This book is an unorthodox ground-breaking scientific study on natural climate change and its contribution to ongoing multi-centennial global warming.
The book critically reviews the effect of the following on climate:
- Milankovitch cycles
- abrupt glacial (Dansgaard-Oeschger) events
- Holocene climate variability
- the 1500-year cycle
- solar activity
- volcanic eruptions
- greenhouse gases
- energy transport
Applying the scientific method to available evidence reveals that some of these phenomena are profoundly misunderstood by most researchers. Milankovitch cycles are tied to orbital obliquity, not to orbital precessional summer insolation; glacial megatides might have triggered abrupt Dansgaard-Oeschger events; and tides are likely responsible for the related 1500-year climate cycle. Climate change affects volcanic eruptions more than the opposite; and secular variations in solar activity are more important to climate change during the Holocene than greenhouse gases.
In this book, we see how important natural climate change has been on human societies of the past. It also produces new climate projections for the 21st century and when the next glaciation could happen.
What emerges from this study of natural climate change is a central theme:
Variations in the transport of energy from the tropics to the poles have been neglected as a cause of climate change, and solar activity variations affect climate by modulating this transport.
The author tells us: -Transporting more energy from a greenhouse gas-rich region, the tropics, to a greenhouse gas-poor region, the poles, increases the amount of energy lost at the top of the atmosphere. The effect resembles a reduction in the greenhouse gas content.-
The book presents the Winter-Gatekeeper Hypothesis on how variations in solar activity regulate Earth's energy transport and in so doing affect atmospheric circulation, the rotation of the planet, and the El Niño/Southern Oscillation.
This book is oriented toward students and academics in the climate sciences and climate anthropology and should also appeal to readers interested in the science of natural climate change. The repercussions of Climate of the Past, Present and Future are far reaching. By uncovering a strong natural climate change component, it provides a novel view of anthropogenic climate change, fossil energy use, and our future climate; a view quite different from the IPCC's gloomy projections.