Health & Fitness
The Gorilla in the Room: The Good and the Bad News about the Sun
The good news about the sunlight from the Sun is that we can't control it so we can't engage in endless (and mostly useless) political arguments about it.
The good news about the sunlight from the sun is that we can’t control it, so we can’t engage in endless (and mostly useless) political arguments about it. The bad news is that we can’t control the sunlight from the Sun.
In my I wrote that sunlight is one of the factors that control the temperature of the Earth. We all know that the tilt of the Earth on its axis produces the seasons as the Earth orbits around the Sun. What is not so well known is that both the orbit around the sun and the tilt of the Earth’s axis are not fixed, but slowly change with time. The good news is that these changes take place over time scales that would make a snail’s crawling trip from Seattle to New York seem like a blink in time. However slow these changes are, when they combine in a way that decreases the sunlight reaching the Earth enormous and disastrous changes happen. Just ask the Ice Age humans about the glaciers in Puget Sound and the two mile thick layer of ice over Canada.
Don’t sunspots also change the output of sunlight from the Sun? They do and they have. The “Little Ice Age” lasting from the 1500s to the 1800s was associated with lower sunspot activity (lower sunspot activity is associated with lower amounts of sunlight reaching the Earth). This lowered sunlight is thought to be one factor in the cooling of the Earth during this time. Some people might like a longer ice skating season, but others might not be so happy with the increased starvation and disease that occurred during the colder periods of the Little Ice Age.
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The last Ice Age came and left so slowly that humans were able to adjust to the change and survive (as evidenced by me writing this blog). Were they happy about the changes? No one knows since “reading, writing and arithmetic” were still centuries away. This was good new for Ice Age kids. The bad news was no Facebook and only living to be thirty somethings.
In my next blog I’ll write about what happens when another factor in the determining of the Earth’s temperature (the dreaded greenhouse gases) undergo potentially rapid changes.