Really useful perspective, from a fully-competent geologist, on climate variation, and where we are Archived Message Posted by Old (Most) Contemptible on December 4, 2019, 9:18 pm now, in the Milankovitch Cycles of the past half-billion years. His perspective meshes quite closely with Dmitry Orlov's contention that we are aleady in a cold period in Earth's long history, and if we don't want to see ourselves dropped into another - naturally-occurring and now somewhat overdue - re-glaciation of the world, we need to keep burning fossil hydrocarbons steadily (which interesting essay of Dmitry's y'all would be able to see already, if you were one of his subscribers, like me )... Sorry if this material blasphemes against the current dogma that carbon emissions just must be stopped, entirely and at all costs, if we're to avoid baking the Earth. But - well - these dissident realities are there; and there seem to be increasing voices - many of them as competent and scientifically meticulous as Dan Britt - piping up right now with accounts of these complications of the issue. Notice that - at the end - Dan shows a rapidly rising mean temperature, that is indeed due entirely to the huge annual inputs of atmospheric carbon that we're causing right now. So - perhaps the right approach is to go on burning less, but some fossil hydrocarbons, judiciously; but also to go on re-foresting the forestable lands, and Savoryising the Earth's grasslands, at the same time? As some sort of savvy global balancing act? Dmitry suggests that it may even become necessary to nuke some of the ocean-floor clathrates now and then, to make them release some of their sequestered methane - sic!! - as part of our balancing work in fending off the over-due ice age. (My christ! What will the massed Chicken Littles say, at me suggesting such heresies! Wait a couple of decades and see whether the whirligig of time will have completely up-ended our panics-de-jour by then, and all this current obsessing about excessive carbon output has become a rather comic old hat."The things they believed then! Good job we're so much savvier now, eh?" ) It is just a tentative suggestion. I don't think anyone knows for sure right now just what tack to take. Approach with great caution, but with a very strictly open mind... BTW, please forgive this otherwise excellent speaker's constant references to 'glay-shurrs', when he means 'glassy-ers'; a colonial quaintness of pronunciation (): Message Thread: Really useful perspective, from a fully-competent geologist, on climate variation, and where we are - Old (Most) Contemptible December 4, 2019, 9:18 pm Re: Really useful perspective, from a fully-competent geologist, on climate variation, and where we are - John Monro December 5, 2019, 7:52 am No-one indeed, John. Exactly. And what Britt is saying too: complex subject where we're probably not - Old (Most) Contemptible (+) December 5, 2019, 8:58 am   Searching