The blog “Global Warming 101” is a blog series that covers:
• A primer on Global Warming and Climate Change
• Difference between climate and weather
• How to counter-attack a science denier over global warming
• Greenhouse Effect
• Ice Age and Normal Global Warming
• Solar System
Understanding global warming and climate change is so gosh darn important – especially since there are those science-deniers among us who wish to deny fact – I feel obliged to take them on in a blog dubbed Global Warming 101. Otherwise, we are all at the mercy of those who wish to marginalize science, the NASA image below with Earth’s constant companion Moon. It is the only Earth we have.
Roger Revelle was born in Seattle, Washington in 1909. He received his undergraduate geology training at Pomona and his doctorate in oceanography at Berkeley. Revelle’s early oceanography research was conducted at Scripps in San Diego. In 1957 Revelle along with physicist Hans Suess published a paper documenting that the Earth’s oceans were absorbing less atmospheric carbon dioxide CO2than predicted, which in turn would lead to a greenhouse effectand subsequent global warming; Revelle and Suess attributing the increase in the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide CO2to the fossil fuel burning that commenced in the 19thCentury – mostly coal – and picked up steam, joke intended, during the 20thCentury. It was perhaps the first time the phrase “global warming” was used; the press picked up on the concern, someone calling it climate change, which also happened to be the first time that phrase was used in reference to a shift in the Earth’s climate.
Normal global warming after an ice age is natural: the Earth has over the last several billion years entered into five major ice ages where it gets a tad nippy, ice sheets advance from the polar regions towards the equator. The advancing ice sheets eventually come to a halt, hang out for a bit, then retreat back towards the poles as the Earth warms up into what is termed an interglacial period, only to repeat the cycle…eventually. The first Earth ice age is believed to have occurred 2.4 billion years ago, and the last Ice Age began about 1.8 million years ago, lasted until 20,000 BC when a warming trend brought us to 10,000 BC, and a relatively stable average global temperature of around 57°F.
What triggers an ice age? This is cool. As the Earth makes its yearly oblong trip around the Sun, it is tilted on its axis and it is spinning one revolution daily on that tilted axis – oblong orbit + tilt + spin.
• Oblong orbit- That annual voyage around the Sun is not the same year-in year-out, but ever so slightly, year-to-year, the course varies with a 100,000-year periodicity only to repeat the pattern.
• Axis tilt of 23.5° also has a periodicity of 41,000 years, tilting to and fro about the axis.
• Spin, well, that’s just our 24-hour day.
When you add the two periodicities together: 100,000 year solar cycle, 41,000 year axis tilt and sprinkle in a dash of daily spin, Earth ends up with a slight wobble, a wobble that also has a periodicity of around 26,000 years.
When you combine those three periodicities – 100,000-year solar orbit, 41,000-year axis tilt, 26,000-year wobble – together they vary how much of the Sun’s heat Earth receives, or doesn’t receive.
…stay tuned…to be continued…
John Bershof, MD
John Bershof, MD is a plastic surgeon who has been in private practice for over 25 years. He is the author of numerous medical articles as well as the first textbook of medicine for mobile phones, entitled skynetMD 2005-2015. An essay entitled Gin & Tonics, Clerics, and Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?, which was extracted from one of his future as yet published books was featured in The Antioch Review.
While working on the medical textbook skynetMD for mobile phones, Dr. Bershof, perhaps not too surprisingly became more interested in the backstories of medical history, like who was Lou Gehrig, what is Lou Gehrig's disease, what was his lifetime batting average for the New York Yankees—.340, nineteenth overall—and who invented baseball anyway. Questions such as these piqued Bershof's interest. Having read At Home 2010 by Bill Bryson, his engrossing narrative journeys room-by-room through his Victorian English countryside home, a former rectory, where each room is a chapter about domesticity, about home. It occurred to Dr. Bershof that in similar vein he could take the reader disease-by-disease as jumping off points into human history, science, medicine—his canvas blank, no subject not within reach—and learn a little medicine along the journey.
The ability of a book that is heavily fortified with science and history to connect with a general readership can be challenging; Dr. Bershof through storytelling, humor, jumping off points and personal anecdotes, accomplishes it, written in a language fleeced of the jargon that normally accompanies such narratives. The first two books, The First History of Man published in 2020 and The Second History of Man published in 2021 are available in print, ebook and audio. The Third History of Man is in final stages of editing to be published in 2022, with more volumes to come after that.