that other people imply this.
Roy apparently cannot grasp basic English composition, as evidenced by his inability to properly attribute which facts are being asserted by which people.]
Sorry I missed the proper time and proper place to offer such a response, when Roy landed this gem. Better late than never, I guess.
Think about it: average … solar … flux
You consider a flow rate of something — joules per second … for a given area — meters squared … over which this flow rate SPECIFICALLY occurs. That’s energy-flow per second, referenced SPECIFICALLY for a surface that DEFINES the flow.
THAT surface area is where exactly this energy-flow is defined. The seconds during which the energy-flow happens are seconds on THAT surface area SPECIFICALLY.
Now go over to the dark side of Earth, where NO energy flow from the sun is happening. There are NO seconds here during which a sun-energy-flow happens. There are HOURS, in fact, where there are NO seconds where sun-energy-flow EVER happens.
Yet, somebody decides, hey, let’s take something that exists in a specific time on a specific surface area and place some of it where it does NOT exist on any part of a surface area for any time. We assign it there, as an “average”, even though it NEVER exists there in any time of reality to define it in fact as what we say it is in our words.
Do you see how ridiculous this is now?
Exactly Robert. Thanks.
Yes indeed…totally ridiculous. Why can’t they understand simple things?
A research study in 2004 came to the conclusion that about 3.6 million lightning strikes occur per day over the world. That’s an average of 100 per second with temperatures up to 4x the Sun (50,000 degrees Fahrenheit) the US alone is hit about 30 million times a year.
NOW I don’t know what the equivalent of 15 microns is (a very low energy flashlight?) but I find it impossible to comprehend how that many lightning strikes a day can have almost no effect on the atmosphere but IR radiation at 15 microns does.
@ danvas
I did a little Max-Min temperature study of different places on this planet Earth.
Except for Montreal (daily 2017 and 2018 combined), all other places data is with monthly average Max and Min in Celcius. All data is January and February combined and July and August combined.
J-F J-A
Wichita, KS 14 14
Niamey, Niger 17 10
N’Djamena, Tchad 18 9
Ulan Bator Mongolia 13 12
Los Angeles, CA 9 9
Seatle, WA 7 11
New York, NY 7 8
Montreal, QC 8 10
Does anybody notice anything ? Although the Sun shines on Earth day and night at the same time all the time, there is a difference in temperature between day and night, winter or summer, everywhere ! Also, dry places have a greater differential then places near big masses of water. Who would have guessed ? Would water have anything to say on this planet ? I’m appying for a PhD ! Or should I ?
Chris,
Lightning has a diameter of 2.5 cm, therefore an area of 20 cm^2, or 0.002 m^2. Times 3.6 million = 7,200 sq. meters.
The Earth is 510 Trillion sq. meters.
By averaging the solar radiation across the earth area AND over time, (by dividing the flux by 4), you get a constant, average, temperature of -18 deg. C. (flat earth model). This eliminates the physical cycles of the water in the atmosphere, converting it into inert ice, on the earth surface, and makes necessary the inventing of imaginary green house phenomena (back radiation) to explain the actual average earth temperature (15 deg.C.) The reality is that the day/night temperature swings crate the water cycles, which, in turn, determine the climate and average temperature. The flat earth theory simply eliminates the atmospheric water cycles, which is an absurd scenario.
Zoe,
CO2 is 0.04% of a 1% trace gas (a 1 to 2500 ratio?) and 15 microns is the equivalent of a blackbody radiating at -80 degrees Celsius (so I’ve been told). Neither CO2 or lighning strikes have a marginal influence on the temperature gradient of the atmosphere…So I’m not following?
Secondly how would you guys (or ladies) explain this point better and more ‘intelligently’:
From what I’m gathering CO2 isn’t ‘absorbing’ new IR energy because CO2 increases it’s the same solar energy that has always been absorbed first by water vapor and then by CO2 and or whatever.
So if CO2 is increasing and it absorbs some IR Radiation and that radiation isn’t increasing in amount is all the CO2 still actually absorbing that radiation or is it in a lower energy level? Please explain.
The more I learn bout the global warming ‘science’ the less I understand.
Joseph,
My email has changed on here and your notices go to it fine but I can’t seem to use that email to comment. I’m still using 4realscience which doesn’t exist. Go figure. I’m going to try and use my current email this time and see if it works.
So I think I fixed it so we’ll see if this posts the problem is fixed.
Joseph,
My email has changed on here and your notices go to it fine but I can’t seem to use that email to comment. I’m still using 4realscience which doesn’t exist. Go figure. I’m going to try and use my current email this time and see if it works.
I’m trying this again.
Global warming science reminds me of trying to follow a baseball game with no established rules. 3 strikes is a homerun, a base hit is an automatic out and hitting the ball over the fence is a lunch break .Clear skies means a weather delay and rain is perfect for playing. Each inning those rules change on the whim of those creating the rules. Emotional science baseball.
This was an explanation of an ice age from a geologist or someone similar, I “” his “insertions” of global warming into his explanation. They just have to do it, they can’t seem to help themselves. My question is how accurate is his explanation removing the propaganda insertions? Whenever you have time, I appreciate an educated eye. I know some about this but the math is hard to dispute if you don’t know it and I certainly don’t know the math:
You’re absolutely correct. We are technically still in an ice-age due to the existence of ice upon the planet. Nested within the ice-age cycles are the glacials and right now we’re in an interglacial, and have been for about 10,000 years.
Both the ice-ages and the glacial maxima are tied to the movement of our planet within space.
The glacial periods occur when there is a decrease in the amount of incoming solar radiation coupled with a decrease in solar radiation absorption due to a lower angle of incidence of sunlight and a greater reflectance from Earth.
This is occasioned due to changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The shape tends to, then from, circularity, such that we have an orbit that stretches elliptically then rebounds back to circularity.
The full cycle lasts some 100,000 years during which time there are 90,000 years of gradual cooling followed by 10,000 years of comparatively rapid warming. Having recently (geologically speaking) encountered the warming phase we are now in an interglacial period and are moving toward the next glacial maximum, albeit some 80,000 years from now.
During a full cycle the temperature swings by an average of 7°C. Other orbital variations that the planet goes through can amplify or attenuate the effects of obliquity such that the normal temperature range falls between 6°C and 8°C.
Much more impressive are the full ice-age cycles, these are tied to the orbit of the entire solar system around the galactic centre and have a periodicity of about 125 million years.
During a full cycle the average temperature of Earth will range from 4°C at the coolest to 35°C at it’s warmest.
During the cold phase all but the Equatorial Region of the planet will be frozen solid. By contrast, the hot phase sees tropical plants growing in the polar regions.
In the grand scheme of things our planet is presently a little cooler than average having, as it does, an average global temperature of 15°C.
As with the glacials, we’re also on the downward slope toward the next ice-age maximum. We’ve been generally cooling for the last 50 million years and have another 10 to 20 million years before we start warming up again. It’s going to be about 50 million years from now before Earth will be completely free of ice and can be truly said to be out of an ice-age.
‘We should be cooling down, the last interglacial warming period ended some 10,000 years ago and since then the general trend has been a downward one with temperatures reducing by 1°C. Uninterrupted this cooling will continue at the same rate until we reach the next glacial maximum. However, all of this cooling, and more, has been compensated for by the warming we’ve seen in recent decades.’
The average temperature of Earth is higher now than it has been since the last but one glacial maximum some 130,000 years ago.
Over much shorter periods of time, ranging from a few days to a few hundred years, there are periods of natural warming and cooling. The reasons for these are many but they all revolve around the amount of solar radiation entering the atmosphere and the amount of thermal radiation being retained by it.
“We should be going into an ice age now and we should have been edging towards one for the last couple thousand years.” Ice ages are most likely caused by what are known as Milankovitch cycles or periodic changes of variables in the Earth’s orbit.
The first of these variables is eccentricity, which can be described as “a measure of the departure of the Earth’s orbit from circularity.” A perfectly circular orbit has an eccentricity of zero while an eccentricity with a value of one is a parabola. As the Earth orbits the Sun it’s eccentricity changes between 0.005 and 0.058 mainly due to interactions with the gravitational fields of Jupiter and Saturn. The second variation in Earth’s orbit is axial tilt or obliquity which can be defined as “the angle between an object’s rotational axis and a line perpendicular to its orbital plane”. During this 41,000 year cycle the axial tilt can change between 22.5 degrees to 24.5 degrees. Earth’s current eccentricity is roughly 0.0167 while it’s axial tilt is approximately 23.44 degrees.
It has been determined that insolation, or the amount of solar radiation recieved in a given area, as the result of orbital variance, along with enhancement due to negative and positive feedbacks, plays a large role in the coming and going of ice ages.
C.M….
Basaltic volcanism beneath the sea or ice sheets likely to be a major factor in warming us out of an ice age. See tuya or table mountains in north eastern Iceland from 10,000 ya. Formed as such by treacle-like molten basalt pushing through ice, solidifying as it does so.