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GLOBAL  WARMING For starts, we are still coming out of the last iceage.   The question everyone should be asking is - ( When will the climatic cycle swing the other way? ) There are climatic fluctuations, but nothing catastrophic. Fluctuations are part of the natural cycles of our planet.                                    DO NOT WORRY The climate has been reasonably stable for several billion years.  Human influences to the planetary climate are minimal at most. What humans do influence however is local climates such as pollution in and around major cities.  Very unhealthy… The worst thing we as people are doing to our planet is over population, and the related consequences. Since World War II, we have expanded our numbers far beyond the point our planet can provide good to moderate lifestyles.  We have built on top of our crop lands, and put farmers out of business.  How smart was that ? ? ?   Plus we have and continue to construct homes out of the wrong or cheep materials that do not last, and pay outrageous prices for them.                                 WHEN OIL WAS CHEEP We build our cities, and the related infrastructures such as roads, bridges, dams and crucial water works out of the wrong materials, inferior materials and in such massive portions that " NOW " we can no longer maintain them.  Basic bad planning and greed by a lot of people. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                           SOLUTION If the population decreases, and levels off, we must live within our STABLE ENERGY capabilities.  Not glamorous, but necessary if we hope to survive long enough to evolve into something better. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                 HISTORY OF CHANGE The Mg/Ca dataset was taken from the fossil record contained in cores drilled on the Chatham Rise, an area of ocean east of New Zealand. It allowed the Cambridge team to map ocean temperature change over time. Once this had been done, they were able to subtract that information from the oxygen isotopic record. "The calculation tells us the difference between what water temperature was doing and what the ice sheets were doing across a 1.5 million year period," Professor Elderfield explained. The resulting picture shows that ice volume has changed much more dramatically than ocean temperatures in response to changes in orbital geometry. Glacial periods during the 100,000-year cycles have been characterised by a very slow build-up of ice which took thousands of years, the result of ice volume responding to orbital change far more slowly than the ocean temperatures reacted. Ocean temperature change, however, reached a lower limit, probably because the freezing point of sea water put a restriction on how cold the deep ocean could get. In addition, the record shows that the transition from 41,000-year cycles to 100,000-year cycles, the characteristic changeover of the MPT, was not as gradual as previously thought. In fact, the build-up of larger ice sheets, associated with longer glacials, appears to have begun quite suddenly, around 900,000 years ago. The pattern of Earth's response to orbital forcing changed dramatically during this "900,000 year event," as the paper puts it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unexpected Microbes Fighting Harmful Greenhouse Gas ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2012) — The environment has a more formidable opponent than carbon dioxide. Another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, is 300 times more potent and also destroys the ozone layer each time it is released into the atmosphere through agricultural practices, sewage treatment and fossil fuel combustion. Share This: Luckily, nature has a larger army than previously thought combating this greenhouse gas -- according to a study by Frank Loeffler, University of Tennessee, Knoxville-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor's Chair for Microbiology, and his colleagues. The findings are published in the Nov. 12 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have long known about naturally occurring microorganisms called denitrifiers, which fight nitrous oxide by transforming it into harmless nitrogen gas. Loeffler and his team have now discovered that this ability also exists in many other groups of microorganisms, all of which consume nitrous oxide and potentially mitigate emissions. The research team screened available microbial genomes encoding the enzyme systems that catalyze the reduction of the nitrous oxide to harmless nitrogen gas. They discovered an unexpected broad distribution of this class of enzymes across different groups of microbes with the power to transform nitrous oxide to innocuous nitrogen gas. Within these groups, the enzymes were related yet evolutionarily distinct from those of the known denitrifiers. Microbes with this capability can be found in most, if not all, soils and sediments, indicating that a much larger microbial army contributes to nitrous oxide consumption. "Before we did this study, there was an inconsistency in nitrous oxide emission predictions based on the known processes contributing to nitrous oxide consumption, suggesting the existence of an unaccounted nitrous oxide sink," said Loeffler. "The new findings potentially reconcile this discrepancy." According to Loeffler, the discovery of this microbial diversity and its contributions to nitrous oxide consumption will allow the scientific community to advance its understanding of the ecological controls on global nitrous oxide emissions and to refine greenhouse gas cycle models. "This will allow us to better describe and predict the consequences of human activities on ozone layer destruction and global warming," said Loeffler. "Our results imply that the analysis of the typical denitrifier populations provides an incomplete picture and is insufficient to account for or accurately predict the true nitrous oxide emissions." For many  full studies ; --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.sciencedaily.com/search/index.php?type=news&total=274&keyword=chock+and+climate§ion=all&period=90&sort=relevance&total=274&page=1