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Changes In Earth's Orbit Were Key To Antarctic Warming That Ended Last Ice Age

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-blame-kepler dept.

vinces99 writes "For more than a century scientists have known that Earth's ice ages are caused by the wobbling of the planet's orbit, which changes its orientation to the sun and affects the amount of sunlight reaching higher latitudes, particularly the polar regions. The Northern Hemisphere's last ice age ended about 20,000 years ago, and most evidence has indicated that the ice age in the Southern Hemisphere ended about 2,000 years later, suggesting that the south was responding to warming in the north. But new research published online Aug. 14 in Nature (abstract) shows that Antarctic warming began at least 2,000, and perhaps 4,000, years earlier than previously thought."

10 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Oh god... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Cue unrelated arguments about modern global warming... time to flee Slashdot for a few hours....

  2. Ice ages are caused by planetary wobbles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But warming is caused by man.

    Got it.

    1. Re:Ice ages are caused by planetary wobbles by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Isn't it inconvenient when people who think differently than yourself speak up?

      Other religious fanatics have the same reactions when their ideals are challenged.

      I have found through the years, "shut up" is the sign of a weak and easily manipulated mind.

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    2. Re:Ice ages are caused by planetary wobbles by Gavrielkay · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Better my trotting out a headcount of experts than others' trotting out gut feelings. I have a degree in chemistry, I understand the scientific method. I work in programming, I understand logic. Both of those concepts help me to understand that hundreds of scientists from around the world are not making this shit up. Perhaps new data will come to light and prove some or all of the current theories wrong, but it won't come from /. posters making snide remarks.

      And it won't come because some people have decided that science is great when it provides computers, internet and porn on DVD but is somehow stacked full of blithering idiots when it comes to climate change.

    3. Re:Ice ages are caused by planetary wobbles by khellendros1984 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If someone makes a post that seems to be making a false-equivalence between two situations, then they aren't even challenging anyone's "ideals", they're just introducing confusion for no good reason. Anthropogenic climate change and climate change through natural processes (like Earth's orbital wobble) aren't mutually exclusive, and any argument that says that they are is either disingenuous or badly confused about the claims being made. If you take the former to be true (and I do), then "shut up" is the correct response to the trolling attempt.

      --
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    4. Re:Ice ages are caused by planetary wobbles by Silvrmane · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Generally speaking, the people who write the papers are the same cast of characters who do the reviews on the papers. Its a fairly incestuous process, so I don't put a lot of stock in "peer review" when it comes to something as unphysical as climate science. Peer review in general, in all sciences, is also undergoing a kind of crisis of confidence. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/Opinion--Scientific-Peer-Review-in-Crisis/

      People treat climate science like it was a hard science like physics or chemistry, where input A results in output B. It isn't. It is at best a "soft science" where opinion and confirmation bias creep in at every opportunity.

      Keep in mind that people are trying to make predictions about the future behaviour of a complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamic system based on poorly founded, unphysical simulations of the past behaviour of that system -- you cannot simulate a system unless you understand all of its inputs and outputs, and the physical relationship between them. Prediction is, if not impossible, is very very hard. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/504.htm

      --
      planet texture maps and more
    5. Re:Ice ages are caused by planetary wobbles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is little insight in a sarcastic comment expressing a common point of confusion: that climate change processes on the scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years are going to matter to what happens in the next century or two.

      I don't mind sarcasm if it's founded on an insightful understanding, but this isn't. It's just dumb. It promotes confusion, not understanding. Here, I'll rephrase it for you with an analogous situation:

      "Tides are caused by the Sun and Moon"
      "But waves are caused by wind"
      "Got it"

      What, is this supposed to be a contradiction? That the surface of the sea could be determined by *two* different processes at the same time at two different scales of observation and timescales? Gasp! Insanity! Sea level skeptics unite and resist the global sea level conspiracy!

      See, I can use sarcasm and hyperbole. But it doesn't really help my argument. What matters here is the observation that the guy making his sarcastic comment about controls on climate doesn't understand that there isn't anything contradictory about climate variations due to astronomical cycles at long time scales (thousands of years) being different from human inputs at shorter timescales (centuries). It's no more contradictory than the different processes responsible for the temperature variation seen over a single day versus a season. Or does he have a problem with that as well? At least it would be consistent.

  3. Re:So basically... by DexterIsADog · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Short answer: No, with an "if".

    Long answer: Yes, with a "but".

    Which equals - No answer at all................

    Clearly we need to spend a few trillion more to find out the answer.

    No, not at all. It would only cost a few tens of millions to keep "studying" the problem until everyone agrees it's too late to do anything about it. Either of the Koch brothers could just write a check. And in 100 years their descendants will still be rich enough to live on the new coastlines... wherever they wind up.

  4. Re:So basically... by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, it's pretty much just "no". The phrase "global warming" conventionally describes the unprecedentedly rapid rise in temperatures since the industrial revolution. That is entirely "our fault" because of aforementioned unprecedented rate, and that data is quite incontestable without dramatic misrepresentation of what is being compared.

  5. Re:Before anyone drags climate change into it.. by Gavrielkay · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or, it was a (partially) successful attempt to deflect the rash of comments about how their research on the previous ice age must invalidate lots of other research on current climate change.