> How have astronomical conditions contributed to global climate change?

How have astronomical conditions contributed to global climate change?

Posted at: 2015-03-12 
over very long period of times, like 50,000 years, the orbit and tilt of the earth affects the amount of solar radiation on the earth. This causes ice ages for example.

This is not the cause of current warming that has happened over the past 150 years.

They ended the last ice age 20,000 years ago and caused most of the slight cooling between the Holocene Maximum, 6,000 years ago and the Little Ice Age. Since humans started burning fossil fuels, their contribution has been insignificant.

Global warming is such a problem that it is necessary to deal with all its aspects, which includes the politics. When politicians formulate their policy they need inputs from many disciplines and from science as well. But unfortunately global warming has become an absolutely political issue and politicians do their best to influence even science.

In 1992 at the Earth Summit the decision to prevent such dangerous climate change was taken. The first step was the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which is supposed to come into force in 2005.

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One of the reports of the U.N. Panel on Climate Changes warns that the U.S. and other wealthy countries should immediately cut their oil and gas consumption and agree to get at least a quarter of their electrical energy from renewable resources - solar and wind power; and that they should double their research spending on low-carbon energy by 2010.In 1997 the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to make Clinton Administration not to send the Kyoto treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification. In his first term president Bush rejected Kyoto. Russia ratified it, but most believe that Putting was made to do that as British Prime Minister and other European Union officials threatened not to let him become a member of World Trade Organization, which could cost Russia billions of dollars each year. But the chief economic adviser of Putting - Andrei Illation shows his doubts as for the upholding commit to Kyoto, he says: "There is no evidence confirming a positive linking between the level of carbon dioxide and temperature change. The U.N. Panel's so called scientific data are considerably distorted and in many cases falsified" (Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb? by James Hansen, 2003, pp.2-15). One of the main ideas of Clarion and others is to break the advanced economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan, by persuading the multi-national companies to move plants and jobs to developing countries in order not to comply with emissions restrictions. But the president of the American Policy Center in Washington - Tom Decease doesn't agree that it makes sense, he states as the main concern and the prime target is the wealth of the United States it would not be wise to place factories in Third World countries, as the same amount of emissions would come out from jungles of South America instead of Chicago and in this case we are not talking about the protection of the environment any more. He is right in a way.

The main goal of the meeting in Kyoto was signing the amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Rio Treaty) in order to require the signatory nations to take the necessary steps to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as these gases cause an alarm situation with global temperatures. The costs of signing it for the U.S. could be really high, as the county could be made to reduce between 10 and 20 % of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020 that would cause reduction of gross domestic products by $260 billion annually; it is equal to $2.700 per household. Certainly it was hard to prove that such costs are justified. Besides as millions of American people could be put at risk, several important questions appeared. The first one was about the possible merits or drawbacks of global warming. The World Bank researches prove that about one-third of the whole population suffers from water shortages. By 2025 they say - around 40 % of the whole population could be living in countries without sufficient water supplies. The crops will also suffer from lack of water. Global warming leads to more condensation and more evaporation, thus producing more rains. So it could be in a way an answer to the problem about lack of water. The second positive point about global warming is possibility of agriculture in North America and Europe, the southern regions of Greenland were not covered with ice when between 10th and 12th centuries the temperature was 0.5 degrees warmer than today, and could be also cultivated. The evidence of this was found when: "scientists from the National Science Foundation sponsored Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 extracted in an ice core from Greenland's ice sheet that spanned more than 100.000 years of climate history. Samplings from the core suggest that a Little Ice Age began between 1400 and 1420, blanketing the Vikings' farms in ice and forcing them to abandon their farms in search of more hospitable climates".( Michael Crichton's State of Fear: Climate Change in the Cineplex, by Amy Ridenour pp.1-5). Thus global warming could mean more agricultural productivity and more water resources.

They haven't

Why did you ask four different questions instead of incorporating them into one???