RicS
Junior Member
Member # 700
Rate Member posted March 26, 2006 03:41 AM
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G'day,
I've never posted here so if my post is out of line, please let me know.
15 Degrees warmer is the earth's natural state? Actually, the earth for the last 50 million years or so has generally been much colder than now and only and a couple of very rare occasions hotter. An "ice age" (glaciation) is inevitable given the cycles the earth has been in for 120,000 years or so and how the natural state in this ice age is to be a great deal colder in the Northern Hemisphere than the last 11,000 odd years.
considering that the current ice age as lasted for 2.1 of that 50 million and that there have been 12 eruptions of the major super valcanos during that time, each of which has led to a 600 thousand year (give or take) ice age, its not surprising that this short period should have an colder average tempature. what matters is that after each eruption the earth warms back up over the same time period.
if you want to calculate short term (in earth time) tempatures, try figuring out what happen the last time two major super valcanos erupted within a relative short time period. it cause the thermal runaway to be exceeded, leading to the freezing of the pacific ocean at the equator. it took 100 million year for the valcanos to pump out enough green house gases to over come the albeto (reflection of heat and other light energy) of the ice.
just so everyone knows, valcanos pump out two gasses, co2 and sulpher dioxide. co2 reacts with water to form a type of ferterlizing rain. sulpher dioxide reacts with water at that altitude to creat a ice particial that take decades for the majority of it to fall out. the clouds of sulpher dioxide ice can reflect the majority of the suns energy cause the world to fall into a deep ice age. if the tempature of the earth does not warm up enough before the next eruption, the second one can cause sufficent ice formation to develope to reflect enough energy that the world's tempature would continue to decrease, causing more ice. basically the reverse of what is happening now.
