” EIJING (AP) — Human rights activists issued a call to action against the Beijing Olympics on Friday, imploring athletes and sponsors to speak out against what they call the “genocide games.”
Speaking at an online press conference organized by the rights group Human Rights Watch, activists representing Chinese dissidents and the minority Uyghur and Tibetan populations urged international attendants to voice their opposition to China’s hosting of the Games, which begin next week.
“The 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the genocide games,” said Teng Biao, a former human rights activist in China who is now a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
“The CCP’s purpose is to exactly turn the sports arena into a stage for political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all those atrocities,” he added, referring to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
Last year, the conventional political wisdom went like this: Republicans, through a combination of population increase and gerrymandering, were poised to pick up upwards of a dozen US House seats in 2022 from redistricting alone. Democrats, after all, only have a five-seat majority in the House, and Republicans could effectively ensure control of the chamber before a single midterm election ballot was cast.
On Wednesday, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster became the 28th governor in the country to sign into law his state’s redistricting plan. Not much changed there. The same makeup of a 6-to-1 Republican advantage remains, though one Republican district became a bit more Republican. …
In Alabama, three Republican federal judges (two appointed by Trump) threw out a map crafted by the Republican-dominated Legislature there because it did not proportionally carve out enough Black districts.
While the list of particulars of many states can go on, the big story is that Democrats, who largely favored nonpartisan commissions to draw lines, began to act more like Republicans.
Republicans were set to gain at least five seats just from population shifts away from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. But efforts in Democratic-led states like Illinois and California have eliminated some of those gains.
What’s left a little over halfway into the redistricting process is that, right now, the central premise all last year turned out not to be true: Republicans won’t win the US House after the midterm elections based on the redistricting process. …
Make no mistake: Republicans are still poised to win back the US House this year. But instead of that being simply because of redistricting, it is lining up to be about poor polling numbers for Democratic President Joe Biden and nearly 30 Democratic incumbents not running for reelection.
That said, more than a dozen states still need to weigh in, along with the courts.
Biden’s low poll numbers are due to the continuing campaign of lies by the Right press. All Lies all the time.
Dems could fight back through organization and creative responses to state anti-voter legislation. From my perspective they would also need to do more than give lip service to the Left.
I advocated last election for Left to come out and vote for Biden because a win by Trump would be a disaster the Left would not recover from for a thousand years. I am afraid I am going to have to do it…advocate…again, because a Republican win would be the same as a Trump win, even if Trump is not on the ballot. But it’s hard to do with a straight face given the failure of Biden proposals to even make sense regarding climate change, environmental pollution, destruction of habitat….more concrete, more roads, more bridges…..or even to make much sense regarding helping the poor. People are homeless, without jobs, without hope…so why is government aid being offered to the near-rich, or at least so far up in the “middle” class that they could be expected to pay for their own child care.
[that should draw some contempt down on my head. but a better targeted spending plan could have been cheaper enough to at least make Manchin blush when he says “too expensive” and actually do some good for the really poor. And a more honest climate plan would give the environmentalists a real reason to fight for Biden and the real Democrats, if any.]
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Since there are a lot of ways to skin a cat, none of which involve cutting off ones own hands, then I will skip the details. Even FDR did not bat 1000. As you recall though, the most popular policies, then ones that lead to winning more elections, put a chicken in every pot, not just the poor and hungry. This is to say that if you take from Peter to give to Peter and Paul, then you don’t end up with Peter in your face.
Good luck and take care, buddy. I got work to do outside after the weekly snow storms stop, but life is good inside for now because my dermatologist hit me with two biopsies on 1/25/22 that need to heal now. It will still take a week or more to know the score on them.
I have a friend, an ardent antiTrumper until recently registered with the GOP who still receives a lot of email loaded with GOP lies, which he seems to read for whatever reason. He cannot figure why the Dems are not ‘doing something about it’.
Ron, good point. But it takes a smarter politician than me to thread the needle between Scylla and Charybdis. I think the chicken in every pot was promised by someone other than FDR, but I’ll need to look it up (I think it ended badly).
Meanwhile, my understanding is that the Big Banks loved FDR while he was saving the banks, then got mad at him when he started saving the people.
I don’t blame Biden for not being FDR, I blame the situation we have all got ourselves into where it is impossible for the advisers that the president listens to to think in any but political terms, and they don’t seem to be very good at that, unless it’s all a charade. [if it was really “just” political reality, I think offering a “compromise” that they either had to take or find a new argument (they would) would have (might have) left us in a better position to take the next step…but of course that means the “middle-class” (by my standards) would have to be at least tolerably sensible,,,which they have shown no signs of being. You will not this is not an argument that amounts to an answer. Just a bitter lament.
sorry about the dermatology. keep in touch.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Ron
SS is popular but nobody understands it. and you (I) can’t teach them. Yet they believe every stupid lie the non-partisan expert liars come up with.
since i’m here I will repeat the Truth about SS: workers pay for it themselves. it has to be that way. “welfare”, by any name, does not work in this country. the great big terrible looming many trillion dollar unfunded deficit canbe paid for by the workers themselves by raising their own payroll tax about a dollar per week per year while wages are expected to grow by about ten dollars per week per year. that needed increase in the tax will stop after a few years. the increase in wages should not stop. but if it did, you would need Social Security more than ever. all it is is a very very safe way to save enough of your own money, at interest, to give you at least enough to live on when you can no longer work. all this can be verified.
but it’s easier for people to believe it’s a Ponzi scheme. or it’s socialism, or its a huge burden on the young. or it’s the young paying for the old. or it’s uncle sam stuffing iou’s in one pocket and then borrowing them to stuff in another pocket. see these are all cartoons and so much easier to understand than “you need to save for your future. SS provides a safe way to do that.”
U.S. Natural Gas Prices Climb Most Ever In Single Day -U.S. natural gas future prices skyrocketed 72% on Thursday on forecasts of colder weather. It was the sharpest one-day climb for the commodity since the contract launched in 1990, CME Group data confirmed.The 72% surge in prices came before the expiry of the February contract for nat gas as weather forecasts now look colder. Natural gas futures were trading below $4.50 per million British thermal units for most of the trading day, but some time after 12:45 p.m. EST, prices scrambled for the $7 mark, with the contract eventually settling at $6.265.
that jump was not due to fundamentals, but rather a short squeeze just as trading in the February gas contract was expiring…
While Ukraine’s president complained about “acute and burning” warnings from Washington, the Pentagon issued a dire new appraisal asserting Russia has amassed enough troops to invade his entire country. …
Ukrainian officials sharply criticized the Biden administration Friday for its ominous warnings of an imminent Russian attack, saying they had needlessly spread alarm, even as a new Pentagon assessment said Russia was now positioned to go beyond a limited incursion and invade all of Ukraine.
The diverging viewpoints brought into the open the stark disagreement between Ukraine and its key partner over how to assess the threat posed by Russia, which has massed about 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s border in what American officials are calling a grave threat to global peace and stability. …
From the border, it’s a fast 140 miles down a newly paved highway to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, but only a few troops stand guard.
NOVI YARYLOVYCHI BORDER CROSSING, Ukraine — On the other side of this border in northern Ukraine, not visible through the thick pine and birch forests that crowd the E-95 highway but noticeable to passing truckers, a force is gathering in Belarus more potent than anything seen in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, officials and military analysts say. …
… “As a result of Russia taking control over Belarus, 1,070 kilometers of our border with Belarus became a threat,” said Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, referring to a distance of about 665 miles. “This is not a threat from Belarus — Ukraine has a very warm attitude toward the Belarusian people — but a threat from Russia moving through Belarus.”
The Novi Yarylovychi border crossing is a fast, 140-mile drive straight from the Belarus border south to Kyiv on a highway that is mostly freshly paved thanks to efforts by President Volodymyr Zelensky to address the poor state of Ukrainian roads. It would be an easy ride for any Russian tank driver so long as Russian forces take out Ukrainian air power and artillery first, and the Javelin anti-tank missiles provided to the Ukrainian military by the United States stay deployed in eastern Ukraine. …
President Biden is suffering in the polls as high inflation saps confidence in the economy, even as growth comes in strong. …
… Mr. Biden and his top advisers are trying to turn attention toward the positives: emphasizing how rapidly the economy has recovered and that wages are rising, and hailing efforts to fix snarled supply chains and rebuild domestic manufacturing. …
(If the Dobbs Index is any indication, stock markets have been hammered since early January. Some say a correction is looming. But markets were up sharply yesterday, and huge buying opportunities abound.)
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
[After being seriously sold out by the scientific community in the early 2000’s when POTUS was from an oil giant family recent anomalies are giving it a comeback.]
Understanding climates from the geological past is essential for understanding the context for today’s human-caused (anthropogenic) climate changes. One reason that records from the past are so important is that they can tell us about climate changes before human activities, and thus they can help us to distinguish between anthropogenic and natural climate variability. In addition, we can learn about the rates over which climate change can happen, from decades to millions of years, through natural geological archives such as ice cores from glaciers and ice sheets, tree rings, coral skeletons and mollusk shells, and ocean and lake sediments (among others).
The keys to understanding past climate changes first involve excellent chronology: age-dating of the archive records through a variety of methods. We need to know the age of climate records in order to draw conclusions about how rapidly or slowly the climate has changed in the past. Second, we need well-understood “proxies” linked to various climate conditions. Proxies are records from the past that preserve Earth’s climate history and substitute for direct measurements of climate variables like temperature and rainfall. Examples of proxies include geochemical, biological, and physical measurements in sediments, ice, trees, and corals. These proxies are used to reconstruct pre-historical patterns of air and sea temperatures, atmospheric chemistry and circulation, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, glacier, sea-ice, ice sheet and sea level history, rainfall patterns, and carbon cycling, among many other environmental factors…
*
[I first learned about this when in grade school, at a time before global warming and climate change had entered the pop science lexicon and were completely secluded in dry scientific theory which dated back to the late 19th century. At that time paleontology was the most fascinating thing on Earth to me.]
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Ask NASA Climate | February 27, 2020, 00:00 PST
Why Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles Can’t Explain Earth’s Current Warming
By Alan Buis,
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
In the last few months, a number of questions have come in asking if NASA has attributed Earth’s recent warming to changes in how Earth moves through space around the Sun: a series of orbital motions known as Milankovitch cycles.
What cycles, you ask?
Milankovitch cycles include the shape of Earth’s orbit (its eccentricity), the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to Earth’s orbital plane (its obliquity), and the direction that Earth’s spin axis is pointed (its precession). These cycles affect the amount of sunlight and therefore, energy, that Earth absorbs from the Sun. They provide a strong framework for understanding long-term changes in Earth’s climate, including the beginning and end of Ice Ages throughout Earth’s history. (You can learn more about Milankovitch cycles and the roles they play in Earth’s climate here).
But Milankovitch cycles can’t explain all climate change that’s occurred over the past 2.5 million years or so. And more importantly, they cannot account for thecurrent period of rapid warming Earth has experienced since the pre-Industrial period (the period between 1850 and 1900), and particularly since the mid-20th Century. Scientists are confident Earth’s recent warming is primarily due to human activities — specifically, the direct input of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
So how do we know Milankovitch cycles aren’t to blame?
First, Milankovitch cycles operate on long time scales, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. In contrast, Earth’s current warming has taken place over time scales of decades to centuries. Over the last 150 years, Milankovitch cycles have not changed the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth very much. In fact, NASA satellite observations show that over the last 40 years, solar radiation has actually decreased somewhat.
Second, Milankovitch cycles are just one factor that may contribute to climate change, both past and present. Even for Ice Age cycles, changes in the extent of ice sheets and atmospheric carbon dioxide have played important roles in driving the degree of temperature fluctuations over the last several million years.
The extent of ice sheets, for example, affects how much of the Sun’s incoming energy is reflected back to space, and in turn, Earth’s temperature.
Then there’s carbon dioxide. During past glacial cycles, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere fluctuated from about 180 parts per million (ppm) to 280 ppm as part of Milankovitch cycle-driven changes to Earth’s climate. These fluctuations provided an important feedback to the total change in Earth’s climate that took place during those cycles.
Today, however, it’s the direct input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels that’s responsible for changing Earth’s atmospheric composition over the last century, rather than climate feedbacks from the ocean or land caused by Milankovitch cycles.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has increased 47 percent, from about 280 ppm to 412 ppm. In just the past 20 years alone, carbon dioxide is up 11 percent.
Scientists know with a high degree of certainty this carbon dioxide is primarily due to human activities because carbon produced by burning fossil fuels leaves a distinct “fingerprint” that instruments can measure. Over this same time period, Earth’s global average temperature has increased by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and is currently increasing at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) every decade. At that rate, Earth is expected to warm another half a degree Celsius (almost a degree Fahrenheit) as soon as 2030 and very likely by 2040.
This relatively rapid warming of our climate due to human activities is happening in addition to the very slow changes to climate caused by Milankovitch cycles. Climate models indicate any forcing of Earth’s climate due to Milankovitch cycles is overwhelmed when human activities cause the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere to exceed about 350 ppm…
*
[Milankovitch has been used by deniers to hide from reality.]
(Our solar system sits in the middle of a rather large void, a so-called bubble, with no other stars nearby. All orbit our galactic center. From one eon to the next, we would still be likely to be approached by other stars, and this would inevitably cause perturbation of planetary orbits in our own solar system. Just be ready for that, okay? It will effect Global Warming.)
The Solar System floats in the middle of a peculiarly empty region of space.
This region of low-density, high-temperature plasma, about 1,000 light-years across, is surrounded by a shell of cooler, denser neutral gas and dust. It’s called the Local Bubble, and precisely how and why it came to exist, with the Solar System floating in the middle, has been a challenge to explain. …
(Of course, maybe ‘this region of low-density, high-temperature plasma’ is what is causing all our ‘warming’ troubles.)
the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey for January, covering western Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and northern New Mexico, reported its broadest composite index rose to +24 in January, up from +22 in December and +22 in November, indicating ongoing moderately strong growth rate of that region’s manufacturing, even though “half of the region’s firms indicated that 10% or more of their workers were out at some point in January due to Covid… Expectations for future activity remained strong, despite firms reporting difficulties from COVID, labor shortages, and continued supply chain issues.”
In a Texas speech, the former president also urged supporters to stage protests if prosecutors in Atlanta and New York take action against him.
Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that if elected to a new term as president, he would consider pardoning those prosecuted for attacking the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year.
He also called on his supporters to mount large protests in Atlanta and New York if prosecutors in those cities, who are investigating him and his businesses, take action against him.
The promise to consider pardons is the furthest Mr. Trump has gone in expressing support for the Jan. 6 defendants.
“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said, addressing a crowd at a fairground in Conroe, Texas, outside Houston, that appeared to number in the tens of thousands. “We will treat them fairly,” he repeated. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” …
… The event in Conroe drew Trump supporters from across Texas and as far away as New Jersey and Washington State, some of whom had camped out at the fairground for several days. For much of Saturday, a festive atmosphere prevailed, with billowing flags and omnipresent T-shirts declaring “Trump 2024.”
As his speech stretched on past an hour, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric grew more pointed, and his attacks on the news media more belabored. “The press is the enemy of the people,” he said, prompting angry boos, adding: “The corrupt media will destroy our country.”
Shameful we and the world are there.
” EIJING (AP) — Human rights activists issued a call to action against the Beijing Olympics on Friday, imploring athletes and sponsors to speak out against what they call the “genocide games.”
Speaking at an online press conference organized by the rights group Human Rights Watch, activists representing Chinese dissidents and the minority Uyghur and Tibetan populations urged international attendants to voice their opposition to China’s hosting of the Games, which begin next week.
“The 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the genocide games,” said Teng Biao, a former human rights activist in China who is now a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
“The CCP’s purpose is to exactly turn the sports arena into a stage for political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all those atrocities,” he added, referring to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/china-winter-olympics-human-rights_n_61f3f400e4b01d3f299a6d13
Democrats feared the worst from redistricting. But then the twists kept coming
Boston Globe – Jan 28
(Personally, I’m still fearing the worst.)
Dem retirements spark worry over holding House majority
Axios – Jan 27
(21 Dems retiring from the House; 8 seeking other posts.)
One cannot own their future until one can first own their past.
sorry to see this.
Biden’s low poll numbers are due to the continuing campaign of lies by the Right press. All Lies all the time.
Dems could fight back through organization and creative responses to state anti-voter legislation. From my perspective they would also need to do more than give lip service to the Left.
I advocated last election for Left to come out and vote for Biden because a win by Trump would be a disaster the Left would not recover from for a thousand years. I am afraid I am going to have to do it…advocate…again, because a Republican win would be the same as a Trump win, even if Trump is not on the ballot. But it’s hard to do with a straight face given the failure of Biden proposals to even make sense regarding climate change, environmental pollution, destruction of habitat….more concrete, more roads, more bridges…..or even to make much sense regarding helping the poor. People are homeless, without jobs, without hope…so why is government aid being offered to the near-rich, or at least so far up in the “middle” class that they could be expected to pay for their own child care.
[that should draw some contempt down on my head. but a better targeted spending plan could have been cheaper enough to at least make Manchin blush when he says “too expensive” and actually do some good for the really poor. And a more honest climate plan would give the environmentalists a real reason to fight for Biden and the real Democrats, if any.]
Coberly,
Since there are a lot of ways to skin a cat, none of which involve cutting off ones own hands, then I will skip the details. Even FDR did not bat 1000. As you recall though, the most popular policies, then ones that lead to winning more elections, put a chicken in every pot, not just the poor and hungry. This is to say that if you take from Peter to give to Peter and Paul, then you don’t end up with Peter in your face.
Good luck and take care, buddy. I got work to do outside after the weekly snow storms stop, but life is good inside for now because my dermatologist hit me with two biopsies on 1/25/22 that need to heal now. It will still take a week or more to know the score on them.
I have a friend, an ardent antiTrumper until recently registered with the GOP who still receives a lot of email loaded with GOP lies, which he seems to read for whatever reason. He cannot figure why the Dems are not ‘doing something about it’.
Ron, good point. But it takes a smarter politician than me to thread the needle between Scylla and Charybdis. I think the chicken in every pot was promised by someone other than FDR, but I’ll need to look it up (I think it ended badly).
Meanwhile, my understanding is that the Big Banks loved FDR while he was saving the banks, then got mad at him when he started saving the people.
I don’t blame Biden for not being FDR, I blame the situation we have all got ourselves into where it is impossible for the advisers that the president listens to to think in any but political terms, and they don’t seem to be very good at that, unless it’s all a charade. [if it was really “just” political reality, I think offering a “compromise” that they either had to take or find a new argument (they would) would have (might have) left us in a better position to take the next step…but of course that means the “middle-class” (by my standards) would have to be at least tolerably sensible,,,which they have shown no signs of being. You will not this is not an argument that amounts to an answer. Just a bitter lament.
sorry about the dermatology. keep in touch.
Coberly,
Understood. Thanks. OTOH, Social Security is popular because it tastes like chicken.
Ron
SS is popular but nobody understands it. and you (I) can’t teach them. Yet they believe every stupid lie the non-partisan expert liars come up with.
since i’m here I will repeat the Truth about SS: workers pay for it themselves. it has to be that way. “welfare”, by any name, does not work in this country. the great big terrible looming many trillion dollar unfunded deficit canbe paid for by the workers themselves by raising their own payroll tax about a dollar per week per year while wages are expected to grow by about ten dollars per week per year. that needed increase in the tax will stop after a few years. the increase in wages should not stop. but if it did, you would need Social Security more than ever. all it is is a very very safe way to save enough of your own money, at interest, to give you at least enough to live on when you can no longer work. all this can be verified.
but it’s easier for people to believe it’s a Ponzi scheme. or it’s socialism, or its a huge burden on the young. or it’s the young paying for the old. or it’s uncle sam stuffing iou’s in one pocket and then borrowing them to stuff in another pocket. see these are all cartoons and so much easier to understand than “you need to save for your future. SS provides a safe way to do that.”
interesting times..
that jump was not due to fundamentals, but rather a short squeeze just as trading in the February gas contract was expiring…
In other news…
White House Warnings Over Russia Strain Ukraine-US Partnership
NY Times – Jan 28
Russian troops mass in Belarus, 140 miles from Kyiv
NY Times – Jan 29
From the border, it’s a fast 140 miles down a newly paved highway to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, but only a few troops stand guard.
NOVI YARYLOVYCHI BORDER CROSSING, Ukraine — On the other side of this border in northern Ukraine, not visible through the thick pine and birch forests that crowd the E-95 highway but noticeable to passing truckers, a force is gathering in Belarus more potent than anything seen in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, officials and military analysts say. …
Growth Is Surging in Biden’s Economy.
NYT – Jan 27
[After being seriously sold out by the scientific community in the early 2000’s when POTUS was from an oil giant family recent anomalies are giving it a comeback.]
https://www.priweb.org/blog-post/what-is-abrupt-climate-change
What is Abrupt Climate Change?
Dr. Thomas M. Cronin*, U. S. Geological Survey, Florence Bascom Geoscience Center, Reston, Virginia 20192
Dr. Ingrid H. H. Zabel, Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca, New York 14850
Published October 20, 2021
Understanding climates from the geological past is essential for understanding the context for today’s human-caused (anthropogenic) climate changes. One reason that records from the past are so important is that they can tell us about climate changes before human activities, and thus they can help us to distinguish between anthropogenic and natural climate variability. In addition, we can learn about the rates over which climate change can happen, from decades to millions of years, through natural geological archives such as ice cores from glaciers and ice sheets, tree rings, coral skeletons and mollusk shells, and ocean and lake sediments (among others).
The keys to understanding past climate changes first involve excellent chronology: age-dating of the archive records through a variety of methods. We need to know the age of climate records in order to draw conclusions about how rapidly or slowly the climate has changed in the past. Second, we need well-understood “proxies” linked to various climate conditions. Proxies are records from the past that preserve Earth’s climate history and substitute for direct measurements of climate variables like temperature and rainfall. Examples of proxies include geochemical, biological, and physical measurements in sediments, ice, trees, and corals. These proxies are used to reconstruct pre-historical patterns of air and sea temperatures, atmospheric chemistry and circulation, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, glacier, sea-ice, ice sheet and sea level history, rainfall patterns, and carbon cycling, among many other environmental factors…
*
[I first learned about this when in grade school, at a time before global warming and climate change had entered the pop science lexicon and were completely secluded in dry scientific theory which dated back to the late 19th century. At that time paleontology was the most fascinating thing on Earth to me.]
[This is almost funny.]
*
https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/
Ask NASA Climate | February 27, 2020, 00:00 PST
Why Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles Can’t Explain Earth’s Current Warming
By Alan Buis,
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
In the last few months, a number of questions have come in asking if NASA has attributed Earth’s recent warming to changes in how Earth moves through space around the Sun: a series of orbital motions known as Milankovitch cycles.
What cycles, you ask?
Milankovitch cycles include the shape of Earth’s orbit (its eccentricity), the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to Earth’s orbital plane (its obliquity), and the direction that Earth’s spin axis is pointed (its precession). These cycles affect the amount of sunlight and therefore, energy, that Earth absorbs from the Sun. They provide a strong framework for understanding long-term changes in Earth’s climate, including the beginning and end of Ice Ages throughout Earth’s history. (You can learn more about Milankovitch cycles and the roles they play in Earth’s climate here).
But Milankovitch cycles can’t explain all climate change that’s occurred over the past 2.5 million years or so. And more importantly, they cannot account for the current period of rapid warming Earth has experienced since the pre-Industrial period (the period between 1850 and 1900), and particularly since the mid-20th Century. Scientists are confident Earth’s recent warming is primarily due to human activities — specifically, the direct input of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
So how do we know Milankovitch cycles aren’t to blame?
First, Milankovitch cycles operate on long time scales, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. In contrast, Earth’s current warming has taken place over time scales of decades to centuries. Over the last 150 years, Milankovitch cycles have not changed the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth very much. In fact, NASA satellite observations show that over the last 40 years, solar radiation has actually decreased somewhat.
Second, Milankovitch cycles are just one factor that may contribute to climate change, both past and present. Even for Ice Age cycles, changes in the extent of ice sheets and atmospheric carbon dioxide have played important roles in driving the degree of temperature fluctuations over the last several million years.
The extent of ice sheets, for example, affects how much of the Sun’s incoming energy is reflected back to space, and in turn, Earth’s temperature.
Then there’s carbon dioxide. During past glacial cycles, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere fluctuated from about 180 parts per million (ppm) to 280 ppm as part of Milankovitch cycle-driven changes to Earth’s climate. These fluctuations provided an important feedback to the total change in Earth’s climate that took place during those cycles.
Today, however, it’s the direct input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels that’s responsible for changing Earth’s atmospheric composition over the last century, rather than climate feedbacks from the ocean or land caused by Milankovitch cycles.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has increased 47 percent, from about 280 ppm to 412 ppm. In just the past 20 years alone, carbon dioxide is up 11 percent.
Scientists know with a high degree of certainty this carbon dioxide is primarily due to human activities because carbon produced by burning fossil fuels leaves a distinct “fingerprint” that instruments can measure. Over this same time period, Earth’s global average temperature has increased by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and is currently increasing at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) every decade. At that rate, Earth is expected to warm another half a degree Celsius (almost a degree Fahrenheit) as soon as 2030 and very likely by 2040.
This relatively rapid warming of our climate due to human activities is happening in addition to the very slow changes to climate caused by Milankovitch cycles. Climate models indicate any forcing of Earth’s climate due to Milankovitch cycles is overwhelmed when human activities cause the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere to exceed about 350 ppm…
*
[Milankovitch has been used by deniers to hide from reality.]
Ron
silly, everyone knows that George Floyd died from exhaust fumes from the police car.
well, he could have.
(Our solar system sits in the middle of a rather large void, a so-called bubble, with no other stars nearby. All orbit our galactic center. From one eon to the next, we would still be likely to be approached by other stars, and this would inevitably cause perturbation of planetary orbits in our own solar system. Just be ready for that, okay? It will effect Global Warming.)
The Solar System Exists Inside a Giant, Mysterious Void
(Of course, maybe ‘this region of low-density, high-temperature plasma’ is what is causing all our ‘warming’ troubles.)
Dobbs
I suspect “the bubble” is just god’s way of quarantining us because we have an infectious brain disease.
Similarly, there is evidence the universe is expanding as everything else is rushing to get as far away from us as they can.
the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey for January, covering western Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and northern New Mexico, reported its broadest composite index rose to +24 in January, up from +22 in December and +22 in November, indicating ongoing moderately strong growth rate of that region’s manufacturing, even though “half of the region’s firms indicated that 10% or more of their workers were out at some point in January due to Covid… Expectations for future activity remained strong, despite firms reporting difficulties from COVID, labor shortages, and continued supply chain issues.”
(Is this anything? Sort of sounds like an announcement.)
Trump Says He Would Consider Pardons for Jan. 6 Defendants if Elected
NY Times – Jan 30