Criticism of the version about the human impact on global warming
The idea of global warming from greenhouse gases and the impact on this process of human activity is currently recognized as official – it is the idea that the heads of most states adhere to. But this theory also has opponents, given that the total emissions of CO2 produced by humanity, according to experts, are about 5-10 times lower than the amount of carbon dioxide that is released from the surface of the world’s oceans.
It does not add credibility to the idea of anthropogenic influence on the climate and the revealed information about the manipulation of data (the Climatgate scandal of 2009), used in the preparation of the famous graph (“hockey stick”) by American Professor Michael Mann, clearly showing that it is getting warmer, however.
Skeptical experts on climate change believe that the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement are more instruments of global policy, rather than a real way to combat global warming. Moreover, in recent decades, climatologists in many places have observed just the opposite phenomena: the average temperature of the Earth has stopped growing since the 90s, and the area of the ice cover at the poles is increasing. So maybe global warming is a myth?
Version 2: Everything goes according to plan
Those who have seen the TV series “Game of Thrones”, probably remember the Guardian of the North, Eddard Stark, constantly repeating the warning: “Winter is near.” Perhaps the noble Lord of Winterfell was right: winter is indeed near. And there is a possibility that it will not be familiar to us, but exactly what it was in Westeros-long.
Another version of the development of climate events, an alternative to the official “warming”: the planet is currently experiencing not global warming from greenhouse gases, which is so much talked about recently, but, on the contrary, cooling: another small ice age, one of those that occur on Earth regularly in the interglacial periods (intervals between large ice ages, which also happened more than once in the history of the planet).
And yet it turns!
As you know, the Earth is a celestial body. It is not flat and does not rest on the backs of elephants perched on a turtle. Our planet is gravitationally bound to other astronomical objects and makes a complex movement relative to the center of the Solar system. And it is this celestial mechanics and the gravitational connection with other participants in the movement that is one of the main reasons for the global change in heat and cold on Earth.
We are well aware of the simplest examples of “warm – cold” fluctuations caused by the movement of the planet, so we take a raincoat with us even on a hot summer day if we plan to return home after sunset. In the summer we plant flowers and sunbathe, and in the winter we wear fur coats and go sledding.
These cycles are short: a day takes only 24 hours, and all four seasons-365 days. Fluctuations in the amount of solar radiation and light reaching the Earth over long periods of time (thousands and millions of years) and explaining natural climate changes are called Milankovitch cycles.
A star named the Sun
The second reason for climate change is a change in the activity of the Sun. The increase in solar activity (the appearance of a large number of sunspots) and its decrease are also cyclical. The main cycles are called: Schwabe (11 years), Heila (22 years), the two-century cycle of Suess, and others.
The two-century cycle of fluctuations in solar activity is that with a periodicity of about two hundred years, there is a significant decrease in the activity of the Sun, lasting several decades and called the global minimum. Several such minima are established – Maunder minimum, Dalton minimum, Sperer minimum, etc.
The Sun showed the least activity during the Maunder minimum – the number of spots on the sun decreased in comparison with the usual 1000 times. The Maunder Minimum coincides with the Little Ice Age in the XIV-XIX centuries.
Just now (since 2004), another such period of decreasing solar activity has begun, which, as scientists predict, will be similar to the Maunder minimum of 1645-1715. The existence of the Little Ice Age is evidenced by historical evidence that the climate in Europe was far from warm: the Thames in Britain and the canals in Holland froze, and snow lay in Italy.
According to climate scientists who adhere to the theory of alternating ice ages, the current warming of the climate is nothing more than the threshold of the next little ice age. A similar warming (then the average temperature of the Earth was even higher than now) was observed before the Maunder minimum, during the Medieval climatic optimum of 950-1250, which just preceded the little ice age of the XIV-XIX centuries.
Perhaps, as much as we would like to feel like something more significant than a grain of sand in the eye of God, climate change on Earth has nothing to do with human activity. And in this song of ice and fire, there is no way we can build our weak voice, no matter how much we monitor our carbon footprint, make dresses out of bananas, and declare our eco-sexual orientation.