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New Ice Age Theory
amigoro writes "Most believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. According to one scientist, that is not the case. Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, has developed a model which hypothesizes a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 or 41,000 years, exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. The main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can't explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle. The cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model line up with the observations."
No one tries the old venerable "Frost Post"
I saw an episode of "Andromeda" where the system's sun would go out every hundred years or so...
life imitates TV? (anyone know which epi it wuz?)
This guy's theories are all wrong. Obviously people are causing the 100,000 - 41,000 year cycles. Someone should take away his meterology license...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So the new model is heliocentric instead of geocentric. I thought we made this switch centuries ago.
Could it be that the inner shells of the sun are bouncing a bit? Perhaps a resonance building up from fast "shell quakes" where localised fuel combinations are changing ?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The climate depends more on atmospheric composition than on any variation in the sun or even our proximity to it. That's why venus is hotter than mercury. I'm not trolling, I'm just really tired of assmunches promoting the idea that the climate is changing as part of a normal cycle or some such garbage.
See, I learned something in all those science experiment classes.
OTOH the check word says the "contrary". Maybe the author should use this system to find the solution.
Could it not be a combination of both Milankovitch cycles and the dimming of the sun?
Yes that's the same theory that has been proposed from the scientists at Oral Roberts University. God attached a dimmer switch to the sun so he can punish us with increasing temperatures.
sophism [sof-iz-uhm] -noun
a specious argument for displaying ingenuity in reasoning or for deceiving someone, e.g. beginning with a conclusion and finding reasons to justify it, regardless of where the evidence points.
Man... Where have I been? I'm no science geek and I guess it shows. What happened to that big asteroid that was supposed to start the Ice Age?
Property is theft.
Yes that's the same theory that has been proposed by the scientists at Oral Roberts University. God attached a dimmer switch to the sun so he can punish us with increasing temperatures.
shouldn't that be:
that's like writing
THE EARTH IS FLAT!!!! according to some guy somewhere.
instead of
some guy somewhere thinks the earth is flat!!
It doesn't explain the cycles but the ice ages are generally believed to be caused by a shift in the jet stream that was caused by the Himalayan Mountains. The cycle's start parallels the rise of that mountain range cutting into the jet stream and causing the shift. The trigger is still up for debate but the cold air is being caused by the jet stream shifting south.
If most scientists believe that the Milankovitch cycles cause Ice Ages, then it must be true. This is just like the consensus on Global Warming. If this guy doesn't believe that the Milankovitch cycles are the cause, then he's obviously being paid off by some corporation for some reason. Milankovitch cycles are SETTLED SCIENCE. This guy needs to stop being a skeptic and start researching how we can stop these cycles!
there's a Home Depot just an a.u. down the road - we should ve able to swap that out with a longer cycle dimmer and all will be well.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Obviously mans careless use of the environment on earth is the root cause of this heliocentric dimming phenomenon. I call for an immediate halt to deforestation and burning of fossil fuels that initiate the anti-dimming process via subatomic sympathetic astrological particles (SSAP)!!
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
natural global cooling? with scientific backing? this sounds like a global warming denier. he should lose his licence and prosecuted in nuremberg style war crimes courts! quick, someone tell al gore!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It's a neat idea. Are there any observations to support it? Peter Huybers from MIT just presented an alternative model which explains the 40 ky - 100 ky switch nicely without resorting to solar fluctuations. The basic idea is that you start out with ice ages every 40 ky, but at some point the ice accumulation retards heating, and one or even two thawing cycles get skipped. This gives you longer cold periods and a warm period every 80 ky or 120 ky. If you randomly distribute cycles with these two intervals, you can get a peak at 100 ky (but you can't just superimpose the sine curves with those two frequencies). He suggests that the 100 ky cycle isn't real, and just an effect we see from skipping some thaws. This is supposedly supported by oxygen isotope measurements, but I'm not enough of a geochemist to verify that.
"Could it be..."
Who the hell knows...
From TFA: "In an article appearing in the journal Nature, Ehrlich describes..."
Click the nature link and you end up at NewScientist.
Even if this guy has a viable mechanisim for his "dimmer switch", I can't see that it has any implications for our current climate problems. Wake me up again iff someone finds an abstract.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They must be. They're the cause of everything wrong in the world.
Milankovitch, Milankovitch, Milankovitch, Milankovitch, Milankovitch, Milankovitch (Drops onto New Jersey Turnpike)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I thank God the scientists keep looking for patterns and physics to try to explain what we see in the geologic and solar record & current observations of the sun, as that is the ONLY WAY we will ever have a chance of really knowing what long term cycles are caused by. There may be 50 models and theories, but it will likely be a stew of dozens of researchers that finally get a theory that is solid enough to be verified and called a Proof, or tentative Proof.
Fact is, no one can yet show a proof of why, but we do know that Ice ages occurred dozens of times and when, but we can not yet prove what the underlieing factor is that causes the repetition (excluding the major "accidental" supermassive volcano or mega-asteroid).
That is what true science is for, which is to keep digging, sometimes literally, until you uncover the data and principals that can be independently verified and eventually acknowledged as fact.
But that is not convenient for politicians who want power, and bureaucrats who can manage whole new divisions of government if they get funding to try to act on something with the citizens money, when there is only speculation as to what is going on and to what degree, let alone whether we can actually do anything about it.
This is such BS. Everybody knows that the sun has been a constant source of heat and light since the beginning of time and that the only cause of disruption in the universe is Western Civilization. To say otherwise is to blaspheme.
Hallowed be the Al Gore.
One competing viewpoint with this theory is that these events were caused by a solar "Clapper" which flipped the sun when bombarded with echoes and reverberations from the big bang. This non-viewpoint is endorsed by non-dimmer switch oriented non-scientists but these non-scientist find it more plausible...in lots of ways.
Ok... Lets go with the whole cycles thing. Were is the human race with in the current 41k / 100k cycle?
Nope, it is caused by Suburbans, HMVs and Expeditions. Obviously even the dinosaurs had SUVs - the ice ages prove it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
if (strpos("shill", $comment[text]))
{
echo "[Post deleted due to:] <i>User being a douchebag.</i>";
$sql_code="delete from comments where commentID = $comment[id]";
sql($sql_code);
}
"The cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model line up with the observations."
Shouldn't this be? The cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model were inferred from observations. Implying that a prediction is lining up with observations is not the same as a prediction that's inferred from observations. And besides, the article is claiming it's an inference based on past observations, not a prediction which has been verified with observations.
The article itself makes no such wild encompassing claim.
A little while later at the bank..... Robert: "What do you mean I don't have any funds?" Teller: "I'm sorry sir, the account seams to have been frozen." Robert: "Oh, man! I knew I should have wated to cash the check before talking about the dimmer switch theory...." Proof that the Ice-Age theory works. If you hit the correct switch. Everything gets cold.....
I don't know that 'sophism' is fair. The Milankovitch cycles don't explain two different period lengths. The actual paper (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0701/07011 17.pdf) suggests a mechanism giving a periodic behaviour in the interior of the sun having multiple period lengths. Unless it was arbitrarily calibrated to give the same cycles as Ice Ages (I concede I couldn't follow all the math), it looks pretty reasonable as a hypothesis. If there's a periodic behaviour on the Earth, and a behaviour inside the Sun with same period lengths, and they coincide, that's worth looking into. (Pity we can't observe the interior of the sun as easily as the Earth's orbit.)
This probably is a precursor for the Second Coming. Unlike the first kid who dropped out of carpentry class, the next kid wants to go to college and he needs to save up.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
http://thebear.org/essays2.html#anchor506010
Need Mercedes parts ?
Actually I just blogged on this. For global warming it is very hard to blame carelessness. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/knowing-warmin g.html
s -selling-solar.html
But, you can still do something about it: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
But come on. "The cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model line up with the observations." The summary says that like its some type of verification. They line up (duh) because he picked the cycles that way. What a stupid end to the summary.
Fwiw, I like the line of thinking - that the ice ages are an action of the sun rather than the earth, but its entirely unsubstantiated and to go _holy crap_ the model that he crafted to fit historical data fits historical data is fantastically disingenious.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
. . . that damn annoying hum.
What would be the smallest size of object would have to collide with the sun to produce a change in the amount of solar radiation we receive on earth?
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
It seems that this theory should be fairly testable. If the orbital theory is correct, only Earth should display climate cycles of similar periods. If it's caused by the sun, then the whole inner solar system would be affected. Granted, it would be nearly impossible to see such evidence on Mercury and Venus, but perhaps evidence of some form would be left on Mars. I'm not quite up to speed on my astrogeology, does anyone know if we have any kind of reliable record of the ancient Martian climate?
Try this on for size:
Picture the Earth in a glacial period. At this time most of the landmass is covered in ice. This prevents nutrients from being eroded and washed into the sea by rivers. This in turn causes phytoplankton populations to decline. As we know, phytoplankton are a major CO2 sink. The small plankton population results in rising CO2 levels, thus increasing temperature.
Melting ensues.
Now picture the Earth in an interglacial period. Most of the landmass is open to the elements. Rivers freely wash nutrients into the sea, and cause phytoplankton populations to boom. The plankton absorb CO2, cooling the Earth.
Freezing ensues...
Fry: Who are you people?
Al Gore: I'm Al Gore. And these are my vice presidential action rangers. A group of top-nerds, whose sole duty is to prevent disruptions in the space-time continuum. Fry: I thought your sole duty was to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
Al Gore: That, and protect the space-time continuum. Read the Constitution.
I predict that in about 7 hours the sun will rise over my house. 10 1/2 hours after that, the sun will fall into dusk.... but I can't explain why!
>> a model which hypothesizes a dimmer switch inside the sun
No, seriously? That must be how they get it to be all dark and stuff at night.
Looking at the majority of posts, I gotta say... I've the feeling, that the jokes that poke fun at theories of global warming caused by human activity will get less and less funny each year.
I just hope we won't cry when we hear one in 10 years.
I guess it's human nature to oversimplify things into two categories of black and white. As always, real life is a lot more complex than this.
I only rent here, I never knew what that darn switch did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Similar changes should then have been observed in some of the stars around us. Have they?
The "Dimmer Switch" (note to self: find a better name for the Dimmer Switch) theory may have something. I am not a trained scientist, but wouldn't fluctuations in the sun also affect other things? Say gravity? If it could be proven it could explain a lot of what happens on earth. Like why do we have an increase in geological activity. And it would explain the Milankovitch cycles itself too. I mean to use an analogy why use 50,000 lines of code when 50 will do?
You know you labelled yourself a douche bag. Not that I've ever seen or even know what a douche bag is. Something from the feminine persuation I will suppose, and that you are a member of the he-man women hater club.
Fluctuations on the Sun's brightness should not affect gravity as Mass of the Sun itself does not change.
Maybe the Sun is refreshing itself with new Hydrogen supplies from inside itself.
But that change in brightness would certainly affect climate on Earth.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Let's try this one. I have the fire going in the house. The weather gets warmer. My wife asks why I have the fire going. I say "The heat is nothing to do with the fire, it's caused by the weather getting warmer. There's nothing I can do about it"
Why is it so hard for these people to understand the idea that several factors can contribute to the same phenomenon, and if we don't want it to happen we should ameliorate the factors we can affect, not bitch about the ones we can't?
They surely can't ALL be PR flacks for Exxon posting?
Pining for the fjords
So basically he has nothing to back his arguement.
"I found this trend on the period of ice ages"
That's reasonable.
"And it's caused by something I have absolutely no data for. I'm just guessing"
That's stupid.
He might as well blame it on Santa Claus,
and it'd have the same scientific validity.
The Earth's only about 6000 years old ;)
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
Most believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles.
Whereas I believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in John Malkovich's moods, known as the Malkovich cycles.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I tried to raise some interest in providing EdGCM with variant insolation input, but it was deemed not a useful idea because the old Model II collapses for any simulated periods of longer than a couple of thousand years.
Do you know of any open-source simulator covering the various orbital parameters of Milankovitch and/or others? It could be handy for plugging into other simulation frameworks, like ESMF.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can't explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle.
Trust me, it makes perfect sense if you're a Dave Matthews Band fan.
"If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
This article is intereting but I highly doubt the sun temperature is the only cause of the ice ages. I am more likely to believe that there are many factors involved.
It seems to me that a number of Theories in Science (this doesn't include Creationism, since that's only an unsupported Hypothesis, and not actually a Theory) compete with each other as if There Can Only Be One right answer. Often, though, when the dust finally settles, the Truth turns out to consist of elements of more than one of the competitors. So, in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if the Truth about Ice Ages includes both the "dimmer switch" and the orbital mechanics thing.
You know, just because you can create a Function F(x,y,z,a,b,c,....) that describes anything observed in nature, doesn't mean that the same function can be used for predictions. That is unless you have a statistical sampling of say, 1500 events that the function has predicted.
How about we call this a new theory yet to be proven when 1498 other events occur?
Heck, technical analysis for picking stocks has millions of data points and still can't predict jack beyond a monkey pointing at a list of stocks.
Needs a girlfriend.
"honey, do you know what this switch does?"
"No, dear."
"Okay, I'm going to flip it...watch to see what happens."
"Okay"
"On"
"Nothing"
"Off"
"Nothing"
"On"
"Still Nothing"
"Off"
"Nope, I still can't see what it does..."
Must be caused by us hitting a hot spot in the sun...It all makes sense now ^-^
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
The sun causes the Ice Age, but doesn't have any significant effect when Global warming is involved, only human can warm the earth... mostly conservitive humans.. :)
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
I'm surprised how quickly the former Governor of Maryland is adapting to non-government life.
Robert Ehrlich sure got a new job quickly. Just a week ago he was governor of Maryland!
From TFA: "In an article appearing in the journal New Scientist..." which was linked; at least, the New Scientist site is.
/. linked to, and is now grinning from ear to ear as the advertising revinue rolls in.
here is the article that the article linked from slashdot is reporting on.
Duh.
I'm thinking the submitter works for or owns the site
"Solar Resonant Diffusion Waves as a Driver of Terrestrial Climate Change".
I don't remember any hollywood movies with people living in glass domes afraid to go out for fear of instant skin cancer.
Dear Earth,
Which one of you apes put the sponge in the cosmic microwave?
- God
:%s:work:/.:g
The Sun is essentially a giant Microwave oven only without a precision (over insane lengths of time)thermostat. In human time frames, the Sun is stable and precise system, promoting life through less extreme hot and cold cycles and we know this from geologic history and the fossil record, the earth was much warmer overall and colder overall in historical cycles.
Anyone who believes the Sun or earth process for that matter, is static expression of energy is simply a moron regardless of how many letters come after their name. Simply a fool.
The onset of cyclical Ice Ages and Global Warming is due to Astronomical forces in comnbination with the lesser but albeit far more powerful forces than human technology can muster at this point, Earth forces whether they be plate tectonics, volcanism etc. in any combination there of.
Global Warming is just todays pet crisis for the cult of Alarmism.
In the 70's it was Global Cooling.
Blaming SUV's, Barbecue's or Cow Flatulence is just demonstrating your scientific ignorance and its no wonder it took millions of years of human evolution just to get to civil rights, the vinyl long playing LP or Windows!
You may now carry on in your usual manner of kneejerk groupthink alarmist drivel and leave the real science to others withouth an agenda.
I wonder what Al Gore will invent next?
What no jokes or takes on my last post, Al Gore got your tongues?
You cant argue with what you dont understand and until you remove thy bleeding heart from thoust sleeve, you'll always be looking to secure additional grant money to prove that leprechauns do exist.
You may even find evdience for it but you'll never get me lucky charms.
Thats it then, back to your desks to dream up the next crisis.
... when God decides to turn the dimmer switch down to save electricity for the next miracle! Religion always provides an answer, not fucking scientists with their peer reviewed ideas. God is fighting the universal warming, which will come if he wastes energy on us.This
But no. They have all been caused by Chuck Norris, depending on how hot or cold he is, and how many people he's decided to let live.
Sorry folks, this is super old news. There's different orbit changes that account for different ice amounts on earth. There are also other factors that are extremely unclear, which can change temperature extremely quickly, as has been the case.
Glaicers move fast. I don't know where you learned your geology or your geologists, but you're wrong.
Plate tectonics has nothing to do with ice ages.
ObGlobalWarming: Glaciers move even faster now.