Timothy Birdnow

Uh, there has been no net increase in planetary ice loss despite what these clowns are claiming.

So what was the Earth doing during non-ice age times, lie the Silurian or the Jurassic or early Cretaceous?

The claim here is melting ice from the poles is causing the Earth's rotation to slow, even though the overall mass of the Earth's hydrological system remains unchanged.

From the so-called article:

New research shows that rising sea levels caused by melting ice sheets are redistributing mass across the planet, reducing how fast Earth spins and gradually lengthening the day. Researchers found that days are currently increasing by about 1.33 milliseconds per century due to climate-related factors, a pace that stands out sharply in the planet’s recent geological history.

I can tell you that we don't know for sure about the Silurian, but during the Jurassic it was [lin=https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=1eb495325707f905fca518754a8d46b5824cc753357e93cacf2936d4c9b1da65JmltdHM9MTc3NDA1MTIwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=1c2f0888-4c6b-6ebb-2cce-1e464d3e6fbc&psq=how+long+ws+the+day+during+the+jurassic+compared+to+now&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuY25uLmNvbS8yMDIwLzAzLzEzL3dvcmxkL2Vhcmx5LWVhcnRoLXNob3J0ZXItZGF5LXNjbi8]shorter than it is now (23.5 hours) and during the Cretaceous it was about the same. Both periods were noted for there being NO icecaps anywhere, no glaciers. The late Cretaceous was also ice free. BTW a wobble in the Earth's axial tilt was likely responsible for the cold snap in the early Cretaceous and the later warming period and NOT atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Here's more on the axial tilt business:

When audiences watched The Day After Tomorrow, they saw a dramatic Hollywood depiction of sudden climate chaos. The film greatly compresses the timeline, but the underlying idea that Earth’s climate can change abruptly is supported by scientific evidence. During the last Ice Age, for instance, temperatures in Greenland rose by as much as 16°C (about 29°F) within just a few decades. At the same time, enormous surges of icebergs repeatedly disrupted the North Atlantic Ocean. Scientists refer to these episodes as Dansgaard–Oeschger and Heinrich events. These rapid changes, known as millennial-scale climate events, show that the climate system can reorganize much faster than would be expected from slow orbital cycles alone.

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So now we are enjoying a fairly rapid warming period and suddenly it's all Man's fault and we are all going to die in the Inferno.

The article continues:

Scientists have often connected these dramatic swings to the behavior of massive ice sheets. That link has created an important question. If large ice sheets played a central role, how could similar millennial-scale climate variability occur during warm greenhouse periods of Earth’s history when such ice sheets did not exist? Researchers have struggled with this puzzle for many years.

A new study now offers an explanation. An international team led by Professor Chengshan Wang at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing) has found evidence that Earth’s precession cycles, which describe the slow wobble of the planet’s rotational axis, can generate abrupt millennial-scale climate fluctuations even when the planet is largely ice-free.

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Yet here we are being treated to the old, outdated idea that ice sheets change the precession of the Earth's axial tilt (and slows the planet's motion) because of a very modest planetary warming. Ri-ight.

While the precession cycles are 25,000 years there are sub cycles that happen every four to five thousand years. Five thousand years ago Earth was in a warm period - the Holocene Climate Optimum. Temps were 4.9*C warmer than today on average. And 13,000 years ago we enjoyed the Younger-Dryas, with temperatures plummeting.

Climate changes and sometimes quite rapidly. Younger dryas happened within decades, for instance.

The more we learn the less likely it is that carbon dioxide is going to burn us up.

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