Monday, July 25, 2005
 
Climactic Cognitive Dissonance
Ice ages linked to galactic position: Study finds Earth may be cooled by movement through Milky Way's stellar clouds:
    It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn't buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers. But new research suggests the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

    Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way's spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays.

    Theorists have proposed that when our solar system passes through a spiral arm, the cosmic rays fall to Earth and knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, making them electrically charged, or ionized. Since opposite electrical charges attract each other, the positively charged ionized particles attract the negatively charged portion of water vapor, thus forming large droplets in the form of low-lying clouds.

    In turn, the clouds cool the climate and trigger an ice age -- or so theorists suggest.
And yet global warming is caused by man.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:00 AM
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To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."