Alaska is a place where it's easy to feel rather small. I'm reminded of how puny human efforts are every time I drive to the post office on a clear day and when I come over a hill just south of our little community center, I see Denali - vast, huge, capping the giant Alaska Range, the great mountains dominating the northern skyline. And Denali is 150 miles north of us.
The earth and its functions are vast on a level that's hard for us to comprehend. When it comes to climate, the more you look into it, the more it becomes apparent that people are trying to predict something that is incomprehensibly monumental, not just on the physical scale but also on the temporal scale. We're talking about systems that exist on not only a planetary scale, not only a time scale of a few hundred years but even on a galactic scale, over hundreds of millions of years.
It's hard to wrap one's head around.
The Story of Climate Change is based on the concept of atmospheric ionization by high energy cosmic rays initiating aerosol and cloud formation. This results in a warming or cooling planet Earth. This cloud albedo effect (Svensmark) is the first leg upon which The Story of Climate Change rests (https://thestoryofclimatechange.substack.com). Galactic cosmic rays, mostly high energy protons, play the central role in this process by ionizing atmospheric gases as they descend into the lower troposphere. Radio observations of exo-galaxies indicate that cosmic rays are galactic plane polarized and are confined to spiral arm structures. This means that during our solar system’s transit through the Milky Way spiral arms the cosmic ray flux will be modulated. High flux levels during spiral arm crossings result in cloudy and cooling climates while lower flux during inter-arm space crossings results in less cloudy and warming climates. These we can call geologic Ice House and Hot House epochs.
That's a lot to take in, but the summary is this: Cosmic radiation varies as our solar system, in its routine orbit around the galactic center, passes in and out of the galactic plane. I'm not a cosmologist, but I'll take that at face value for the moment. So how does that affect the earth's climate?
As our solar system continues to orbit the galactic center, we appear to encounter the same spiral arms and inter-arm regions again and again. If this process influences the climate, the cyclic nature of paleoclimate should be revealed. Assuming that the nearly 13-billion-year-old Milky Way galaxy structure has been stable in aggregate, at least since our system’s inception – about 5 billion years, we will continue to repeat the same pattern and periodicity of climatological conditions into the far future. The spiral arms of the Milky Way appear to us to be rotating but at a slightly different speed than other stars in the disk like our sun. From the solar perspective we appear to be at rest while the galactic structure moves past us and slowly recedes in our wake. It has been estimated that our system orbits the galactic center every 225 million years or so. Our story indicates that three of our galactic orbits will result in one complete spiral structure transit – every 675 million years.
There are a lot of cosmological concepts involved here, many of which I have only a nodding acquaintance with; I was educated in biology, and physics and cosmology aren't my bag, although I'm innately curious and have done a lot of reading. It was also a subject my Dad found interesting and we spent many happy hours talking about cosmology and deep time. Relative motion, frames of reference, and even relativity all factor into this in one way or another. But the big factor appears to be the relative levels of cosmic radiation, which again is higher as the earth is passing through the galactic plane and lower as we move out - on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years.
So where are we now? Through most of the Pleistocene and Holocene (now) epochs, we've been moving through ice ages, where mile-thick glaciers have been going up and down like window blinds on the geologic time scale. But that may well be changing - in about three million years.
Over the next 3 million years, as the out-of-plane orbital motion of our planetary system reduces cosmic radiation, cloud cover will be reduced driving temperatures warmer. This Pleistocene Ice Age will finally dissipate, leaving behind these glacial-interglacial oscillations – for now. What goes up must come down. In about 15 million years we will reach maximum out-of-plane position with the accompanying warmest temperatures. Our star system once again proceeds back into the galactic plane cooling the planet. 30 million years from now, while crossing deeper into the Sagittarius spiral arm, we will once again be fully in-plane receiving the highest cosmic ray flux, resulting in more ionization, and maximum propensity for cooling cloudiness and glaciers returning. This will mark the entry into the next Ice Age. Since our climate is cyclic, the past climates will be repeated – with a replay of the Marinoan Ice Age of 640 million years ago.
So what does all this have to do with our current controversy over "climate change?"
See Related: A Warming Climate May Make Canada the World's Breadbasket
2023 Was a Warm Year - Here's Why (Hint: It Wasn't Just Us)
As I've been writing on this issue again and again, the earth's climate is almost impossibly vast, complex, and chaotic. There are billions of influencing factors, from geology (especially vulcanism), solar output, and changes in ocean currents (for example, the closing of the ancient Tethys Ocean had a big effect on global climate), and now we see that there may well even be cosmological influences.
Meanwhile, your local TV weatherman has trouble predicting the weekend's weather on Thursday evening.
This climate, this vast, chaotic system with cycles measured in hundreds of years to hundreds of millions of years, is what climate scolds cite when they want us to surrender our modern lifestyle, surrender cheap and reliable energy, surrender cheap and abundant foodstuffs, and to surrender our modern technological lifestyle - to return us, in effect, to a much earlier time, when life was much less comfortable - and shorter. And the more you look at all the data, the more it becomes apparent that their claims are "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Here's the complete picture - it's a lot to get through.
The cycles of geology, solar activity, and now we see even the progress of our solar system through the Milky Way galaxy, all are unbelievably huge influences over vast stretches of deep time. We are, as becomes more apparent the more we look into it, a small part of it.
