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©CDC/ James Gathany; William Nicholson |
The blacklegged tick Ixodes pacificus, a known vector for Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease. |
©NGRIP |
The North Greenland Ice Core Project camp. |
©Solarcycle24.com |
The spotless Sun, as it appeared yesterday at 12:48 p.m. The Sun's spotlessness is giving rise to speculation of another Little Ice Age. |
"Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb." -- Shlomo Brom, Israel's deputy national security adviser under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak
Quite apart from the science, one thing I find suspicious about climate catastrophism is how there's supposed to be this massive and terribly deleterious change ahead of us, and yet (by what strikes me as an amazing coincidence) we are always said to still be capable of stopping it but only -- and here the speaker invariably assumes the urgent air of an infomercial voice-over -- if we act right this very minute. This is strange, given that we're dealing with what (on the catastrophist account) seems to be a slippery-slope doomsday scenario that has been building up since the Industrial Revolution. Given the long time-frame and massive uncertainties involved, you'd think that predictions of the exact timing of the "point of no return" must involve a fairly significant margin of error. In light of that, it's odd that there doesn't seem to be even one climate-change affirmer out there who's saying "Rats! I hate to tell you this guys, but it's one or two (or ten or fifty) years too late and there's basically nothing we can do now." Perhaps adding: "So we might as well just go out in style -- let's everyone head out to the SUV dealership!" Or "Let's get 10,000 of our best friends together and jet over to Bali for a big wingding!"And that's it: We're always a few years away from the point of no return, whether it's Iran, climate, or some other "catastrophic" event we must act now before it is too late. What if Iran already has the bomb? What if we're already past the point of no return? What will you do, what will They do then?
On the other hand, there are thousands of them who seem to think we're just a few years away from this point of no return...
©SOHO |
©Nature |
You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especially during the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.Now the question must be asked, Is there a relationship between the sun's missing spots and a 100,000 year ice age cycle coupled with cometary debris entering the solar system?
Comment: For additional analysis on shorter period cycles of the last 100,000 years and their causes see The Younger Dryas Impact Event and the Cycles of Cosmic Catastrophes - Climate Scientists Awakening.