Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns Leading Climate Expert
 

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0123-01.htm

Published on Sunday, January 23, 2005 by the lndependent/UK
Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns Leading Climate Expert

by Geoffrey Lean

Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate watchdog.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favor of Dr Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalized American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose."

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colors and turn a ghostly white. Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was speaking parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.

He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that climate change may be accelerating out of control.

He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Has anyone else seen this article? Does anyone believe that our window is closing?

I got this in an email from my sister --
 

In late January, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, declared
that the world has "already reached the level of
dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep"
cuts in emissions if humanity is to survive.


Pachauri's declaration came alongside new findings
unveiled on Jan. 24 by a commission of scientists from
the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, which declared that
the world is about 10 years -- or about 2 degrees
Fahrenheit -- away from irreversible climate change.
The scientists calculated that the "point of no
return" will arrive when concentrations of atmospheric
carbon dioxide reach 400 parts per million (ppm). For
most of the 20th century, these carbon concentrations
increased by about 1 ppm per year. In recent decades,
that rate rose to 1.5. Today it's more than 2 ppm per
year. Grand total: 379 ppm, and counting. It's a level
of atmospheric carbon this planet has not experienced
for 420,000 years.


As if on cue, about a week later, researchers with the
British Antarctic Survey reported that the massive
West Antarctic ice sheet may already have begun to
collapse. Citing recently discovered increased glacial
flows into the Antarctic Ocean, Chris Rapley, head of
the survey, noted: "The last IPCC report characterized
Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate
change. I would say it is now an awakened giant."

It's scary!

We can slow the process, But not bring it to a hault..This sounds pretty serious. I think alot of people keep this type of stuff in the back of thier heads..I know i do until i read about it.

Of everything we can control with our technology, Mother Nature is uncontrollable.

I don't know too much about this whole issue, So what do we have to do to slow this process down?

Are we our own victims, We hold our own fate in our own hands by the way we live and how we are slowly destroying the earth with our modern ways of living.

I am alittle baffled on something. The article says that the ice caps in the arctic are melting, How will this affect us? Or is this just a refferance to the fact that the earth is getting warmer?

I think that means that the earth will cover with water, then will freeze and everything will die off. Ice age all over again...

(Someone correct me, I'm just guessing)

Ice displaces water, Put a ice cube in a glass..fill it with water, when the ice cube melts it will not overflow, it will only take up the space that it did when it was ice.

I read michael crichton's latest book about how the global climate and it's changes are not understood, even by the scientists studying it. (well, it was actually about an adventure that would make a great movie, but it was really about the global climate)
I had heard about the frozen wooly mammoths with fresh leaves in their mouth before I watched "The Day After Tomorrow." I've also read a few (nonfiction) books actually about global warming or the lack of it.

Based on what I know, I don't think that scientists have enough long-term information to be able to determine just what exactly is going on in a system as complex as the globe's weather, and I'm not scared.

I still think it's bullcrap. :) I've read numerous times that the global temperatures are colder right now than they were 500 years ago. I've even read reports that explain in intricate detail how global warming is 100% wrong (based on the same information that 500 years ago the global temp average was way higher than it is now). Some of my professors at college also don't believe in it. I don't know, after having professors tell you that it's "fake" and reading multiple articles about how the global temperature average used to be way higher than it is right now, it's hard to take it seriously.

-Lasereth

I take it seriously, But it's very hard to treat it as a present threat..Why, I don't know.

I don't doubt that when we compare the way we live today to those that did 100 years ago, We are doing alot more damage to the planet..I guess the question is, How much abuse will it take?

Does anybody know what caused global warming to start? I'm guessing all the pollution we let off has a part in it, But what else?

Well with all our pollution problems no one can dismiss that we may have global warming problems. For all the skeptics we should at least keep researching it till there is a defenant conclusion, which may never happen but the consequences could mean our downfall.

This is what's scary.....

If you want to discuss Global Warming, there is a thread in the Politics Section. There are links to articles and research that might help you make a decision as to what to worry about.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=84075

I am not trying to be a jerk and tell people what to do. I am just throwing this out there for people who don't check out the Politics thread. If you want to discuss it here, by all means, go ahead.

Just a heads up.

Ice is reflective and helps keep the heat out. So when it melts it gets warmer, which creates more clouds, which helps hold the heat in more. There is an equation in astronomy that lets you calculate the temperature of a planet based on cloud coverage and a few other factors.

Global warming is one of the biggest frauds ever. The earth has been going through periods of relatively warm and cold (ice ages) for millions of years. To think humans can actually impact it significantly is a little far fetched imho.

Yeah I know that global warming is part of a cycle our planet goes through... However from what I've read it appears it has never happened this RAPIDLY before.

And to say that humans have had no impact on global climate change is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.

It makes me fear for the future of the planet if people don't realize that we ARE hurting the environment....

That is brilliant...as long as you don't take into account all the ice that is NOT sitting in the ocean (your glass), but on top of land (i.e. the continent of Antarctica).

Didn't Rush Limbau have his ass verbally handed to him when he used the ice/glass analogy a while back?

And please, don't try to tell me that we don't have to worry about Antarctica because it is "downhill" from North America.

Thats pretty freaking scary. Thanks for the post. Something to think about, thats for sure.

I was only speaking of the ice caps that are in the water.

I don't know anything about Rush Limbau.

The ice that is on land, Yes i would worry about that. I don't know if that was directed at me or somebody else, But i never said that we don't have to worry about antarctica..I was simply reffering to the ice that's in the ocean.

But if this is true, how did the concentrations of atmospheric
carbon dioxide reach 400 parts per million (ppm) 420, 000 years ago then? :hmm:

From the way I see it. These experts are given gov't grants to conduct this research. Then they come back with there "the sky is falling" findings. Well the gov't gives them more federal funds to fill there pockets. That's what they are after, the $$$.

I know college professors and researchers who aquire these gov't grants. Let's just say a far cry from 100% go towards the actual research.

I can't answer your question because I don't have the time to source out and read all the material I'd need to make an educated response.

I guess the best I can say right now is "I don't know"

I just don't get how people can see the release of human made CFC's, CO, and other noxious chemicals released from factories into the atmosphere as having no effect.

As a follow up to this sentiment, I will state that if you take any closed chemical system, and begin to add substance X to it, you will change the system. Yes, there are some questions as to how well the Earth's ecosystems can absorb / chemically deal with the substances we produce, but the fact is that we now have the technological ability to make changes in our environment at a pace unparalleled in human history. If you're the type of person who believes that some analogue of evolutionary development is a highly probable explanation for the development of our current ecosystems, consider that this process occurred over 100's of thousands / millions of years. The question is simple : can we respond to changes occurring at time scales much faster than the rate at which our bodies / supporting environments are conditioned to respond? If you're not sure of the answer to that question, or if you think that we probably can not, then I feel you might want to start worrying about environmental issues / global warming in a very serious way. If this position is wrong, so what? Everyone laughs at the hyper-reactive idiots. If this position is correct, your ass just got saved.

/as far as I know it, dinosaurs and cavemen didn't have factories.
/re: the question of CO levels 420,000 years ago, I seem to recall that is related to the level of volcanic and other geological activity at time. SOx species were pretty prevalent too. <--- Not a geologist.

Ah, yes! Thank you for your response.

Yes, I think that is an excellent point about the process taking hundreds of thousands, to millions of years to effect the change... Something we have done in ~200 years.

[edit]

However, the earth ISN'T a closed chemical system... It is powered by the sun.

the planet was here before people came... and will remain long after people are "frozen" out....

or long after we've all killed eachother over fresh water and clean air

i meant in a practical sense of chemical flow for most purposes. we have not only solar radiation, but star light and meteors and other universal anal detritus smacking us every day. the problem with the breakdown of the ozone is that we may be a *much* more open system soon than we like. the problem with nitrates, sulfur species / other teratagenic compounds / plastics and other polymeric compounds / nuclear waste etc is that the Earth does behave like a closed system for them...their rate of transport is slow, their rate of degradation may be interesting, and what they chemical react to form may be more interesting. i certainly didn't mean to imply that we are cut off from everything else in the most strict sense.

agreed, and thundar the barbarian may not be the worst of it. the question is do we want to be around, and for how long. can humanity be a force for positive change / increased organization of the localized universe, or will we simply wipe ourselves out? it wouldn't be the first time a culture has destroyed itself; unfortunately (or fortunately) we are rapidly becoming much more globalized...i suspect that failure of our environment on the scale I believe we are talking about will not have localized effects within the scope of our planet.

let's say the earth warms significantly,,,ocean levels rise...weather patterns change...I still don't get why all of the fear....cannot we adapt as a species?, as societies? Have there never been climatic changes..change agents...extinctions and dawning of new species....If all humans die off, some would argue, THAT would be a good thing.

How did they pick 400ppm and not 399 or 401..is it just a guess at the real point of no return? Could we actually have passed the Point of no return already? IF so in the words of Bobby Knight "Lay back and enjoy it"

*turns on fans*
Global warming? HAH!

Duh! We may not need to worry about Antarctica, but the North pole is UPHILL from us Mister Smarty Pants. :lol:

Well we could just all vibrate at a 4th level density and be ok but that's some crazy theory I read on the internet.

If the ice age does occur again I'm moving to New Zealand.

Oh and clean air comes from the sea I believe... and global warming isn't caused by pollution (contrary to popular belief). If God wants all to die we all will. Till then I'm jes gonna walk around with a mnly strut... cuz I AINT GOT NO LEGS (eminem)

It's not been proven. However, look at this graph:
http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming....2TempChart.jpg
Fine, it's not conclusive. However, looking at ice samples we see this pattern over and over again, as CO2 levels increase, world temperatures increase.

That's an excellent question, in my opinion. Do you have a conclusive answer, because I'll confess that I do not. There is also the supplemental question as to whether we want to change that drastically or not, but that may be out of our hands. I don't personally see any reason to continue behavior that very likely may induce rapid environmental change before you / we have a very good answer to the question of whether or not we can survive the change. The last time I talked to a Mayan Indian / Native American, they said it could be kind of dicey....hold on, that must have been a dream, because they wiped themselves out with slash and burn crop treatment. Same amount of igorance humans display today, more localized effect.

However, in my opinion, it's not just about reducing CFC emissions, it's about embracing a different lifestyle that is inherently more geared towards renewability and sustainability of energy and material. Why be so wasteful? We don't have places to just throw the shit anymore, so why continue to act like we do? I just don't understand.

In North America we have some of the cleanest air.

I wish I still had these pics that showed the pollution coming across the sea from china and dispearsing when it hit American and Canadian soil. We live very clean lives over here and in Europe too. Whatever we do in our own countries is not going to change the world climate. We should go to these bad countires and fix it there.

Plus in the 60's (when they started to actually look at weather data and record it) these same "scientists" thought the world was cooling down. So, I can not listen to an over emotional person that is looking at data from 40 years ago telling me how the world is changing. Their sample time is way too small.

out of control??? we have had eruptions from places like yellowstone that blocked out the sun for decades.. we've had asteroids that left craters hundreds of miles across, and there were times in the distant past (like the triassic period) when CO2 was much much higher than it is now. Apparently someone needs to review the Keq of CO2-H2O reactions from high school.

Yes we are getting warmer, but so what? It's been a hella lot warmer before.

I would have to disagree with this point for a few reasons:

1. Whatever you do, it will affect the environment in which you live. I am not speaking of environment here in the strict "tree-hugger" sense, but in the webster dictionary sense. Nothing is truly isolated.

2. Lead by example. It's much more effective. If you want a cleaner, sustainable world, work to create one. The notion of only working on remote areas does not work nearly as well as embracing the change in your backyard. Try to control China, S. America, or Eastern Europe. I think that it will be excessivly difficult. As an analogy, we are not having tremendous success reducing the cocaine traffic from Columbia, assuming that we are truly trying to halt / control it in the first place. You can work on improving the environment wherever you actually live. Texas, for example?

I'm not sure if the "over emotional" tag was aimed specifically at me, or at the others speaking up in favor of environmental (tree-hugger use this time) awareness, but I will dismiss it as a strawman attack with mild emotional appeal. This is not a simple emotional issue of loving to hug teddy bears and save the manatees from Florida motorboats. How about this for a take on the discrepancies in the data / opinions of people, many of whom are undoubtedly intelligent and proficient in their fields? If you have multiple set of data, which seem to contradict themselves, then I would fall back on the mighty Occam's Razor idea. Which one makes sense and is the simplest? My personal concern for environmental issues and sustainability is based on recognition that reality is ontologically an inherently dynamic structure, wherein everything is affected by, and has an affect on everything else, to some degree or another. Thus, the question is simply to determine what type of effect you wish to perpetuate throughout reality. Wastefulness and excess waste, or conservation and cleanliness. Regardless of how good you think the quality of your environment is, I challenge you to prove it can't be made better. (hint, you can't prove this - it borders on becoming a logical fallacy)

Ok, I think that's enough of this for a while, but I become somewhat irked when people try to equate a concern for the environment with being emotionally hypersensitive. While it's true that one must care about the world in order to change it, the root concern is seldom based on pure emotion, but more often is based on rational principle which engenders emotion when the consequences of poor decisions are evaluated.

What was the world like during these times?

I wouldn't have minded. Plants grew a lot faster then, maybe we could feed all the starving people of the world. :)

1. Michael Crichton is a pseudo-intellectual hack who doesn't understand anything about the science.
Linky dink
The link includes indepth criticisms of it and the way it was written along with a scientific debunking of the book from Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

2. It's very simple.
-CO2 and world temperature are intricately linked.
-There is a very specific heat capacity that CO2 has
That said:
--We know that we are pouring CO2 into the atmosphere.
--We know that it is building up and not being absorbed by sinks in any substantial capacity
--We know that the earth is heating up in line with the heat absorbing capacity of the extra CO2 we have introducted to the atmosphere.

We. Are. Doing. It.

What will happen as a result of our unplanned heating, there are plenty of models. None of them are anywhere remotely close to being appealing.

so we should be concerned over a mean raise of 1 degree farenheit over the last 100 years? Yea right...

and that guy debunking crichton sites few to no sources at all to any of his information...at least crichton backs up his claims with published scientific journals

There's two major things that stick out to me as dangerous in the main post:

1. The US government is more willing to let Exxon dictate the way it behaves than concern from it's citizens. Apparently the business of Exxon is more important then the lives of every single human being on the face of the planet.

2. Even after the US planted it's government shill into the position, this shill took one look at what was happening on a global scale and STILL agreed with his predecessor. This sticks out to me. A guy who was put into his position because he believed we didnt really need all that much help with the problem suddenly reversing his position drastically and saying that we really DID need to get our asses to work QUICKLY on fixing the problem.

See, I said there was a link to Dr. Schmidt's debunking. Here it is if you couldn't fnd it.
Link

Who should we believe? The intellectual heirs to those who put a man on the moon. Some of the smartest, most disciplined scientists in the world...
Or the sci fi equivalent to a Harlequin author....

We already could feed the starving people of the world, save that it's economically infeasable. How's that for fun? Hey Starvin' Marvin, want more than a cup of rice a day? Ooops, sorry had to burn that corn because of that black market affect. I'm reducing a serious problem to a ridiculous example, but still it makes me a little vexed, as SuperBelt might say.

At least the chickas would all have tans until they had that little melanoma problem ;)

**********************

Re SuperBelt : exactly.

Re ObieX : I think that 2 is exactly on. I think 1 is more complicated, sort of like the world starvation issue. Exxon and Sunoco and all the rest of them are buying up patents right and left to corner the market on alternative energies, and they put independent research into it as well. These companies and our government are aware of peak oil as much as anyone else. I just saw data from Savanah River National Labs that acknowledges as much two weeks ago. They just want to control the technology and the transition to maximize $$$ and to corner the market. I think they're interested in doing the right thing...eventually, which makes it the wrong thing because the time lag could be so dangerous. Perhaps this was your point - I'm just saying they don't want to cut out alternative fuel sources, they just want to stifle them for a while and then focus on those that can be controlled.

edit but yes, the level of entanglement between business concerns and our political structures is a serious problem. Putting the wolf in charge of the hen house, and all that stuff.

I've been thinking about global warming lately.

The environment is deteriorating with our pollution. I am not an environmentalist, but I think we should save our energy.

I took a glimpse of global warming in the episode of Captain Planet when Wheeler is sent to the future after he refuses to accept his ring.

My point was that this data is being used to fuel emotional appeal to get their side of the argument talked about.

It is nice to say that global warming is all man's fault, but we have seen large meathane gas eruptions in the sea. Tjhese releases are far larger than what we puit out from our cars. And we all know Meathane is a "green house gas."

So, the world is heating up on its own, and we are not taking time to really look at our data. All these theroies are all based off each other. I do not trust this data that is coming out, because I have seen both sides of the argument and the global warming side has less data that spans a lesser time period.

I'll agree with this part without reservation. It's both sides, and emotional appeal has always been a large part of the view of science in the public eye. It is also emotional appeal to hint that people might be smarter than their contemporaries if they can see through this ridiculous new-age science hippola crap, which is the predominant ad pitch I see the anti-global warming crowd throwing out. I dislike both of them, despite my obvious position on the matter as a whole. As previously stated, not only is their nothing wrong with having an emotional response to your work / your world, but it is prerequisite to be effective / enact change. That doesn't make uninformed emotional appeal conducive to effective change, which is what I think you are saying?

First, I'm not aware that the position that global warming is solely man's fault has been stated, at least not here, yet - but I think that the position has been stated that technological practices of man which contribute to global warming phenomena should be discouraged. Perhaps I am wrong. I am aware of the methane gas eruptions in the sea from watching National Geographic / Discovery, and I aware of the possible effect of cow flatulence. However, I am not clear on the exact frequency of these eruptions, the depth at which they occur, nor the exact solubility of methane in water. Do you have a source for this? I am not trying to be a smart ass, but I would be interested to learn more about it. My intuition is that if this is a semi-rare occurance, then the time integrated effect of these eruptions may be much less than the output from factories / automobiles on a continuous basis (increasing with time too), while a single blast may be much larger than, say, the emissions of the automobiles in North America on an annual basis. I am not stating any of this as fact, only trying to gain some perspective on the information which you have shared.

You may not, and I may not - but I'm guessing that some people are. This is not my specific field, and thus I can not claim expertise. I do know that there are experts in the field, and it seems like an awful lot of them are becoming very adament about the fact that we need to pump our brakes a little bit on our emission levels.

Which theories are you referring to?

I accidentally erased the part considering the time scale of data collection for global warming, but I would say that 1. I am highly skeptical that such a sweeping statement is representative of serious research being conducted in the field, otherwise no one would ever be able to publish because it is highly improbable that you or I are the first people to recognize that post-Industrial Revolution data are on the same time scale as the geological formation of the Earth's environment, and 2. As for man's effect on the global warming front, data prior to about 1850 would be useless.

/ps. I felt compelled to point out a couple of typos given your sig. I hope you take it in the right way - not trying to be a dick. Just thought it was funny ;)

edit: //ps - if the Earth is heating itself up, wouldn't that make the drive to reduce our contribution to it even stronger, or else go ahead and legalize herb and heroin and so forth. I mean, if we're getting ready to go ahead and get all paleozoic up in here, why fuck around? Drop the rest of this crap, and let's make operation Get My Ass on Mars a lot more important ;)

what i dont understand is how all this climate change happened before man was around? Like the ice age etc...there was no man around to mess anything up so why did the climate change? is it not normal for the climate to change on its own??

I agree with samcol, 100 percent.

I think the whole thing has been cooked up by statist, totalitarian busybodies who want to limit individualism. They want to tell the rest of us to lower our expectations in life, to want less, to have less, to be happy with less, and most of all to trust them to tell us how to live. The folks who dreamed this stuff up are no different than all the other phony do-gooders and fake moralists of the past. What they want, they want "for the good of us all," but in the end they have always been exposed as sadistic thugs who'll do anything to get power.

Human-induced global warming is a fraud.

Well thats where part of the problem is. Technically we've entered a time when the temperatures are supposed to be heading DOWN. Heading toward another ice-age type time. So technically even if the temperatures were to stay the same it would be global warming, since according to the natural cycle temperatures would be higher than they're supposed to be. The real problem now is that instead of temperatures going down as they should be at this point in history, or even staying the same, they're going up. Imagine how bad it would be if we werent heading into a time when temperatures were going down? There would be no doubt that there is global warming because it would be much more noticable.

Anyone read scientific american? Their article a few issues back about how humans began affecting the world climate some 4000 years ago was really interesting.

Come on people- we're a population 6 billion strong, consuming and wasting enormous amounts of resources. We're using up the trillions of gallons of oil that have been slowing building up for billions of years, that have been locked in our soil, in little over a century- and Millions of tonnes of that oil we're throwing into the atmosphere as CO2, CO, and who knows what else. Coal, gas, oil, wood- they are all being consumed and a lot of it is released as smoke. In the miniscule time that man has been "civilized", we've had an impact on our world no less than a global disaster has. We've triggered massive dieoffs, endangered and outright exterminated countless other species, altered immeasurably the land around us- changed forest into plain, desert into oasis, swamp into suburbia.

The moment we became creative and intelligent, we began changing our environment to suit us instead of altering ourselves to suit the environment. And by doing so we prospered in our artifice. But alteration did damage. With 6+ billion all altering, changing, destroying (and creating), we've changed the world significantly enough that some very respected scientists are saying we have arrived at a cusp. One that will seriously change the face of our world as we know it. Deserts will be flooded. Plains and forests will become deserts. The sea level will rise and shoreline cities will sink into the ocean. Global warming will have very serious consequences. I have no doubt in my mind though that humanity will survive, although i think it'll be very uncomfortable for a while.

Milankovich Cycles
 

This is probrably going to stretch the page, but...
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~martin.../ms/img012.gif
Milankovich Cycles.
The eccentricity is the especially important part for you to understand, but all three parts, eccentricity, tilt and precession combine to dictate our interglaciation. The cycle that is relatively circular around the sun gives even heating throught the year. The axis tilt is also pretty minor which keeps the sun angles at the poles steep throughout the year. (Ice build up)
The odd heating eccentricity has the earth very close to the sun for half the year, and direct sunlight that is heating the earth moves substantially north and south of the equator. This is a heating cycle.

We are in the circular part of the cycle right now. We should be getting colder.

Here, read up on the Milankovich Cycle

I know this might be sarcasm, but it also might not.... And if it isn't, then this kind of thinking really scares me.

And just makes me give a face like this:

:rolleyes:

To humanity.