Nadine, as you say, water is the biggie controlling the temperatures. Water in the form of oceans, which are dark and absorb sunlight like crazy, snow, which is white and reflects sunlight like crazy, clouds, which are white and reflect sunlight like crazy, deserts, which are dry and light and reflect sunlight quite well as well as getting hot and re-radiating it, leaves, which are dark and wet and absorb sunlight efficiently.
Clouds are water below the dew point. What happens to clouds is what controls the climate.
Water evaporates from plants, ground, oceans etc. It goes up, floats around to a cooler place, reaches the dew point and falls out as rain or snow.
As earth cools, the balances of snow cover, cloud cover, evaporation rate and other water cycles change and rebalance in a way too complex for me to figure out. We can see though, that cooler means more snow cover, more cloud cover, more rain and snow, more sun reflection because that's what happens each winter.
An ice-age is just an extension of winter. A warming period is the equivalent of a permanent summer.
The doomsters worry about non-linear runaway heating. But that can't happen as shown because it has never happened, despite the most extreme atmospheric changes over a billion years. Huge changes have taken place including huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere in the early eons and there was never a runaway heating to make a cooked planet.
Doomsters love non-linear and trigger effects because they can imagine all kinds of dramatic stuff such as human populations reaching plague proportions. In fact, contrary to the Malthusian Club of Rome doomsters, [reincarnated as CO2 doomsters] human populations are going to drop dramatically and due to contraception, the whole character of being human is going to change. No longer does sex-drive cause people. Women have to choose to have babies. That's a non-linear effect of major proportions.
They are universally choosing to have none, one or very few. People are dying out.
Mqurice |
