The Milankovitch Theory—Earth’s Climate through Time

Serbian astronomers and war prisoners Milutin Milankovic were busy calculating the gravitational attraction of planets like Earth's slopes and orbits on the orbits when the First World War hit Europe in the 19th century. He knows that the amount of solar radiation reaching high latitudes will cause the Ice Age and warm the Earth. He believes that the slow change in the orbit of the earth will cause the amount of solar radiation to reach a specific latitude. By the end of the war, his first paper was published on this topic, and he began to spread his original ideas.

The ice ages that you mentioned are caused by the collective influence of the movement of the earth on its climate change for thousands of years. The natural cause of the current temperature rise has not yet been determined. There is no climatological theory that carbon dioxide will not raise the temperature. The precedent of natural circulation does not indicate the same extreme change as we are now witnessing. Furthermore, you said that scientists are not proving that carbon dioxide causes a temperature rise, it is a basic chemical fact that you should learn at its best. We release billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Of course it is not difficult to think that carbon dioxide is increasing. However, if simple common sense is insufficient, there are more cases.

Changes in the orbital nature of the earth around the sun, known as the Milankovitch cycle, occur at a time scale that is too short to account for long-term climate change. These cycles will be explained below with reference to the medium term change. So, what caused a big ice age? Let's consider the possibility of change in atmospheric temperature effect. The best guess of today is related to the very slow process called "plate tectonics" and the impact it has on the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere. Plate tectonics are explained in detail in the previous section of this course. In retrospect, it is sufficient to know that the continent (plate) floats above the fluid matrix in the geological era. When a plate collides, a process called "diving" pushes out substances under the crust, increasing volcanic activity.

What is important is that current climate change due to the Milankovitch cycle and current changes in global warming caused by increased greenhouse effect are not confused. These changes are completely different time scales, which occurred decades later, but the former occurred for thousands of years. Here we will focus on the eccentricity of the Milankovitch cycle (the fact that the Earth moves in an elliptical shape, the fact that the trajectory of the ellipse changes over time is shortened to a period of about 100,000 years). In many cases, quirky teaching materials can cause confusion by mistake about how it affects the sunlight the Earth receives and how it will affect other factors of the Milankovitch cycle there is. When drawing the scale of the solar system, the size and distance from the planet can not be drawn on a piece of paper, the planet is too small to disappear.