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    Digging about in the deluge of climate-shift material, I came across an interesting perspective - Archived Message

    Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on November 21, 2019, 10:42 am, in reply to "Re: Murdoch and the News Corp climate change denying"

    1) The Earth has a long-period pattern of climate cycling, which has created a sequence of glaciations at approximately equal intervals, separated by inter-glacials - such as we have right now - of warmer conditions, globally.

    2) The geological record is pretty conclusive about this; and it appears to be connected to - driven by? - certain long-term, very slow variations of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, together with further input from the Sun's own regular cycling up and down of its total energy output.

    3) According to this old oscillation period established by the record, Earth is now somewhat over-due for a new glacial period; the next Ice Age, that is...

    4) KEY POINT: The geological record suggests that these periodic Ice Ages appear to announce themselves by a brief period of global WARMING (sic!!), right at the beginning, which seems in some way not currently well understood to be the trigger process which gets the overall glaciation shift going.

    Wouldn't it be a - sort of ironic - hoot if the advent of the hom sap explosion in numbers over the past few millennia is in fact nothing more than the trigger for the next Ice Age - which, if it happens, will deal effectively with this preliminary warming phase, as it always has in the past? Perhaps each of the past glaciations has been triggered by brief blooms of some sacrificial species - aren't we all! - which bred uncontrolledly - er, like idiot yeast, in fact - and thus fulfilled their destiny of being the harbingers of the next Ice Age, who knows?

    Just another awkward bit of yer actual pragmatic physical reality, to throw into the religious-conviction fest currently being laid out by the 'Sky is falling! Gotta act with crash priority right now!' apocalypse groupies.

    BTW: Do I think it's a global emergency, despite all of the above, and that we need urgently to do a worldwide Manhattan Project top priority response to it? Yes, assuredly. Whatever the truth of the conjectures outlined above, that much seems immediately clear. Moreover, there are actually-sound, actually-workable remedial responses, such as massive tree-planting, forest-re-establishing pushes; as also returning the world's grassland and semi-deserts to stock-rearing practices which mimic, Allan Savory-style, the way these lands are populated and used - and are thus maintained in a high state of ecological stability - by the original wild herds of mixed herbivores (and their essential predators, of course: "The wolf is doctor to the caribou, and keeps him strong!").

    I guess where my thinking has evolved by now is to the idea that we are indeed in for a seriously rough time, with a lot of over-population shedding, by automatic Gaian processes; a lot of socio-economo-political upheavals; a resetting of human communities on models from an earlier era which have proved their durability in bad times; and some massive folk-wanderings to boot - all of which will prove as unstoppable as the climate change.

    But though none of this can be prevented per se, all of it can be alleviated significantly, by right, wise responses. And a lot of that can be done by local communities or small countries. It's not just an all-or-nothing global response that's going to be effective. Contrary to the short-term-human-extinction ideologues, I suspect that quite a fair representative sample of hom sap will survive past the worst of the warming-phase crises, simply by being lucky enough to be in one of the communities scattered about the fortunate niches in the world where survival proves possible, in actual practice. (A thought experiment: how did crocodilians and bird-like dinosaurs survive the Chicxulub asteroid impact, that produced a much-worse-than-climate-shift global crisis? Hint: lucky niches...)

    And then - perhaps, according to the long-followed pattern - comes the onset of the new glaciers, ice-caps, and colder winters, in the next bout of global cooling.... The complex pattern of long-term Earth orbit cycling, plus the Sun's periodic energy cycling are likely to prove well beyond any human capacity to manage, after all; so - what can't be cured...

    Just a thought. It fits with the basic fact that the future is inherently unpredictable in precise, god-given-certainty detail, simply because we live in a probablistic reality, where some things are - by definition - unpredictable; like whether Schrodinger's Cat will be alive or dead when you open the box: simply not predictable. At all.

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