Al Gore

[RIROCKHOUND]

Basswipe...
yeah but... not really...
Baldwin is right, among most scientists there is little disagreement that there is warming occurring. They tend to bicker about rates of change, mechanisms causing it, whats forcing what to change etc.. There is little debate that things ARE changing

Magnetic reversals happen at random intervals w/in the geologic record, 4-5times/million years with times of that being much longer. These are not directly linked to ice ages.

As far as they other cycles your describing are Milankovitch cycles, which determine the precession (wobble of the North Pole) Axial tilt (tilt of planet and causes seasons) and Eccentricity which determines how oval the earths orbit is. These occur on time scales of 23K, 41K, 100K (with a second peak at 400K). You are right about the Aphelion or Peraphelion, and in ~10.5K years our winters will occur at the time when we are furthest from the sun (the opposite of now) which COULD shift us into a glacial stage.

These can and do have a profound impact on climate change, however these have been going on for Millions of years (I have seen rocks where it was believed to have an influence on their deposition 400+Million years ago) But we have not always had ice-ages. They occur at intervals throughout the geologic record; ~700Million years ago, 300Million years ago etc.. the current one is less than 3mil years old with several glacial and interglacial periods.

Yes we are probably in an inter-glacial period, however some would argue that was the Early-Holocene was the warmest period, 10000ish years ago. The last Glacial maximum was the Laurentide Icesheet, which was ~24K years ago and extended south of Block island.

Baldwin basically hit the nail on the head, go with the weight of evidence approach. If 99 Doc's tells you smoking causes lung cancer, you can choose to believe the 1 that tells you it doesn't. There will always be naysayers and disbelievers, and if they choose to use politics as their platform shame on them. What this did do was get people talking about global warming who might not have talked about it before. And hopefully it helped people realize that 'The day after tomorrow' was not going to be reality... changes wont happen that fast. I think the fastest change in the ice-cores are 4 or 5 Degrees C in a few decades.

[FormerUser]

RIRock while I essentially agree with a good portion of what you stated, but not all.

In the end Man only accelerates our inevitable return to an Iceage by a mere few hundred years,a blink of an eye in time.The time IS now.This is where Baldwin and I will disagree.Most scientists are not saying that Man is the major contributing factor to our planet getting warmer but that we are entering another massive global climatic change that heralds the next Iceage.Whether "non-scientists" know the difference between theory and hypothesis doesn't matter,the fact is time marches on and moves forward.The fact is Time says we are on the doorstep of our next Iceage and that the Earth gets very warm right before that happens.The rocks don't lie.


As far as magnetic reversal is concerned,"Flip-flops" absolutely occur around the same time as massive global climatic changes +/- a few million years and not at random but at a very regular interval almost timely according to most geologists.But when you take into consideration the age of the Earth(4 billion years) that +/- a few million ain't so big,it does coincide with massive climatic changes.
Again the rocks don't lie.

[spence]

Originally Posted by basswipe

Whether "non-scientists" know the difference between theory and hypothesis doesn't matter,the fact is time marches on and moves forward.

The problem is a lot of those "non-scientists" are really energy industry marketing firms

Like I said, I believe there's debate as to the total influence of man...but few believe that man isn't having a large influence.

Listen to Rush Limbaugh on this topic and it's no wonder people don't see the substance of the issue. The baseless claims and disinformation he spews forth is pretty amazing.

-spence