Climate

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The idea that Global Warming is a natural cycle is well understood from paleo data covering the past 1 million years. Is there a difference between current climate, and the natural cycle? For the past million years the natural climate has oscillated between warm periods and ice ages. This shifting in and out of warm periods and ice ages is correlated strongly with Milankovitch cycles. In order to understand the difference between natural cycle and human-caused global warming, one needs to consider changes in radiative forcing and how this affects systems on earth such as the atmosphere, vegetation, ice and snow, ocean cycles and related effects. The current radiative forcing levels are clearly outside of the natural cycle range.

Is global warming a natural cycle? Or is global warming affected by human influence? What does the science say? Both are true. In the natural cycle, the world can warm, and cool, without any human interference. For the past million years this has occurred over and over again at approximately 100,000 year intervals. About 80-90,000 years of ice age with about 10-20,000 years of warm period, give or take some thousands of years.

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huffingtonpost.com - reuters - by Alister Doyle

OSLO, May 4 (Reuters) - Part of East Antarctica is more vulnerable than expected to a thaw that could trigger an unstoppable slide of ice into the ocean and raise world sea levels for thousands of years, a study showed on Sunday.

The Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica, stretching more than 1,000 km (600 miles) inland, has enough ice to raise sea levels by 3 to 4 metres (10-13 feet) if it were to melt as an effect of global warming, the report said.

The Wilkes is vulnerable because it is held in place by a small rim of ice, resting on bedrock below sea level by the coast of the frozen continent.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - Ice plug prevents irreversible discharge from East Antarctic

CLICK HERE - Video - MSNBC

(Reuters/China Daily)

The climate crisis has such bad timing, confronting it not only requires a new economy but a new way of thinking.

thenation.com - by Naomi Klein - April 21, 2014

This is a story about bad timing. . .

. . . We too are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world.

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commondreams.org - by Harvey Wasserman - April 17, 2014

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has left zero doubt that we humans are wrecking our climate.

It also effectively says the problem can be solved, and that renewable energy is the way to do it, and that nuclear power is not.

The United Nations’ IPCC is the world’s most respected authority on climate.

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IPCC - Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)