ive noticed some attention on the oceans getting warmer too but thats an average i wouldnt doubt if its just as colder in places as it is warmer...in the ocean that is and more than likely on land too YO squiggly dont go out of your way or anything but whats up with Global Tilt is or did that happen to play a role in all this?
Some people characterize this as a chicken-before-the-egg argument, but it really isn't. Allow me to explain a bit.
Okay so we have three things in play here.
1. The "tilt" of earth's axis.
2. Global warming.
3. The ocean.
Okay so let's get 1 out of the way, as it's the lion's share of the discussion.
The tilt is affected by a fucking shitdickload of factors. Mass of the earth, distribution of weight on the earth, gravitational pull on the earth/from the earth, and then there's the fact that the tilt itself isn't perfectly aligned and has always been changing on it's own and would continue to do so even if the rest of these factors were held constant because of the nature of it's orbit and movement.
The mass of the earth, as we covered earlier--is changing, we're losing oxygen molecules. It happens very slowly, but it's also been happening since earth day #1.
The gravitational pulls slowly change as the orbits/axis of the earth/moon change--and these factors confound each other (i.e. you end up in a feedback loop, one effects the other which effects the original one which effects the other, etc. ad nauseum).
The biggest thing for this discussion to center on is the distribution of weight. The "global tilt" dudes will tell you that the axis is just tilting on it's own (and to some degree this is correct)--but they want you to believe it is wildly tilting on it's own. What we know from physics (an object in motion will stay in motion......) says that this can't be the case. Instead something about the planet must be changing.
We haven't seen big results here yet, but we DO know that they WILL happen (also from physics) if we warm the oceans past a certain amount. This is because increasing temperature causes liquid water to expand. So not only will we be melting polar ice caps and changing the weight distribution there--but we're actually going to expand the volume that each molecule of liquid water takes up, and even more significantly change the distribution of weight.
This change means the most because it is a change on the planet-scale. The ocean is basically everywhere, and there is a lot of it. We often hear we've only uncovered 20% of the land mass of earth, and the rest is a big blue mystery to us. The ocean more quickly changing, bigger, entity than just about anything else on earth.
Whether its man made or not, warming oceans are a scary prospect. We at the very least need to be absolutely DUMPING federal money into research into this. Really the biggest travesty of this problem is that the research isn't being properly funded. We won't even know what the fuck to do if this shit hits us soon, and we really don't know when it's going to hit us.
Our models show that things are shifting in the direction we expect them to--but as for when crazy shit will really start to kick off, we can't say--the recent hurricane for instance. We didn't predict that, and we don't know whether we can blame it on warming yet or not, but it's possible that we can.
There is some grey area here, and that's why you see inaction. Science does a really poor job of self-promotion when there are not absolutes involved. Absolutes are really where we, as scientists, do our best work. We can't get there yet with this, and part of that has to do with the lack of interest/belief/funding or however else you want to frame it.
The reason this is not a chicken-before-the-egg argument is that, while many of the factors involved here effect each other, the tilt of the axis does not actually affect the temperature of the oceans
AS MUCH AS the opposite is true. So say we warm the oceans 10 degrees and the axis tilts 2 more. If we tilt the axis 2 to begin with, it'll probably warm it maybe 5 degrees (if it tilts the right way).
Of course you can end up with a feedback loop here (though there are limits to it, its not an infinite loop)--but the
initial effect is a greater when you warm the ocean.
The amount the axis is tilting doesn't match up with the warming of the ocean--but the opposite might be true (that the warming of the ocean is tilting the axis some now--and will do so considerably more later).
