Your letter got me to your website and publications which I read with great interest. You and I may only disagree on the contribution of man’s activities to global warming. Your many climate analysis and comments focus on the last few hundred years of the global heating cycle.
My studies were focused on the daily-recorded high and low temperatures for Superior’s north shore cities. What I found was that the yearly number, and “coldest,” of winter days was steadily declining and corresponded well with existing global studies of rising average temperatures. It was also evident that Jupiter and Saturn positions with respect to earth also corresponded to the years with the “coldest” winter days.
Your figure “Comparison of the various thermal reservoirs” showing that 93 percent of earth’s stored heat is in the oceans helped me to understand the remaining “low temperature” anomalies in the weather recorded from 1895 to 2014 – thank you again.
All earth temperature cycles – day-night, year-seasons, global-warming/cooling are a balance between the heat stored on earth, and the constant cooling of this stored heat by radiation into deep space. These cycles seem to have a strong correlation with the earth’s tilt axis. Perigee and apogee with the sun, and the heat stored by the oceans, and combined to produce the earth’s average temperatures.
The Vostok ice cores show 420,000 years of data for estimated earth temperatures and CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere. About every 100,000 cycles there is a phase of this repetitive cycle, where the CO2 concentration and air temperatures start an abrupt rise; 20,000 years ago this phase began for our earth again as shown in the Vostok ice cores.
If I understand your position, industrialization started this phase of the present cycle, and the increased burning of fossil fuels has made this rise much more rapid than the previous 100,000-year cycles. I hope you can give a layman’s explanation for the scientific rationale for understanding what part of increase of CO2 and temperatures are attributed to this repetitive cycle, and which is attributed to man’s various activities.
Thank you for your many contributions (in addition to climate studies).
Chuck Flickinger
Hovland
P.S. Since most of earth’s carbon is stored in the oceans, some scientists believe that increased heat causes the oceans to release carbon in the form of CO2 – if this is so then our global heating cycle is likely an area of study to determine the percent of naturally released CO2, and giving the remaining percent for man’s activities.
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