…by shellfish? The lead is interesting:
A couple hundred thousand years ago, the planet became a much colder and drier place. In Africa, deserts expanded, species were wiped out and the human race was in deep trouble.
Climate change! But it wasn’t warming. And it wasn’t caused by humanity. Or at least, there’s no case made that it was. I continue to think that a cooling planet is much more to be feared than a warming one, and I’m thinking more and more that it’s not necessarily unlikely.
I’m pro-AGW for that reason. Geologists call this period an “interglacial” period because most of the time the world is covered with ice. They don’t call the glacial periods “intertropical” after all. And our current interglacial period is currently going on longer than any previous one, so we are due. More coal!
That’s a very good question. The connection to the sunspot cycle continues to get minimal attention in the public debate, which is not super surprising, but something that will cause sensible people to smack their foreheads in frustration when the aha moment finally does come. The press will treat it like a momentous sudden amazing discovery, when anyone who’s been really paying attention has known it for a while. Clowns.
This sunspot minimum has gone on for a strangely long time, and for my money the connection between the curiously long sunspotlessness and the cooling is something worth pondering, especially considering the historical impact of the Maunder minimum 250 years ago or so.
Long term, however, it seems very likely that warming is in our future. The Sun has been getting gradually brighter for a billion years and it doesn’t seem super likely that it will stop, or reverse. Indeed, the notion that the Sun’s output will remain absolutely precisely balanced at what it’s been during historical times seems…naive.
For my money, the absolute priority as we become a species more sensitive to climate change is to learn to adapt to it. Spending our resources trying to prevent our own contribution to it is a stupid waste of time and energy. Even if we ourselves are helping along a recent warming trend, it would be naive and egoistical to assume the only source of future climate change will be mismanagement of the environment by man. Now that we are aware of the issue, and learning to track it, we should be spending all the resources we have to spend on this issue learning to adapt to it, so that when it happens in the future for reasons we absolutely cannot control — e.g. the Sun — we can cope.
I mean, metaphorically we’re in the position of a tribe that has discovered that some of its members are pissing in the well. We’re all focussed on making dead sure that no one with a full bladder ever comes near the well, when what we should be thinking is Hmm. We’re all dependent on a single well. What if there’s a drought? An animal falls into the well? A rock fall blocks it up? Shouldn’t we have a more robust water supply?
Carl,
Building on your point. I am frustrated that people do not realize there are multiple cyclical phenomenon overlaid on top of each other. It is childish to zero in on one effector and ignore all of others.
Aww, shucks. For those of us who love oysters and who live in the DESERT, that photo was just cruel. 🙂 🙂 And the article reminds me of a week I spent with Dr. Jack Cohen, one of the UK’s top reproductive biologists, who was working with the National Zoo in DC on cheetah reproduction troubles. The poor kitties got lots of those, and according to Jack and others, from what they can tell ONE pregnant mother survived at some time in the remote past. One. Possibly two. So the theory that about 1k-2k of our direct ancestors survived to make all of us isn’t that fantastic.
It is childish to zero in on one effector and ignore all of others.
One has a rate of change that dwarfs the others.
One has a rate of change that dwarfs the others.
Solar flux.
> One has a rate of change that dwarfs the others.
It’s not rate of change that matters, it’s size of effect of change.
The physics of heat absorbtion by CO2 itself is sublinear in concentration. The Alarmists claim that a minor change is, none the less, leading to a runaway feedback cycle through other mechanisms. However, their models of those mechanisms are, to put it kindly, lacking.
Note that it can’t be temperature alone that causes the runaway – the earth has been hotter than it is now and didn’t runaway. (It’s also been colder.) So, if there’s a temperature threshold, we’re a long ways from it.
And then there’s the question of whether there’s actually any warming occurring. The unreproducible data says yes, but the reproducible data says no.
As I posted, there’s a nice bit of data coming out of Russia showing that the Warmists were cherry-picking. At this point, almost all of the warming seems to be coming from the adjustments, not the data. (The same is true of the sea level data too.)
To make the ark plan even more stupid the have built them in the Himalaya. I know that there is not many earthquakes in the Himalaya but they a mountains created by a collison of two tectonic plates. Given the nature of the disaster there is a great chance that the Himalaya would become quite unstable.