Wet, wet, wet

Oh my, it sure has been wet lately. And the early summer sure was dry. I read today in the news a poster thought this could only mean one thing and that was the climate had gone awry. I have thought about this before and usually my thinking goes back to the ice ages, climate changes on a big scale. And today I came to the conclusion that I never really understood why the climate has been changing like that through the eons. After looking it up on the net I found that no one really understand this, now I was feeling I was in good company.

The most common truth at least in Sweden is that global warming causes ice to melt and then the oceans to rise. I have always had a problem with that reasoning. Global warming causes more water to be bound in the atmosphere and this water will come down where the air is chilled. Snow that falls on the arctics would add to the ice masses and the ice that has melted would be rebuilt. At this point I start thinking about the ice ages, why did the ice grow then. To explain this we need to have a change in temperature difference between the equator and the arctics. We need a build up moisture in the air and we need cold climate over the arctic region making the buildup of ice greater then the melting.

And today I found that this actually could be the case. In the mid 19th century James Croll, a British amateur scientist, came up with an idea that the gravitational pull from the moon, sun and the planets cause the earth's axis to fluctuate. Sometimes the arctics gets more sun as the axis is tilted more to the sun and the melting gets greater than the ice buildup for a while until equilibrium is reached, when it tilts back the ice sheets start to grow again. I found this quite enlightening and it seems this is the only theory that actually can explain why ice ages come and go cyclically. I guess this theory has other flaws otherwise I suspect Al Gore wouldn't travel the world with his new documentary, please fill me in on this.