Guest post by David Archibald
Baby boomers like me have enjoyed the most benign period in human history. The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace, we had cheap energy from inherent over-supply of oil, grain supply increased faster than population growth and the climate warmed due to the highest solar activity for 8,000 years. All those trends are now reversing. But it will get much worse than that. The next glaciation will wipe out many countries and nothing will stop that from happening. For example, the UK will end up looking like Lapland. As an indication of just how vicious it is going to get, consider that there are rocks on the beaches of Scotland that got blown over on ice from Norway across a frozen North Sea. As scientists, our task is to predict the onset of the next glaciation.
Onset of interglacials is driven by insolation at 65°N. That is where the landmass is that is either snow-covered all year round or not. It seems that insolation above 510 watts/sq metre will end a glacial period. For an interglacial period to end, the oceans have to lose heat content so that snows will linger through the summer and increase the Earth’s albedo. Thanks to the disposition of the continents, our current ice age might last tens of millions of years yet. From the Milankovitch data, this graph shows insolation at 65°N from 50,000 BC to 50,000 AD:
The green box has the Holocene ending at 3,000 AD – an arbitary choice. Insolation is already low enough to trigger glacial onset. For the last 8,000 years, the Earth has been cooling at 0.25°C per thousand years, so the oceans are losing heat. We just have to get to that trigger point at which snows linger through the northern summer. Solar Cycle 25 might be enough to set it off. By the end of this decade, we will be paying more attention to the Rutgers Global Snow Lab data.
From the source at: http://most-likely.blogspot.com/2012/03/milankovitch-cycles-and-glaciations.html
Model input is obliquity and precession and model output is the inverted δ¹⁸O record, with zero mean during the Pleistocene, from Lisiecki and Raymo 2004 and Huybers 2007. Lisiecki and Raymo use orbital tuning to constrain the age of the benthic records, while Huybers explicitly avoids this, consequently the two datasets are occasionally completely out of phase, but generally in good agreement, especially in the late Pleistocene.
As fitness function we take the product of the sum of squared errors (SSE) between the model and the two reference records from 2580 thousand years before present, with 1000 year timesteps.
For the longer term perspective, this is a combined crop (to make a continuous timeline) of the two fulls panel from the model prediction of the Milankovitch data.
The time period represented is from approximately 450,000 BC to 330,000 AD. The scale on the vertical axis is change in O18 content. There is a very good hind-cast match between the model and past temperature change as shown by the work of Lisiecki et al 2005 and Huybers 2007. The next glaciation is fully developed between 55,000 and 60,000 AD, with the next interglacial 20,000 years after that.
References
Huybers, P., 2007, Glacial variability over the last 2Ma: an extended depth-derived age model, continuous obliquity pacing, and the Pleistocene progression, Quaternary Science Reviews 26, 37-55.
Lisiecki, L. E., and M. E. Raymo, 2005, A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic d18O records Paleoceanography, 20, PA1003, doi:10.1029/2004PA001071.
Source Data: Download the consolidated data, including orbital parameters, insolation calculations, reference data and model output: Milankovitch.xlsx
David and Leif,
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/150kyeareventsignatureinthetropicaloceans.png
I cleaned that up a bit so now it should be a fairly good reconstruction of past tropical ocean sea surface temperature. Comparing climate to the Antarctic Ice cores is misleading at best. The CO2 temperature correlation in the ice cores is more likely related to Antarctic sea ice extent than global climate. The Milankovic Theory should have been a global climate theory not a theory of the ice ages, right church, wrong pew so to speak.
I think the issue isn’t when the next Ice Age will begin, as the point most people are missing is that despite all the hype about Anthropological Global Warming, we are indeed in an Ice Age right now. Humans have thrived because we have been blessed over the past 10,000 years to have retreating glaciers, though some still stubbornly cling to existence at the far reaches of our world. The real question is when will the ice resume it’s forward advance and start to wipe out all the apparent progress civilization has made over the years of warmer temperatures. There will come a time when we our descendants will laugh with sad irony that we feared a warming planet.
Winter is coming!! But we have to wait until April. 😉
Milankovitch cycles in themselves pose little threat to the current climate, but of course they had nothing to do with the LIttle Ice Age–that was the Maunder Minimum–which if repeated would freeze much of Eurasia and North America. Obviously it wasn’t severe enough to prevent recuperation with current insolation. A longer minimum might do it sometime, and there’s not much we could do to reverse it–not enough carbon in the ground. Anyway, the ice cores show no secular (or millennial) CO2/T forcing–burning carbon won’t help. Soot? That only helps when it stops snowing.
George Smith: I guess I don’t understand your question–I don’t know what modeling you’re talking about. Newton’s gravitational modeling of the solar system was pretty good, I thought.
–AGF
O H Dahlsveen says:
September 16, 2012 at 10:16 am
“…Come to think of it; why do sunrays still shine through orifices in stonewalls etc. (Stonehenge is one example – and there are many others) the same way as they did when they were first built in ancient times if the axial tilt of the Earth fluctuates back and forth between 22 and 24.5 degrees every 41000 years – and the globe also does a “Gyroscopic wobble” or a complete circle around it’s axis every 23000 years – which should mean that since it is, presently, mid-summer in the Northern Hemisphere in June when that hemisphere tilts towards the Sun – 11500 years (half a wobble) ago it would have been mid winter in June. – Any evidence for that in ice cores etc.?”
I believe your are referring to “precession of the equinoxes”. The term summer and winter are fixed to the time of the year when the axis is tilting towards (summer) or away (winter) from the Sun. Northern hemisphere summer solstice always happens in June and NH winter solstice always happens in December (according to our current calendar). However, precession changes the place in the orbit that these solstices occur. Currently NH winter solstice is at perihelion, when Earth is closest to the Sun. 11,500 years ago NH summer solstice was at perihelion. As an aside, obliquity at that time was about maximum (24.5 degrees) so is it any wonder why the NH ice sheets started melting as Earth approached that condition?
To kadaka:
According to the blog, Watts Up is “…the world’s most viewed climate website.” I’m presuming Watts is the sole owner if the site. All that advertising you see, he gets paid for. My guess, and this is a pure guess, is he earns 7 figures. Isn’t that what “the most viewed climate website” would pull in?
That is paid. Watts doesn’t publish his salary. Rush Limbaugh does. Rush earns $50 million per year being a paid propagandist. The truth is free by the way. “Spin” or “propaganda” needs to be paid for.
For Anthony Watts, the more “no global warming” sentiment he stirs up, the more he gets paid in advertising. That’s the simple reality of our world. I’m not being critical. I’m just saying be knowledgeable and understand that.
As for me, I am an unpaid observer. And I look at the data you posted, that data Anthony posts, the information the government agencies post and they don’t post theirs “for profit” or for “advertising dollars,” they simply post the numbers they see, and everybody’s numbers say the same thing: we are in a warm period that does fluctuate and is at present getting warmer.
I hear the argument “it’s natural.” I hear the argument “man’s effects are zero to inconsequential.” I’m just asking “Are they?”
And I’m asking you skeptics, do you ever listen to the other side? Are you observers or blind little sheep?
I am rooting for cooling. I was ecstatic when the Bering Sea set a record Ice Extent this last spring. I was happy the Arctic as a whole approached what could be called “normal” or “average” Ice Extent last spring. I’m happy Antarctica is very near it’s record now and am hoping it manages a new one.
BUT.. we’ve just set a record low summer Minimum Ice Extent in the Northern Hemisphere by blowing out the old record. And that’s by any organization’s standards of measurement.
How come you skeptics don’t talk about that and say “If we’re cooling, why did we just set a record low Arctic Ice Extent?” “If we’re cooling or stable, why are temperatures still climbing?” “If temperatures are climbing, can we genuinely say they are static or cooling?”
And I hear the argument “Cooling is just around the corner.” Is it? We’ll find out won’t we.
I do agree with the post “it’s nice to be warm.” It is. It just MAY NOT
To finish my thought.. It just may not be nice to deal with the consequences of warmth. Of which we don’t fully understand. And conversely if cooling begins, we’re not completely understanding of those consequences. But there’s time to explore that if it occurs.
I’m such an unprofessional at this I sent my last message before I completed it. I didn’t hit Post Comment so I have no idea how I did it.
I’m thankful for the forum and thankful for the debate. I am skeptical however that minds will be influenced, but it’s fun to try.
johnpetroff,
Anthony has mentioned that he earns a few hundred dolars a month from ads. That’s not much money for all the work he puts in. Most of the revenue goes to WordPress, which selects and posts the ads.
You write: “I’m asking you skeptics, do you ever listen to the other side? Are you observers or blind little sheep?” That is psychological projection. You sound as silly there as you do assuming that WUWT makes millions of dollars. Your connection with the real world is very tenuous.
The real problem is that the alarmist crowd refuses to listen to scientific skeptics. Alarmist minds are already made up, and closed tight.
For example: I have asked for years for someone to post verifiable, testable, measurable scientific evidence of AGW. But no one has ever posted any measurable evidence. The conclusion is that there is no such evidence for AGW [or for the even more preposterous CAGW].
That does not mean AGW does not exist. But without evidence, AGW is only a conjecture. It is not a hypothesis, and it is certainly not a theory. It is an opinion based on radiative physics — which is not the same thing as AGW.
The AGW conjecture is based primarily on rising CO2. But global warming has been stalled for fifteen years, so your claim that the planet is still warming is false. Temperatures are not “still climbing”. And your fright over Arctic ice is based on the misconception that what is being observed now has never happened before. But it has, and during times when CO2 was much lower.
I suggest you re-think your entire comment. It is illogical, and your supposed ‘facts’ are plain wrong. All scientific skeptics are saying is: “Show me”. But the alarmist crowd has no evidence of AGW. Doesn’t that make you wonder if you’re swallowing the AGW claim hook, line and sinker?
Demand evidence! Because without scientific evidence, all you’ve got is opinion. Belief. That is not convincing enough. We need empirical, testable, verifiable, measurement-based evidence confirming AGW. But there is none.
Leif objected to my saying that neither he nor Axelrod ‘knows’ when the next ice age will be and I stand by that, neither of you do *know*, you are making educated guesses which don’t meet the bar of fact at this point.
johnpetroff:
You say your two posts at September 18, 2012 at 10:40 am and September 18, 2012 at 10:25 am should be considered together. You conclude the latter saying
I don’t believe you!
Your provided a sequence of posts which made a series of blatantly untrue assertions about warming. As each of your falsehoods was refuted you retreated back from “acceleration” to “slower warming” to “How much warming?” to nothing.
Then you started attempting to defame our host, Anthony Watts.
Importantly, your posts have presented nothing except lies and smears which do not pertain to the subject of this thread in any way.
Clearly, you are a troll attempting to disrupt this thread by posting lies and defamations: you have done nothing else
Discuss the subject of the thread or go away.
Richard
johnpetroff:
“The truth is free by the way. “Spin” or “propaganda” needs to be paid for.”
And where, pray tell, does one find this “free truth”? CBS, NBC, PBS, newspapers, Church (pick your religion), The Web, politicians, the government? What a ridiculous statement! That “truth” was plucked from your anal orifice. No information is free, other than possibly word of mouth, and as they say, you get what you pay for, or sometimes what someone else has payed for. Very little in this world does not have a cost attached in one way or another. That cost may be acting upon bad information.
DavidG says:
September 18, 2012 at 11:00 am
“Leif objected to my saying that neither he nor Axelrod ‘knows’ when the next ice age will be and I stand by that, neither of you do *know*, you are making educated guesses which don’t meet the bar of fact at this point.”
You are 100% correct. Leif is very knowledgeable in his field and mostly logical though tends to accept theory as fact and state probables as fact. In both cases they may be well substantiated by data, but are not fact. I have argued this with him on occasion. Such discussions with him can take on marathon proportions, though tend to be interesting. Sorry but I don’t know Axelrod.
We, as skeptics, need to stay away from being overly accepting of theories as fact,or fall into the same box as the warmist crowd. I continue to believe that true scientists think out of the box even when consensus is against them.
johnpetroff says:
September 18, 2012 at 10:40 am
I’m thankful for the forum and thankful for the debate. I am skeptical however that minds will be influenced, but it’s fun to try.
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Patience now, John is a child. He thinks he has taught us something. He confesses to ignorance, yet attempts to teach us, thinking we are even more ignorant than he.
John, you have been taught by morons, the most intelligent of which is dumber than the dumbest posters on this thread. Do you think we don’t know Arctic ice is shrinking? WUWT has a site monitoriing it. You probably think polar bears are in trouble. All 50,000 of them. The bears of North America are the safest big predators on the planet, including Ursus maritimus. You wanna know a species that’s in trouble? The Siberian tiger is one, maybe a thousand of them left. Panda’s are in short supply too. Everywhere people go, the predators disappear. Polar bears don’t have much competition with humans.
Humans now, their population continues to grow; not danger there. Especially not from Global Warming. Maybe you think rising sea level is a problem (since you obviously believe every scary fairy tale you’ve been told). How fast do you think it is rising? A foot a year? Three feet per year? An inch a year? How fast? How dangerous is it. Try and inch in ten years–that’s the truth. Do you think that’s dangerous? The quacks you trust in would have you believe it is, and that it’s growing and bound to grow more (which it isn’t).
These Milankovitch cycles discussed here involve variation in insolation (at the top of the atmosphere) of 100W/m^2. Do you have any idea how much energy is attributed to GHG’s? About 1.6W/m. Do you know what an order of magnitude is? Do you understand that taking clouds into account, M cycles cause radiation variability of an order and a half of magnitude more than GHG’s? That is to say, it takes about 30 times as much energy to melt the ice as is attributed to green house warming. And you want us to share in your scary Global Warming superstition!
If you want to learn a little about climate history as learned from ice cores, go here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg
You’ll see that we are currently in the longest interstadial of the last 400,000 years, and we could very well be in for a new ice age.
Now you seem to think that warming is bad, and cooling is good. Would you tell us why you think so? Have you ever heard of the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period? Which do you think brought us the most plagues? Or famine? Or drought? What makes you think that current Arctic melting is something new? How do you think medieval explorers mapped out the Arctic coast of Siberia? How long do you think satellites have been monitoring the ice? How do you think polar bears survived the MWP? How well do you think they fared during the LIA? Through what thickness of ice do you think a seal can maintain a breathing hole? Do you think polar bears can live on thick ice?
So I hope you get an inkling of an idea how you have been duped by the worst excuse for science that the modern world has seen. It makes the American Association of Petroleum Geologists look enlightened by comparison, even when they officially pooh-poohed Continental Drift for decades. You have suckered for the most outrageous propaganda that was ever spouted in the name of science. You need to forget everything you have learned and start over again. You need to learn how to think critically. That’s why we are gathered here at WUWT. –AGF
D Boehm.. does Anthony Watts have a separate full time job that also allows him to blog full-time here? Because i need a job like that. If no, then he makes a lot more than a couple of hundred dollars a month. You’re saying he’s earning a minimal income, I’m guessing he’s making a very good income. That’s a very good guess. One way or another he’s earning a living from skepticism.
Everyone doing studies on global temperatures are saying temperatures are rising… including the “skeptic” websites, and you say “no one has posted measurable evidence?” I posted a whole page full of graphs and websites, both main stream science and skeptics. Were you unable to click on any of them? Any of them will have mountains of data.
Speaking of open minds.. I did come here. I looked at data representing “cooling” and “stability”. The data still showed increasing temperatures but were misread by “skeptics.” I pointed that out for several of you. And even after my pointing it out you’re still misreading it and arguing about it. How should that be perceived by an impartial observer? As intelligent or sane?
Speaking of open mindedness, are your minds so open that you can’t review ANY scientific evidence for warming? Is that how open my mind should be in regards to skeptics?
Then you resort to hate speech and insults. Do you honestly have no comprehension of why the scientific community doesn’t take you seriously?
Leif, I really hope you are correct. especially about warming in the next few decades.
Let’s discuss in another few years, by 2020 at the latest.
johnpetoff,
What “hate speech and insults”? You called us “blind little sheep”, remember? If you can’t take the heat…
And may I remind you that you wrote: “I’m presuming Watts is the sole owner if the site. All that advertising you see, he gets paid for. My guess, and this is a pure guess, is he earns 7 figures.”
See, you specifically referred to advertising, not to a paying job. Anthony can speak for himself, but if you had read the most recent PBS articles you would have found out that Anthony runs a successful technology company. Anyway, it is really none of your business, is it? I suppose your green-eyed envy is intended to distract from the plain fact that you have no credible AGW arguments.
Next, all honest scientists are scientific skeptics. That leaves out the alarmist scientists, no? They are in it for the money, for the travel, for the status, for the perks, for the notoriety, and for other motivations that have nothing to do with scientific truth.
You referred to some graphs and websites, after I explained to you that those are not scientific evidence. Evidence consists of testable, falsifiable data and empirical scientific observations. You only cut and pasted opinions.
When/if you can directly connect global temperature with human CO2 emissions, we will all sit up straight and pay attention. But so far, no one has been able to do that. That’s why the debate over the climate sensitivity number is never settled. There is no measurable evidence showing that X amount of CO2 causes Y temperature rise. There are no such measurements. There are only measurements showing that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. You have cause and effect reversed, so you reach the wrong conclusions.
There may be AGW. But the evidence is lacking. And the fact that global warming stalls for decades at a time, while CO2 rises steadily, puts the onus on the alarmist cult to show that CO2=AGW. Just showing an intermittent correlation is not enough. Because when the scientific method is employed, AGW becomes nothing more than an evidence-free conjecture.
Friends:
Please stop feeding the troll.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
September 18, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Friends:
Please stop feeding the troll.
Richard
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That’s what the others said the last time I posted on a believers’ website. –AGF
DavidG says:
September 18, 2012 at 11:00 am
he nor Axelrod [sic] ‘knows’ when the next ice age will be and I stand by that, neither of you do *know*, you are making educated guesses which don’t meet the bar of fact at this point.
The ‘educated guesses’ have correctly matched every glaciation the past 750,000 years. This is a high bar to meet and is good enough for me. The ‘know’-word is too big. We don’t ‘know’ if we are going to be hit by an asteroid tomorrow that will destroy civilization or at least the big city it hits, but it is a good ‘educated guess’ that we will not.
Leif Svalgaard says:
September 18, 2012 at 5:30 am
“But Berger and Loutre argue in their Perspective that with or without human perturbations, the current warm climate may last another 50,000 years.”
But then again as it has been declining since the Holocene maximum for several thousand years, past patterns suggest it should continue falling, and the decline *may* accelerate as soon as within the next 2,000yrs.
Upon reflection, I do agree it’s unfair to speculate what Watts earns. So I do agree with D on one thing. I was speculating and projecting my view of propagandists onto Watts. He may or may not be profiteering from this website or your community. I honestly have no idea.
As followers or believers, I do think you should be wary and understand his motives may not be entirely for the good of your community. There MAY be a profit motive. That’s for each reader to determine how they feel about that.
As far as science and AGW, here’s an old chart (2004) showing methane and CO2 from a Vostok ice core sample.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/xMethane.htm
And D, if you say CO2 trails temperatures, then I’m presuming you agree there’s a link. I believe Methane may be a greater greenhouse gas than CO2. The above chart shows historical values. The present day values for both gasses is off the chart. That means both gasses are at unprecedented levels in the last 400,000 years. The only large planetary difference in the last 400,000 years is man.
If CO2 and CH4 lead temperatures, we have more warming coming. If temperatures lead CO2 and CH4 production, we have more CO2 and CH4 coming. Your scenario may be the worst lose/lose scenario as far as warming as it creates a self sustaining feedback loop.
I’m not an expert, but for me this shows AGW. I’ll look for more examples as time and desire allow.
— The Troll
johnpetroff,
First, the Hansen graph you linked to says, “There is good reason to expect a temperature rise must follow promptly.”
“Promptly”? That was in 2004, so there is yet another Hansen prediction that is flat wrong. At what point do you admit that Hansen has not got anything right, and should therefore be ignored?
Next, enough with the psychological projection. Skeptics have nothing to prove, therefore we are not “believers”. That term only applies to those pushing the evidence-free CAGW conjecture.
Next, you can see very clearly here that ΔCO2 always follows ΔT. That, my friend, is solid scientific evidence. But there is no such evidence showing that changes in CO2 cause temperature changes. You have cause and effect backward, which leads you to believe that CO2 is the cause of rising temperatures. But where is your evidence? In fact, there is none. It is just a conjecture.
Finally, your Hansen chart has a problem with the x-axis. The scale changes radically at zero. And despite the increase in (harmless, beneficial) CO2, his predicted skyrocketing of temperatures never happened. An honest scientist would look at that discrepancy and admit there is a major problem with his conjecture. But James “Coal Trains of Death” Hansen has never let facts get in the way of his climate alarmism.
Ulric Lyons says:
September 18, 2012 at 6:26 pm
But then again as it has been declining since the Holocene maximum for several thousand years, past patterns suggest it should continue falling,
We are not just matching and extrapolating past patterns. We can calculate precisely what the solar insolation will be at any time past or future [for several millions of years at least], so no mere ‘suggestions’ carry any weight. You can argue against good data that the solar insolation has little to do with climate, but that is not a tenable position [on the other hand, lots of people hold untenable positions, so you will be in good company]
“””””…..agfosterjr says:
September 18, 2012 at 8:01 am
Milankovitch cycles in themselves pose little threat to the current climate, but of course they had nothing to do with the LIttle Ice Age–that was the Maunder Minimum–which if repeated would freeze much of Eurasia and North America. Obviously it wasn’t severe enough to prevent recuperation with current insolation. A longer minimum might do it sometime, and there’s not much we could do to reverse it–not enough carbon in the ground. Anyway, the ice cores show no secular (or millennial) CO2/T forcing–burning carbon won’t help. Soot? That only helps when it stops snowing.
George Smith: I guess I don’t understand your question–I don’t know what modeling you’re talking about. Newton’s gravitational modeling of the solar system was pretty good, I thought.
–AGF…..””””
What on earth could possibly be difficult to understand about my question; ESL readers are granted a special dispensation.
David presented some data, and some history, including mentioning Milankovitch, and also some data including 18O data, and then plotted two data sets, and one model prediction on the same graph.
OK, so far so good, no problem.
So I commented that I thought the fit of the model to the data was remarkably good… That is simply A PERSONAL OPINION. Sometimes we like models to agree with experimental data to within part in 10^8. Clearly not in climate “science”.
So given what I felt was a very nice fit, and as an aside I mentioned that it is always possible to construct a model function to agree with any finite length continuous data stream. Purely mathematical prestidigitation; I then asked a very simple question: CAUTION: QUESTION AHEAD !!
“””””…..So then that begs the question: How much of this modelling exercise is based on, and calculated from real Physics (and maybe other science disciplines), rather than simply a brazen mathematical exercise on some data stream……”””””
CAUTION: QUESTION BEHIND !!
No I challenged nothing in David’s story; challenged nothing in Dr Svalgaard’s response to me either, simply wanted to learn how much of the model that matched the data was based on fundamental Physics.
OK, I get that Milankovitch descriptions of solar system orbital changes, effect earth climate as Leif expanded on… No I don’t have to understand the fine points; I get the concept so it satisfies me to know that folks like Dr Svalgaard, can do the actual calculations, when somebody needs to know the fine details; I just accept that he knows how to do that; just as I know how to do what I do, that people pay me for.
It was the significance of the +65 deg insolation that puzzled me. Nearness to the arctic circle?? Zone of lots of land mass that can retain snow ?? Lack of South Pacific Islands ?? Whatever ?? Why +65 Insolation ??
Yeah I get that earth orbital changes over eons will change the +65 insolation. So would a sudden doubling of the sun’s output; for a reason, that not even Dr Svalgaard understands (why the sun doubled, not why that would affect +65 insolation)
Yes I can follow Leif when he describes what orbital change such as ellipse eccentricity, and axis tilt will do in the future as to affecting earth climate.
It is way cool to have somebody like Leif trot out those simple geometry things and explain why that is going to change things and for fairly well predictable lengths of geologic time.
You know we can answer virtually ANY question anyone wants to know, about the cause of physical things that happen that we can observe. Furthermore, we can answer ALL such questions with precisely the same simple answer.
Ice ages, and other climate changes are ALL caused by The Big Bang !!
Now Milankovitch cycles and the effect of Jupiter are a bit more informative, than is the big bang answer; but frankly, neither of those answers explains very well, why +65 deg Insolation matters to ice age onset.
george e smith says:
September 18, 2012 at 8:06 pm
neither of those answers explains very well, why +65 deg Insolation matters to ice age onset.
There are two answers to that:
1) There is a lot of land mass at that latitude for the ice to collect on.
2) This is where the calculated insolation matches best the inferred temperature
From D Boehm on September 18, 2012 at 10:55 am:
I must have missed hearing about that.
It has to date from less than a year ago. In October 2011 Federated Media partnered with WordPress.com which laid the groundwork. From that came WordAds. For advertising on WordPress.com, with a free account like WUWT has the only choice for ad revenue is WordAds.
Going by the WordAds FAQ, it sure wouldn’t be much even for the most trafficked blogs. Nowhere near seven figures, not even if two of those figures are to the right of the decimal point. Figuring in the time involved in writing and moderating and generally running the site that could be used for other work, a part time job at McDonalds is more profitable.
Don’t forget those are extra ads, WordPress will run ads to pay for WordPress whose revenue only goes to WordPress.
So after many years of toiling away in the wilderness for free, Anthony finally gets some small financial recognition. Very small, but at least it’s there. Good for him!
From johnpetroff on September 18, 2012 at 6:36 pm:
For many years Anthony has been contributing his time and effort without expectation of compensation, with the notable “reward” of massive heaps of personal insults and disparagement heaped on his head, with damage done to his business which is his real job. He has demonstrated himself to be a man of integrity and honesty. Also, WUWT is known for allowing dissenting opinions, even dissenting guest posts, which is overwhelmingly not found on “opposition” sites.
Anthony Watts has earned our trust.