climate change, or global warming, or whatever

so, in my first post i said that i would explain the climate change or global warming thing in a clear concise way, the scientific facts that most people seem to not realise. i suppose to day is as good a day as any to do that.

this will not be a crazy-time rant thing (see the 'libya' post, about two days ago) I'll do it better this time, hopefully.

first of all, climate change is 100% a natural phenomenon, it has been happening since just before there has been life on earth. it is necessary for life to exist.

chemical processes, some biological, some not, cause build ups of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, heating the earth up, making it more habitable for life. after a while, the earth gets hot enough that over a few thousand years, the ice caps on the equator melt, making more liquid water in the world. the earth is then cooled down over another few thousand years by the liquid water, most of the greenhouse gases are absorbed by the water and consequently trapped in soils, to be consumed by life processes.

this creates a cooling of the earths global temperature. the cooling effect cause the processes that cause greenhouses gases to go up in the atmosphere to cause warming to increase, setting in motion the whole cycle .

here is a picture version of this cycle, during the medieval warm period and the little ice age, which caused the downfall of viking culture:

probably not the best pic i know. I'll try to find a better one later. this is a very short version of the cycle. there are graphs of the larger cycle, spanning very long stretches of time, but these are very hard to come by, even on the Internet.

so the question that should be controversial is not 'does climate change exist?' or 'are humans responsible for it?' but 'is human activity able to knock this fragile balancing act askew?'

what will happen to earth if this cycle is broken can be seen if we look at the two nearest planets, mars and Venus.
if we put too much greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, so that even if the water is saturated by it and the earth keeps getting hotter, over a very, very long time, the earth would come to resemble Venus.

if we do the opposite, not enough greenhouse gases so the earth keeps getting cooler, we'll end up like mars.

the hockey stick graph doesn't really show much, since the ones i have found only go back a thousand years. far enough to show the earth is getting hotter, in the last 200 years, not far enough back to show the larger cycle of heating up and cooling down.

OK, so the fact that climate change is a natural process is now out of the way, as well as the consequences of what will happen if that process is disturbed too much. also that the graphs that only show the last thousand years don't show the full story, and even though they are the majority, other more reliable graphs that show longer amounts of time do exist. somewhere.

I'll continue this tomorrow. i don't want to bore anyone away with a wall of text. its a pretty simple subject, theres just a fair bit of stuff to talk about.

wanna see a dog riding a unicycle? sorry, all i have is an advertisement for mainstream media. but its by john la joie!!!