Earth's Climate Changes in Tune with Eccentric Orbital Rhythms

[gilliam]

**Ocean sediment reveals the pattern behind the rise and fall of ice ages and the shape of Earth’s orbit. **

The useless shells of tiny ocean animals–foraminifera–drift silently down through the depths of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, coming to rest more than three miles (five kilometers) below the surface. Slowly, over time, this coating of microscopic shells and other detritus builds up. “In the central Pacific, the sedimentation rate adds between one and two centimeters every 1,000 years,” explains Heiko Pälike, a geologist at the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, England. “If you go down in the sediment one inch, you go back in time 2,500 years.”

Pälike and his colleagues went considerably further than that, pulling a sediment core from the depths of the Pacific that stretched back 42 million years. Limiting their analysis to the Oligocene–a glacial time period that lasted between roughly 34 million and 23 million years ago–the researchers found that global climate responds to slight changes in the amount of sunlight hitting Earth during shifts in its orbit between elliptical and circular. “Of all the records so far, this is both the longest and, also, the clearest that most of the climatic variations between glacial and interglacial at that time [were] most likely related to orbital cycles,” Pälike says.

The researchers pulled specific foraminifera samples from the core and then dissolved the shells in acid. They pumped the resultant carbon dioxide gas into a mass spectrometer and determined exactly what elements comprised the shells. This allowed them to distinguish between shells composed of the relatively lightweight isotopes of carbon and oxygen versus those made with a higher proportion of heavier isotopes.

Read the rest

 

[Al_Masetti]

The Earth’s orbital dynamics and the Sun’s physical characteristics are a lot more complicated than folks give credit.

None of this is simple.

The computer models attempt to simplify it.

But then the computer models fail to capture the elegant complexity of what God has Wrought.

 

[Dee_Dee_King]

if you read the entire article, it says that bascially the effects of the extra carbon that man has put into the earth’s atmosphere and oceans should tend to accentuate the long 40k cycle and attenuate the shorter cycles associated with the earth’s tilt, which paradoxically have a greater effect on the amount of solar energy the earth receives.

so, this article is saying little on how much of an effect CO2 will have on our near term global climate.

 

[Al_Masetti]

Although the average solar sun spot cycle is 11 years, N. Gerson in an unclassified NSA paper also identified 12- and 15-year cycles. M. Milankovitch found a variety of other cyclical variations based on orbital eccentricity (shape of the earth’s orbit), obliquity (angle of the Earth’s axis) and precession (direction of the axis of rotation). There may be more than a dozen different cycles; for example, the 13,000 year cycle may account for the periodic appearance and disappearance of glaciers, which deposited “glacial till” (polished boulders) here in New Jersey. K. Lassen found a radical change in cycle length since 1880; a decline from 12 years to 10 in 1940; then back up to 11 years in 1970 and now down to 10 years.

The paragraph above is extracted from a paper I wrote in 2003.

Apparently I am prohibited from referring to it with a link because it is by me or because it is on my own Web site.

Anyway, check out the different cycles.

 

[jman507]

The Earth’s orbital dynamics and the Sun’s physical characteristics are a lot more complicated than folks give credit.

None of this is simple.

The computer models attempt to simplify it.

But then the computer models fail to capture the elegant complexity of what God has Wrought.

Models are only as good as the formulas they are set up with.

It is easy to say do humans have an effect on the environment, but to say what do we want to do and how to go about doing it is much much more complex.

With hurricanes we have so many models that we use, one can use them to come up with a prediction. Now if we want to engineer something to actually effect the hurricane and move it with precision and accuracy…good luck! I mean to start with we’d actually need one model that does accurately predict the storm path, then one would need to understand how to do something to effect it’s path.

 

[Al_Masetti]

If the climate models were any good, there would be no need to constantly update them. Tweaking a model merely means that the person writing them didn’t get the results he wanted in the first place.

Readers here who are interested should refer to the now infamous Club of Rome [Limits to Growth] models that projected shortages of raw materials and natural resources. As I recall, the shortages of every commodity including food and water would become dire and the population of the earth would become seriously endangered.

As it turned out, there were surpluses instead of shortages.

As I recall (doing this from memory), the planet Earth was supposed to run out of everything around 1990. I have the report (and the refutations issued about the same time) around here someplace … in dead or dormant storage. But the Club of Rome is a classic example of the best and the brightest devising models that fail.

Readers here should do a Google search for that earlier study as a case study of what can so easily go wrong with these gigantic models.