7 comments on “Milankovitch Cycles – Eccentricity

  1. So, the Earth warms and cools, relatively, over an approximately 100000 year cycle.
    And despite the fact that humans, like birds, consistently defecate in their nest, will
    not have any great effect on the life of the planet? Interesting.

    Do we humans consider ourselves the most important happening on the planet?
    Seems that way. And since we tend to feel guilty about our actions, we feel that
    humans are responsible for what we call global warming? Perhaps our point of view
    is distorted? Perhaps there is another way of looking at the world?

    There is so much that we explain by observing inferences from the world around us.
    Reminds me of the story of blind men describing and elephant by touch and
    limited point of view.

    Thanks for sharing the Green Comet.

    • Stay tuned for more information. There will be two or three more posts on the Milankovitch cycles and you will see that it’s not as simple as it looks. Obviously, in the vastness of geological and astronomical time, our current warming trend is not alone. It might be uniquely abrupt and rapid, but similar things have happened before. In the Ice Age of the last three million years alone, glaciers have advanced and retreated more than twenty times, with only a five degree difference in global average temperature. Right now we should be cooling off as we head into another big freeze, if the 100,000 year cycle continues. But we’re warming instead. This should tell us that life on Earth can play a role in the climate. Plants can take up carbon dioxide, decreasing the greenhouse effect. Termites can release huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas even more effective than carbon dioxide. Humans can release carbon that was buried by plants hundreds of millions of years ago, bringing back the greenhouse of that time. Sure, things do seem to balance out eventually, if you’re willing to wait tens of millions of years, but it can be a big mess in the meantime. Humans uniquely have the ability to see what they’re doing and change it.

      • I love the perspective and the added information in this séries of posts. Can’t wait for the next one. The balance in your comments is of much value also. Merci.

Leave a Reply to Laird SmithCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.