The point was that radiant heat from the sun has the biggest influence over the earth's surface temperatures, and scientists seem to know very little about the sun's capacity to radiate heat. I suppose I'm off topic, and we need a different thread about the sun's influence on the earth's climate. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is the biggest influence. Easily overlooked, you're right. There's the grand solar minimum (solar minimum) that some say started two years ago and will cause cooling until around 2050? I don't know much about.

Informative as was your previous post. I thought you were a psychologist? Hopefully Tate you're getting "up to speed" and we can start discussing the climate crisis. — Benkei

Your attitude is unwarranted. By and large, everything I've said is true. If I happen to get facts muddled, I'm still well-meaning and don't deserve the scorn level you've been generating.

If you don't want to contribute meaningfully to my thread, could you at least go elsewhere?

@unenlightened

From here:


"For cyanobacteria to trigger the rapid onset of a Snowball Earth, they must have had an ample supply of key nutrients like phosphorous and iron. Nutrient availability is why cyanobacterial blooms occur today in regions with heavy agricultural runoff.

"Fortunately for the bacteria, Earth 2.3 billion years ago had already entered a moderately cold period, reflected in glacially formed rocks in Canada. Measurements of the magnetization of these Canadian rocks, which the Caltech group published earlier this year, indicate that the glaciers that formed them may have been at middle latitudes, just like the glaciers of the last ice age.

"The action of the glaciers, grinding continental material into powder and carrying it into the oceans, would have made the oceans rich in nutrients. Once cyanobacteria evolved this new oxygen-releasing ability, they could feast on this cornucopia, turning an ordinary glaciation into a global one.

"Their greater range should have allowed the cyanobacteria to come to dominate life on Earth quickly and start releasing large amounts of oxygen," Kopp says.

"This was bad for the climate because the oxygen destabilized the methane greenhouse. Kopp and Kirschvink's model shows that the greenhouse may have been destroyed in as little as 100,000 years, but almost certainly was eliminated within several million years of the cyanobacteria's evolution into an oxygen-generating organism. Without the methane greenhouse, global temperatures plummeted to -50 degrees Celsius."

There's another theory that snowball earth was caused by the break up of Rodinia which exposed basalt which absorbed CO2 and released sulfur which causes cooling.

The cyanobacteria story is more poetic, though.

Well I put up links to help folks with terminology and timelines, and numbers of years ago are really useful for sorting things. — unenlightened

The times were on the graphs.

My goal is to get to articles. I think what you are telling me is that you want more depth. Would you like reading homework? Or excellent and trustworthy PBS documentaries? (it's called Eons, and it's great) Or do you want to talk about something specific? The cyanobacteria?

I'm figuring you and I are the only ones reading this, so let's do it our way.

Sorry. Michael had already posted a blurb about how geologists call those larger scale cold events "ice ages", while in the public domain that term means woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers, in other words, the last glacial episode.

I responded to him that I've been compromising by calling them "large scale ice ages."

Do you have advice for how to make it clearer?

point that brute fact reveals our finitude as knowers, because it's something that happened to us, which makes no sense — Pie

Why doesn't it make sense?

Proceeding on with the history of climate change widening the horizon to 500 million years.



These fluctuations in climate are not cyclical like the the first graph I posted, which showed a parade of interglacials. This graph shows the dramatic change that one little lifeform called cyanobacteria caused, almost resulting in the final mass extinction due to the loss of atmospheric CO2.
The whole globe was covered in ice. It shows the results of massive emissions of CO2 caused by volcanoes, which caused equatorial waters to steam and put palm trees on the poles. It's a fascinating saga.

At the bottom of the graph you see four purple blocks representing events that some geologists call ice ages. it doesn't really matter what we call these larger scale cold spells. The point is: we're in one.

But scientists appear to have little if any understanding of this magnetic field, or fields. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure what you're referring to. The sun's electromagnetic field is polarized like the Earth's. It doesn't extend too far into space. It doesn't reach Mercury, much less the Earth.

Are you talking about solar winds?

Reglaciation is usually abrupt because once it starts there are positive feedback loops that reinforce it. The trigger points just happen from time to time. They're caused by changes in the circularity of the Earth's orbit.

Whether the abrupt shift to reglaciation happens depends on a number of factors, which is why they try to model it with computers, to account for all the variables. I say "all" the variables, but some are hard to account for, so all climate models carry some degree of uncertainty.

Someone mentioned this in the other thread and it bears repeating: climatology is a science that requires getting used to a lot of unknowns. When will reglaciation start?

We really don't know.

would be better to describe safety net programs as pro-citizen, or pro-worker, rather than pro-union. — Bitter Crank

Yea, that's true.

That isn't the same thing as unions existing because of federal backing. The federal government is a tool which capital and labor both use for their own ends--the former more effectively than the latte — Bitter Crank

I didn't say unions wouldn't exist without federal backing. I said the labor movement wouldn't exist without it. Maybe I'm overstating it. I think there's some truth to it, though.

I think labor unions were a tool the federal government used to wrest power away from industrialists. The rest was Christian do-gooding on the part of Wilson.

People who aren't in that situation should be supportive of unionization. — Moliere

ok

Well, then I'd say I think you're an engineer who has decided to edit the history books to suit your preferred outlook, and that you do not want to know that working people *forced* the government to help them in far-reaching ways. — Moliere

Labor never had the power to do that. When unions were strongest, it was when the government had a policy of backing labor. When the government withdrew it's support, when Reagan shot down the air traffic controller strike, the tide turned against them and they're gone now.

But there are people who are still cleaning, stocking, etc. And they are suffering. — Moliere

What should we do?

it's when you're an engineer, but you're sent to handle critical jobs that aren't being manned because of the strike.

The strikers are fine with it because they know you aren't going to take their jobs permanently. Back then it was illegal to fill a striker's position with a new employee.

I think you've decided to edit the history books to suit your preferred outlook. You don't want to know that the federal government protected unions in far reaching ways.

Eh, you're a scab.

What do you know of "really powerful unions"? — Moliere

Do you know what a management scab is?

really powerful" ? Naw. — Moliere

Like the dinosaurs, they once roamed the earth.

And what happened before? Just some stories that people like to tell. — Moliere

I was there. I was a management scab during a CWA strike once. I smile now because that whole world is gone. You've never seen a really powerful union, have you?

The government, in the USA at least, has been mostly anti-labor and pro-capitalist. — Moliere

Since the 1980s, yes. Before that, no.

: I have met people physically disabled by Starbucks. They qualified, even in this regressive government, for disability. Serving coffee. — Moliere

That's kind of hard to believe. Maybe they had some health issue that came to light while serving coffee?

But aren't disability payments a result of the labor movement? That, social security, medicare, worker's comp, unemployment payments, aren't all these things a sign of the government's historic loyalty to labor?

Interesting!

I'm just used to "labor movement" referring to the bloody conflict between the government and industrialists with labor backed by the government.

That labor movement required government backing because of the far reaching power of the industrialists.

The labor movement far predates Roosevelt — Xtrix

Ok. When I think of the labor movement, I think of the Haymarket time period. I guess you're taking a much broader view.

I've been looking into web3 ideas which may be a bit utopian — Pie

What's that?

No, it’s not close to true. Feel free to pick up literally any book about it. The labor movement far predates any “government backing,” Teddy Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson.

Stop talking nonsense. — Xtrix

There were strikes, yes, but industrialists overtly controlled federal, state, and local governments. This meant that industrialists were free to use violence against strikers, and they usually did.

Roosevelt was the first president to use federal troops to protect strikers. He acted without consulting the industrialists, setting up a new dynamic that made the labor movement possible.

Hoffa and mob stuff comes to mind, but then I think we just need unions that are harder to corrupt. We need to keep trying to find corruption-resistant social structures. — Pie

Power corrupts. Per legend, union stewards were usually the scum of the earth.

One thing you do need to understand about the American labor movement is that it only existed in the first place due to federal backing
— Tate

Not remotely true. — Xtrix

Yea, it's true.

One thing you do need to understand about the American labor movement is that it only existed in the first place due to federal backing, originally by Teddy Roosevelt and then Wilson. In Wilson's case it was in line with his progressive Christianity.

After WW2, domestic policy was behind strong unions. That changed in the 1980s, and unions started to disappear. So American unions were always part of the way the US government pushed back against the control of industrialists. Then the US was de-industrialized, automated, and labor was outsourced oversees. A large chunk of the labor force today is just temporarily working on contract. There's no way to return to the days of powerful unions.

The Myth of the Individual in the USA mitigated against the uptake of unions. A Real Man stands on his own, not needing others to help him negotiate his workplace contract.

Hence the Myth of the Individual helped ceed power to corporations, resulting in the failed democracy that is the modern USA. — Banno

I'm afraid this is a myth. Unions, protected by the US government, were incredibly powerful until the 1980s. Stagflation and Reagan: the one two punch, killed their power.

As others have commented, unions were always a two edged sword, not nearly as romantic as we'd like to think.

the time scale of climate change will be barely noticeable compared with that of the next ice age. — Joshs

True.

Yes. He's saying the world is going to experience a climate whiplash which will likely make it difficult to maintain civilization.

I think it's possible that the stress will divide our species between civilized and those who lose skills and devolve. That may sound bizarre, but it's easy to forget that our gigantic population of close relatives is unusual for organisms like us. Splitting would be kind of normal.

Have you read that whole article?

Can I suggest that we take this slowly, and provide sufficient detail to avoid misunderstandings as much as possible. I'm going to start with this — unenlightened

My plan is to take it slow. I've dragged out the old textbook. My plan is to do an overview of historical geography, and then start examining articles.

Perhaps you can shed some light on that? — unenlightened

I'm familiar with the 100,000 year problem. We'll get to it.

Do you mean looking at ice cores? Looking at rocks would involve much longer timescales. — unenlightened

I was talking about the original conception of ice ages. The word "quaternary" refers to the idea that there were four ice ages in the past. We now call those glacial periods.

My takeaway thus far though is to notice that the change in climate we are now undergoing has been man-made in a couple of centuries, and for us to have noticed the effect so very quickly suggests that it dwarfs the effect of the Milankovitch cycles — unenlightened

I've wondered about this question for a long time. I was really happy to see scientists creating models to try to answer it. It seems that every year more advances are made, so let's look at some of those advances!

What do you think causes the shape of earth's orbit to abruptly change? — Metaphysician Undercover

It doesn't.

What is this "trigger point" you keep talking about? Is it a solar change, something to do with the sun's magnetic field, causing reduced energy from the sun? The sun's magnetic field is not well understood: — Metaphysician Undercover

It has to do with the shape of the Earth's orbit. Sometimes the orbit is more circular, sometimes elliptical. When it's elliptical, the Northern Hemisphere summers are cooler. When this happens, per theory, ice which formed in the winter doesn't get enough heat to melt, and so it keeps growing. Ice reflects heat back out to space, so increased glaciation is associated with positive feedback. This explains why reglaciation is always so abrupt.

So different people are using the term "ice age" in different ways. — Michael

:up: I've been saying "large scale ice age" to try to specify.

That's a frigging long, long waiting time. — Agent Smith

We don't really know when the next glacial period will start. What we know is that we're moving into a trigger point now. Reglaciation would start with an increase in the size of the northern glaciers. We know the opposite is happening. But we also know the global oceanic heat conveyor is slowing down (due to global warming). If it stopped, the climate would plunge into an event like the Younger Dryas. That would probably be followed by a long glacial period. So ironically, increased CO2 could trigger reglaciation.

But let's get back to basics. Next up: what is a large scale ice age?

It's odd to me that people universally assume I'm a climate change denier because I brought up the fact that we're in a large scale ice age. I actually brought it up to explain why climate science is complicated, but people latched on to a certain narrative and decided to be vomit their angst at me.

Anyway, I started a potentially doomed thread in the topic. We can close this thread now, I think

@Agent Smith

The amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emitted into Earth's oceans and atmosphere is predicted to prevent the next glacial period for the next 500,000 years, which otherwise would begin in around 50,000 years, and likely more glacial cycles after. — Wikipedia

Cool. So let's look at the science behind this. How could you object to that?

It's just a picture of glacial cycling. There's no motive other than it's fascinating. This is going to be a long thread. Stick with me. :grin:

:up:

Yes, Harry Hindu nailed it recently. Meaningful propositions are informative (that's basically what he said).

Propositions of logic aren't informative. They can't be false. They're tautological. The issue is in that general direction.

I completely honor whatever your viewpoint is. I'm sure it's great.

My own introduction to this topic was from the Encyclopedia Britannica. I was a small child and the encyclopedia was way out of date, so it said that there had been four ice ages. That's what they could see from looking at rocks.

We now know that those four "ice ages" were glacial periods in a larger scale climate event. The climate swings back and forth between long glacial periods and short interglacials.

It looks like this: