[Noozhawk’s note: Second in a series. Click here for the first article.]

We left Part 1 of this series with a big question: The credibility of the United Nations and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on truly explaining all the other factors of climate change and focusing reporting on man-made emissions.

But to truly understand life, we need to review it through a telescope, not this microscope.

The genius of our existence is an evolution of time and space that started billions of years ago with different forms of life, of which we are one of the current residences — simply because of warming.

So, advancing to today’s epoch (a geology division of time) is an honest place to start this lesson in better understanding climate, which drives the cycle of life and new life, what scientists call flora and fauna.

For the last 600,000 years (the Pleistocene Epoch), earth has had consistent climate patterns.

At the turn of the 20th century, Milutin Milanković — a Serbian mathematician, astronomer and geophysicist — wonderfully studied/documented various degrees of earth’s planetary orbits and tilts.

He divided them into three distinct orbital variations, with consistent time scales, acting differently but consistently over time.

Earth is now in a more circular (versus elliptical) orbit, putting us closer to the sun and producing a warming phase currently going back some 12,000 years.

We’re also in a roughly 40,000 global tilt (currently 23.5° or half cycle), which produces more warmth in the northern hemisphere.

And finally, the earth’s axis wobbles about every 23,000 years because of the weight distribution of land mass versus ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere.

But many good citizens believe the only greenhouse gases they’ve been told/sold, sadly, are man-made fossil fuel energy sources and their emissions.

In fact, the largest greenhouse gases are the result of clouds and water vapor, which only amount to 0.4% of all the molecules in our atmosphere — but account for up to 90% of the atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat!

This is really important to grasp. Carbon dioxide (CO₂), our second largest greenhouse gas, has a concentration fairly level throughout the globe at roughly 7%. (We’ll get to its impact soon.)

Most college-level climate courses (are supposed to) teach that without the greenhouse effect, there would be no life.

The average world surface temperature is a balancing of the warming from the sun’s solar radiation and how much of that reflected sunlight is intercepted because of greenhouse gases that reheat the earth on the bounce back.

This feedback loop is a fundamental process that happens independent of human interference and must be understood.

Let’s start with the benefits:

Without clouds/water vapor and carbon dioxide and the carbon cycle, there would be “no” life on earth.

Photosynthesis is the natural process by which green plants and other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water, while generating oxygen as a byproduct.

According to the NOAA’s National Ocean Service, “Carbon is the foundation to form complex molecules like proteins and DNA. This element is also found in our atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (C0₂). Carbon helps to regulate the earth’s temperature, makes all life possible, is a key ingredient in the food that sustains us, and provides a major source of the energy to fuel our global economy. The carbon cycle describes the process in which carbon atoms continually travel from the atmosphere to earth and then back into the atmosphere. Since our planet and its atmosphere form this closed environment, the amount of carbon in the system does not change.”

Carbon dioxide is our second largest greenhouse gas, with a concentration fairly level throughout the globe at around 7% (and we’ll get to its impact soon).

So, let’s widen the aperture to view the relationship between this greenhouse gas and the climate: CO₂ is the lowest it’s been for hundreds of millions of years and global temperature and atmospheric CO₂ rarely correlate.

After the Cambrian Period (500 million years ago), temperature and CO₂ have been in an inverse correlation that hasn’t demonstrated cause and effects for the earth’s warming.

There are many other influencers of our globe’s climate, and for that we again need to continue viewing the world in relation to the rest of the universe.

Currently, we’re 97 million miles from the sun (give or take) during its most perfect orbit cycles, with photons emitted, taking about 8 minutes to reach earths’ atmosphere.

Also, on average, 70% sunlight is absorbed with 30% reflected back to space. Scientists call this the “radiative equilibrium” effect in which earth is neither gaining nor losing energy.

This percentage split is because the “albedo,” in other words the white of the earth: land, ice, snow. It’s complex but our albedo is as important as greenhouse gases to our climate system.

Another factor in life on planet earth is travel speed. Our globe spins up to 1,000 mph if you live on the equator, orbits around the sun at 66,627 mph, travels around the galaxy at 448,000 mph while our solar system travels throughout the universe at about 70 miles per second.

All these dimensions affect the climate but our distance from the sun is the largest consequence of our globe’s temperature.

And we need to add our moon into the mix; without it, we would wouldn’t have gravitational pull to stabilize earth’s tilt, relatively stable seasons, and ocean tides that have an impact on marine life/coastal ecosystems.

Among the most fascinating facts for me are the solar rays leaving the sun’s surface at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the same temperature of earth’s core.

And the earth’s surface is also continuously heated by dormant volcanoes and geothermal and hydrothermal energy, including black smokers that are natural orifices emitting greenhouse gases like methane.

What follows is a graphic view of the last roughly 15,000 years as our earth has been adjusting to the Milanković cycles, which puts earth closer to the sun (a lot because of the moon).

The takeaway is that our globe is an ever-changing light bulb of intensity and has been warming for the better part of 10,000 years, with our current temperatures consistent within this period.