Sunday, November 25, 2018

Malenkovitch cycles

Here is a geologist talking about climate science. He explains how the Milankovitch cycles caused the ice ages. One lesson is how delicately balanced the climate system is, and is affected by what seems like a small change.

The point that is quite surprising is that Earth presents essentially the same size disk to the sun all the time, and the only thing that changes from the viewpoint of the sun, is the location of the pole in that disk. This changes the mix of land and sea presented to the sun, and this small cyclic variation over millennia, is enough (apparently) to cause ice sheets to advance or to retreat, assuming that the CO2 level is low enough to allow Earth to cool, so that average global temperature falls below 32F for "long enough" periods, in enough places.

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