Not our fault.......................
earth is moving around a sun that fluctuates in intensity and heat... the sun moves around a universe that i am sure has differences in temperatures, and we blame the smallest insignificant element of all—man.
That’s nice and all, but the great scientist Sandy Cortez has assured us that astronomical forces can be overcome with taxes and politics.
Unpossible. Before global warming the earth’s temperature was a constant 72F, then came White Supremecist Republicans driving SUVs.
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
I have often wondered if passing through a comet’s tails affects weather. It always seems unseasonably cold and/or rainy during Meteor showers.
There are still other factors.
The array of land is one. Most of the world’s continental landmass is in the Northern Hemisphere. When it, due to those forces described here, points away from the Sun, snow can accumulate quickly into ice sheets that grow and do not melt completely over each weak Summer period until you have continent-wide glaciers. This doesn’t happen as much in the Southern Hemisphere, as it has far more oceanic coverage and there’s just no place for the ice to accumulate except Antarctica and a small bit in Tasmania and the Southern Andes.
Another issue is the joining together of the North and South American continents, and the closing of the Tethys Sea, which reduced the global warm ocean currents, and produced a cold water current at approximately 60 degrees latitude South, which insulated Antarctica into its current ice box climate that hasn’t varied much in 25 million years, as it was sent by plate tectonics to the (bottom of the globe J/K) Southernmost part of the globe.
The Earth’s orbit, and axis tilt, and positions of the summer solstice, etc, have been the same for at least 85M years, if not more. The positions of the continents, which effect ocean currents, have been generally the same for 85M years, and nearly identical to today’s for 34M years. The only thing that has changed is the joining of No America and So America about 6M years ago, if I’m remembering my geology from 55 years ago correctly.
So haw do astronomical forces being on ice ages at periodic intervals, when that is not seen in the record before the current glacial period?
Wasted reading through three paragraphs to learn “...but the details of the mechanism have not been understood.”
The “greatest minds in science” really don’t have any idea.
The orbital perturbation cycle which causes ice ages is probably the simplest of the Milankovitch cycles.
This is hardly breaking news due to climate models. Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian scientist calculated this more than a century ago. He did it with paper and pencil while held as a POW in a prison camp. that’s why these time periods are called “Milankovitch Cycles”.
I think it is the SUV’s in orbit in the asteroid belt that gets us out of the grip of an ice age. Every so often a stream of them drive by the earth creating global warming and melting the mile of ice over places like North America