THE COMING ICE AGE...

     The website New Scientist posts an article that posits global warming and cooling are simply part of the earth's response to the Sun's natural cycle:

Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

25 January 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition.Stuart Clark

There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.

Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.

He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gábor Ágoston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.

Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.

These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.

    

    

Comments

[Rubik]

magic rose cube ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL BLOGS: THE COMING ICE AGE...

[Rhoufiekxz]

My children and some of my nieecs and nephews attend the same small school where I teach. The other day my four-year-old asked me why her cousins had not yet arrived at school. I explained that they had a dentist appointment to go to and would be at school later. I went on to tell her that she and her sisters would soon be having dentist appointments as well. Armed with that information, she went running off to find her sisters. I over heard her saying, "The Petroviches (cousins) aren't here because they have a disappointment this morning and we're going to have a disappointment soon too!

[John A. Jauregui]

Pay a tax, chnage the weather. I don't think so. Humans account for only 3 percent of the carbon dioxide released into the biosphere annually (Google: carbon cycle). Congresswoman Pelosi's and Senator Reid's plans for regressive new carbon offset and green tax legislation are designed in concert with UN and Kyoto Accord mandates. The goal is to reduce human CO2 production by 1/3. How high would new carbon offset taxes on transportation and heating fuels need to be to motivate you to cut back by 1/3? At best that level of tax will reduce annual CO2 production by 1 percent globally. Not much mitigation nor hope there. Certainly 1% is not enough to make a difference in the perceived problem of anthropogenic (human) global warming gases. The impact of such draconian tax measures can only be imagined. However, it does beg the question, "If humans can't really be expected to make much of an impact on global warming gases, how can they possibly be blamed for warming in the first place?" Why are people compelled by politicians and the media to feel responsible and guilty for causing global warming? For the answers, Google "blame, shame and guilt used as political controls", read "Unstoppable Global Warming" and the "Chilling Stars" for the scientific facts and "State of Fear" for the political dynamics behind this renewed eco-tax controversy. Those party faithful that think this debate is over are sorely mistaken.