A LITTLE ICE AGE

THE TREE OF LIFE NEEDS REPAIR

THE EARTH COMES TO A STOP?

compiled by Dee Finney

THE ICE AGE

The last Ice Age peaked about 20,000 years ago, after which the Earth again began to warm. Fossil evidence shows that by about 15,000 years ago, Ice Age people were roaming the plains and forests in North America, hunting enormous mammals with stone-pointed spears. Most of those animals were extinct by about 10,000 years ago.

The ice age climate had a stronger effect on the habitats in the high northern and southern latitudes than in equatorial zones. By measuring surface temperatures for the worlds oceans, reconstructed from ocean cores, the carbon dioxide content of the air, derived from ice core data, and the slightly modified solar radiation at that time, the mean temperatures during the last ice age were about 4 degree C lower than today. 

Only 4 degrees!

From: http://www.vehiclechoice.org/climate/cutler.html

We've had little ice ages before:

THE YEAR WAS 1645, and the glaciers in the Alps were on the move. In Chamonix at the foot of Mont Blanc, people watched in fear as the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) glacier advanced. In earlier years, they had seen the slowly flowing ice engulf farms and crush entire villages. 

Similar dramas unfolded throughout the Alps and Scandinavia during the late 1600s and early 1700s, as many glaciers grew farther down mountain slopes and valleys than they had in thousands of years. Sea ice choked much of the North Atlantic, causing havoc with fisheries in Iceland and Scandinavia. Eskimos paddled their kayaks as far south as Scotland. At the same time in China, severe winters in Jiang-Xi province killed the last of the orange groves that had thrived there for centuries. 

These and many similar events, bewildering and disruptive to the societies of the time, are pieces of a global climatic puzzle that scientists and historians today call the "Little Ice Age." 

Throughout the world, from Norway to New Zealand, glaciers in mountainous areas advanced. Elsewhere particularly in parts of Europe and North America, temperatures plummeted and harsh weather set in. It was a time of repeated famine and cultural dislocation, as many people fled regions that had become hostile even to subsistence agriculture. 

Experts disagree on the duration of the Little Ice Age. Some mark its inception as early as the 1200s, others view the Little Ice Age "proper" as beginning around 1450 or even later. 

Disagreements arise because the phenomenon was not simply a giant cold snap. The cooling trend began at different times in different parts of the world and often was interrupted by periods of relative warmth. 

All agree, however, that it lasted for centuries, and that the world began emerging from its grip between 1850 and 1900. 

"We're trying to understand the warming over the past 100 years," says Alan Robock of the University of Maryland's Department of Meteorology. "Some people have said it's just a `recovery from the Little Ice Age.' Well, what does that mean?" 

In the 10,000 years since the end of the last major ice age, which closed the Pleistocene Epoch, Earth's climate has undergone a series of global warmings and global coolings. Though far smaller than the temperature swings of the Pleistocene, during which vast ice sheets expanded over large parts of continents and melted away several times, these oscillations nonetheless left their marks on human cultures and natural ecosystems. 

With each climate change, whether global or local, ecological communities shifted north or south or were disrupted, leading to the creation of new groupings of species. Likewise, human cultures were uprooted and driven to more favorable locales, or people adapted by changing their technologies and behaviors. 

THE CAUSE OF THE CURRENT GLOBAL WARMING

FROM: http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1/annex10.htm

Causes of Global Warming of about 0.5 C, 1880-1997

In much of the popular, scientific, and policy literature, the observed warming of a half degree Celsius (0.9 F) is attributed to greenhouse gas warming. However, there are several other forcings of climate that contribute to this apparent warming. They are changes in solar luminosity, decreases in stratospheric aerosol loading due to fewer explosive volcanic eruptions, urban heat island effects (which introduce a spurious effect), changes in skyline (which introduce a spurious effect), changes in anthropogenic sulfur aerosols, changes in anthropogenic carbon aerosols, and so forth. 

The two most important factors in causing climate change are solar luminosity increases and the decreased number of explosive volcanic eruptions, which together can explain about 80% of the warming seen since 1880. The other 20% of the variation is caused by a combination of miscellaneous climate forcings and measurement errors. There is no need to invoke increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as major factors in climate change in the past, nor is there any solid evidence to indicate they will play a major role in future climate change. 

Changes in solar luminosity are the major driver of climate change in the 20th century and earlier.  The greenhouse effect models predicted  that most of the warming occurred after 1940 when  most of the carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere. The warming however occurred mostly before 1940. Warming cannot be a random event: it must have been forced by changes in external conditions. The key external parameter that changed was the luminosity of the sun. Changes in sunspot decay rates, sunspot structure, or solar cycle lengths all indicate a warming of the sun until the mid-1930's, a dimming of the sun until the 1960's, and a return to a brighter sun in the 1990's. 

Sunspot decay rates change by as much as 25% over decades. They can only do this if the convective energy transport in the sun in varying. There is no other choice. A variable convective energy flux must be accompanied by a change in solar luminosity. These changes in solar luminosity can be monitored by changes in sunspot structure, the number of penumbral spots, solar cycle lengths, and other proxies. The solar luminosity variations can be reconstructed to about 300 AD. Since 1000 AD these luminosity variations and climate have paralleled each other closely, although more work is required to reconstruct climate variations accurately. 

Since the mid-1960's the sun has warmed. So has the Earth. Additional factors leading to a warming in surface thermometer measurements are the urban heat island effect, increases in greenhouse gases, and possible changes in sulfate and carbon aerosols. Much of the recent global warming can be explained by warming of the sun. 

NOTE: We are at the peak of the sunspots - it'll be downhill from here.

THE LAST LITTLE ICE AGE

The Little Ice Age: local or global? 

- Scattered evidence from Europe and high latitudes of the North Atlantic suggests a time of relatively warm climate near 1000 to 1300 called the Medieval Climatic Optimum. During this interval, Nordic people settled SW Greenland along the fringes of the ice sheets and managed to grow wheat (that's why it's called Greenland...). Sea ice, common today around the Greenland coasts, is rarely mentioned in chronicles from this era. 

- The subsequent cooling during the Little Ice Age (1400-1900) seriously affected the populations of Europe. With colder winters and a shorter growing season, grain and grape crops repeatedly failed in far northern regions where they had been successfully grown during the warmer Medieval Climatic Optimum. Settlements on Greenland had to be abandoned, and mountain glaciers advances in Norway and the Alps destroyed farmhouses and even some villages. 

In contrast to the effect of the solar activity cycle on Earth's climate, there is clear evidence of the consequences of non-uniform solar cycles on space weather. Great magnetic storms occurred on February 4, 1872, and August 5, 1972. These were accompanied by exceptional auroral displays at middle and low latitudes. During the 1872 storm some telegraph communications were sent using the induced currents in the system, without power sources, while at other times they were totally disrupted. Space-based measurements available during the 1972 storm revealed potentially lethal doses of radiation had astronauts been outside the magnetosphere enroute to the moon.

There were weeks of sea ice per year off the coast of Iceland. That was well monitored because fishing is Iceland's major food supply. The frequency of sea ice increased into the 19th century and then declined in the 20th century. 

Lichens grow on rock surfaces in the Arctic at known rates. Halo-like areas of dead lichens in parts of the Canadian Arctic (Baffin Island) may record an interval of expanded snowfields late in the Little Ice Age. This makes sense as Baffin Island is one of the regions in which ice sheets probably began to advance during the last 3 million years and where the ice melted last.

Even though the Little Ice Age was not a true ice age (in the sense that major ice sheets did not actually develop), it was a small step in that direction, but one that ended by the warming of the 20th century. 

An ice core taken in 1980 from the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes, shows more negative values and higher dust concentrations from 1600 to 1900 than in the 20th century. A return expedition that cored the same location in 1993 found that the annual signal at the surface was being destroyed by melting, the first such melting event in the last 1000 years. 

Tree rings from the larch trees in Siberian and mountains of Mongolia in Central Asia, show cool conditions in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a deeper cooling in the mid-19th century, a slow but substantial warming since 1870 with a brief cooling between 1950 and 1970. For both records, the warming of the middle and late 20th century are unprecedented within their record. 

During El Niño years, the atmospheric and oceanic circulation pattern change such that upwelling does not occur and the eastern Pacific warms by 1-5°C causing most fish to either migrate or they die. Sea birds and mammals living from fish then also have to migrate or they die. The warmer waters allows convection to take place and results in major floodings.

The accompanying change in atmospheric oscillation shows that warm El Niño years near S. America are times of drier conditions (higher pressures) in northern Australia but wetter conditions (lower pressures) in the south-central Pacific, near Tahiti.

A synthesis of high-resolution climate records from the Northern Hemisphere spanning all or part of the last millennium together with the uncertainties. The first 900 years show a gradual cooling consistent with the slow orbital pattern followed by an abrupt warming in the 20th century.

Temperatures of the last few decades have just begun to rise above these uncertainties, that is, they are becoming warmer than the warmest temperatures we can possibly interpret history as permitting. That is, this warming is not a natural climate oscillation, but human-made.

In Alaska, although 63 percent of the 200 glaciers measured were retreating, seven percent were advancing and 30 percent were holding their own.

It may all happen again, say geologists, and it could start happening quite soon, really, geologically speaking, of course. We've been out of the last ice age for quite awhile, many think about the average time between ice ages, actually. Add to this that scientists are getting much more comfortable with catastrophic explanations. Research done in the Greenland Ice Cap raised the startling fact that global climates can change 15 degrees in as little as a decade.

Volcanoes are recent catastrophes in our environs, and humongous lava flows, many feet thick repeatedly shaped our central plains. Now add that the Pacific Northwest could theoretically be an average of 15 degrees cooler in ten years, by the year 2012, as compared to the worst case scenario of a measly "seven degrees warmer by the end of this century in 2100" that Global Warming doomsayers predict in moments of cautionary warnings. While a few generations would still not have glaciers in their back yard, a whole new chain of weather events and consequences would dramatically alter our life styles.

THE REPAIR OF THE TREE OF LIFE

THE 32 PATHS OF THE TREE OF LIFE

THE LOWEST PATH ON THE RIGHT ON THE TREE OF LIFE

28th Path of Wisdom 
The Active Intelligence - From this source is created the spirit of every creature of the supreme orb, and the activity, that is to say, the motion, to which they are subject. 

Tzaddi "Tz" the eighteenth letter and path 28, Netzach to Yesod, Victory to Foundation, numerical value is 90. Tzaddi means "fishhook" and is attributed to Aquarius and is distinctively feminine with the tarot card being The Star. It is called "The Natural Intelligence". The plant is the olive, perfume is galbanum, color is sky blue and gemstone is chalcedony. 

Say "Tzaddi" (path 28) and visualize a beam of violet light rising at a low angle from the violet sphere at your loins and joining the red-violet beam at your left hip. This is the path whereby emotional impressions of the dream consciousness are communicated to higher levels. 

Colors 
Atziluth: amethyst 
Briah: dove color 
Yetzirah: bluish mauve 
Assiah: white-tinged purple 

Physical Body correspondence 
Kidneys and Bladder 

Tarot 
Major Arcana - Star - Loss, theft, privation, abandonment; hope, bright prospects 

THE TREE OF LIFE CROP CIRCLE FORMATION

RITUALS FOR THE TREE OF LIFE

Floods Coming on Long Island?