Astounding, mesmerizing, essential.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth – we are all crew.
Here, Basic Orientation for newbies.
Climate science is complicated business, and understanding the extent to which climate change is man-made also requires an understanding of Earth’s powerful natural cycles. One of those natural cycles involves Earth’s orbit and its complicated dance with the sun.
The first thing you need to know about Earth’s orbit and its effect on climate change is that orbital phases occur over tens of thousands of years, so the only climate trends that orbital patterns might help explain are long-term ones.
Even so, looking at Earth’s orbital cycles can still offer some invaluable perspective on what is happening in the short term. Most notably, you might be surprised to learn that Earth’s current warming trend is happening in spite of a relatively cool orbital phase. It’s therefore possible to better appreciate the high degree that anthropogenic warming must be taking place in contrast.
Not as simple as you might think
Many people might be surprised to learn that Earth’s orbit around the sun is much more complicated than the simple diagrams studied in childhood science classrooms. For instance, there are at least three major ways that Earth’s orbit varies over the course of millennia: its eccentricity, its obliquity and its precession. Where the Earth is within each of these cycles has a significant effect on the amount of solar radiation — and thus, warmth — that the planet gets exposed to.
Well done.
As for “It’s therefore possible to better appreciate the high degree that anthropogenic warming must be taking place in contrast”, Fred Singer would not agree—-it’s the sunspots, not the orbit.
Add to that:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/human-emissions-will-delay-next-ice-age-by-50000-years-study-says?utm_source=Daily+Carbon+Briefing&utm_campaign=9da0c10251-cb_daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_876aab4fd7-9da0c10251-303446941
To me that study has come as a truly great shock, I am considering paying 32 bucks for the full paper. It seems that many others are already in the know about it and James Hansen already wrote about it in “Storms of my Grandchildren”, which I have not read. Maybe I should buy his book, instead of the paper.
Our expected next glacial event (in around 50,000 years will be completely skipped, unless we invent a reliable super atmospheric CO2 scrubber (which seems highly unlikely). Damn it ! we are so powerful, so dangerous now we can stop ice ages, with a few tonnes of fossils.
I am truly glad I visited the Franz Josef Glacier in the 90’s, it was an exhilarating experience and spectacle. Are we really heading for a “Hothouse Earth” in which our species has never experienced before ?, will we (or some of we) survive it ?. If this was an Arthur C. Clarke novel I would be fascinated to know the ending.
I like this site Peter Sinclair keeps it all very real, feet on the ground, all we need to do is keep cool, de-carbonize and quickly too. Plant plenty more trees and let nature continue looking after us all, as it did in the old days before James Watts and bright engineers started tinkering around.
Just keep those shady guys with their fingers stuck in the tills in check ! No need for yet more fighting, bloodshed and extinction.
Note to Porter Ranch – We got enough problems, keep on the job and plug that leak guys…
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-aliso-well-hole-20160115-story.html
Storms of my Grandchildren is a great read, even if it gets a bit heavy in spots, but it’s somewhat “conventional” in what Hansen discusses—-others have said much the same as Hansen—-all he does is pull it together in book form.
I have touted Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, by Curt Stager. His “look” at the future is considerably broader than Hansen’s and probably a better read for someone like you who has studied AGW extensively and already “gets” Hansen. I picked Stager’s book up in a used book store for just a few bucks, and you can get it on Amazon cheap.
I have often been disappointed when I’ve shelled out the bucks for the papers behind paywalls. Lots of highly technical stuff and data tables to wade through, and most scientists do NOT write in a fashion designed to communicate with anyone but other scientists. IMO, it’s much better to surf the web and find articles ABOUT the study by reliable guys who have paid the $$$ for the paper and summarized/analyzed the main points.
“Damn it! we are so powerful, so dangerous now we can stop ice ages, with a few tonnes of fossils” is one of the most cogent things you have ever said, and Stager has some interesting answers to “…will we (or some of we) survive it ?”.
Speaking of cogency,”…let nature continue looking after us all, as it did in the old days before James Watts and bright engineers started tinkering around”, is way up there also. I often say to myself “Curse you, James Watts”—-he and his fellow “bright engineers” (or those who would have come after them and invented the steam engine anyway) are the ones to blame for our present predicament.
Thanks for the advise Curt Stager’s Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth is on top of my list. He seems very qualified and I’m looking forward to reading his work.
Reblogged this on A Green Road Daily News.
Okay sort of Earth’s orbit video. I dislike these cartoons that hugely exaggerate the shapes and sizes of orbits in the solar system. If you draw a perfect circle of diameter 9 feet 9.8 inches with an 0.3 mm extra-fine ball point pen then Earth in its orbit around the Sun lies always entirely within the extra fine pen line of that perfect circle if it’s scaled down by 100,000,000,000:1. You couldn’t possibly discern by eye that Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not a perfect circle. Earth is 0.005″ across as it traverses its ~10′ diameter orbit. I see that Earth at 0.126 mm diameter is the same as P120 fine sandpaper grit. So that fine sandpaper grit granule travels around always inside the extra-fine ball point pen perfect circle occupying slightly less than half of the pen line width and its eccentricity is only that it touches the outer edge of the ball point pen line twice and touches the inner edge of the ball point pen line twice as it goes around. The reason why Earth gets at instantaneous peak 3.34% more Sun energy than at instantaneous minimum is not that Earth’s orbit is off-circular, it’s that Sun is offset from the centre of Earth’s almost perfectly circular orbit. On the preceding scale Sun is an orange nerf ball half inch across but it’s exactly 1″ off-centre of Earth’s almost perfectly circular orbit (the circle ~10′ across).
Not sure what your point is. As you point out, the actual “deviations” are so small that they are virtually invisible, so exaggerating them is the only way to make them “visible”, especially for the “newbies” for whom this clip was intended. This clip is actually so “deep” that it is going to put some of them to sleep.
Thank you for the interesting math games that point out the “real” picture, though What I took away from it was this thought. “Yes, it IS quite amazing that such small and seemingly inconsequential numbers DO produce such large effects as seasons and occasional ice ages”.
It underscores the fact that the Earth orbits the sun in a habitable zone in the solar system between too-hot Venus and too-cold Mars, and that the zone is so narrow that we can negate the Milankovitch cycles and move Earth closer to the Venus boundary simply by burning fossil fuels over a span of a couple of hundred years. You too would benefit from reading Stager’s book.
My point is that I dislike these cartoons that hugely exaggerate the shapes and sizes of orbits in the solar system. It’s a science thing. I have considerable difficulty such as this here (far more) when I comment against various videos because I find that people want to discuss socio-political and pretend to discuss science when I want to discuss science. I sometimes lose my cool (I’m not social) and Potty removes my post but doesn’t ban me.
The sun goes around the earth anyway, at least in Florida, where this guy is back in the news:
https://youtu.be/evLtCNSFETw
A bit OT, but nevertheless interesting and pertinent considering “this guy’s” stance on AGW, which is killing a lot more folks than bad hospitals in FL. When are we going to see news about “this guy” being removed from office and put in jail?
(And Andrew, you failed to mention that the sun goes around the earth in every state where the Republicans hold the governorship or the state legislatures, not just in FL).
Rick Scott reminds me of ‘He Who Should Not Be Named’ and is clearly as lethal.
Stellarium is a rather excellent desktop application for viewing the sky. One can play around with the controls including speeding up the rate of change of time, turn into night mode, eliminate atmospheric effect and more.
Of course what it does not do is take you outside of the Earth to watch from such a viewpoint, but nonetheless well worth looking at.
Got a 404 error message for stellarium (?).
Sorry about that, not sure what is gouing. From here I went to a site http://www.stellarium.org/en_GB/
so knowing most readers were in USA I truncated that to http://www.stellarium.org/
which appeared to work but seems munged in my first post. Now which of those two will work.
I’ll do a page source call up tomorrow and see if I made a HTML slip but its late here and the Mrs is getting agitated.
LOL By all means take care of the needs of the “agitated Mrs” first. My Mrs is (reasonably) happy with me right now—-I spent the day doing one of those chores she has been after me about. Her list is long.
Aren’t they always, and they do keep breaking things.
Did you have a look at Stellarium?
No. After waiting long minutes for it to download, my computer informed me that it “does not support” etc. I’m running Windows XP on an old machine—-maybe I’ll try to access an earlier version of the program. Looks impressive from what I saw on the home page.
Love this video. Truly awesome. How were they able to find out the maximum and minimum of the Earth’s axial tilt? What measurements or lines of evidence did they take to get the finding that the last maximum happened c8500 years ago?
I like C2A, another free program showing the sky and all the celestial objects in incredible detail, with easy loading of orbits for comets new and old, asteroids, etc. Amazing what complex and full-featured software is being created by intrepid fans of astronomy and distributing free gratis. I suppose the Right Wing Think Tanks are not able to comprehend such things. Or rather, as Peter likes to say, their heads would explode if they let such facts in.
forgot to add… cue the “Mars Attacks” tag shot !
Someone already mentioned Milankovitch but here is some info on his cycles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
DoG
Have a look here where you will find earlier versions: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/Stellarium-win32/
I still have an XP version here on HD it is v 0.11.2-win32 file size 53,295 KB and on the list at link above, if you have snags email or FB contact me.
I have it running on Ubuntu also.
v 0.11.2-win32 works fine with XP on my clunker. This is a pretty spectacular program with a neat “tool bar”. Wish I had it back in the old days when I was in the Boy Scouts and we were trying to learn the constellations (correction—trying to even SEE the constellations). Today’s spoiled kids can just take the tablet out in the backyard and viola! (And I wonder who had the patience to tag all those stars and enter all that data?)
There is a useful user guide for Stellarium which sets out how to go about incorporating your own horizon. A few years back I shot a 360 panoramic outside a lodge on Loch Sunnart, Ardnamurchan, West Highlands where we were staying, and slotted it in.