Home Reports Ecology, The Environment and Conservation Content

Greenhouse Gases - Nothing To Blame For?

next article

02.08.2004

In the nearest future we may witness global cooling in spite of increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That can happen, if the following hypothesis is correct: not the growth of greenhouse gases concentration provokes temperature to rise, but vice versa.

It is generally believed nowadays that greenhouse gases are responsible for the growth of temperature of the atmosphere, but that might be wrong. Recent climate change is similar to those regularly developed in the past of our planet. Studies conducted at the research station "Vostok" revealed that for the last 100 thousand years an increase in temperature always preceded the growth of greenhouse gases concentration, but not inversely. When temperature began to decrease, the concentration of gases continued to grow for a period of 2-3 thousand years.

Russian scientists have analyzed changes occurred within the past 5, 20, and 100 thousand years and established that each warming is associated with the same behaviour of greenhouse gases: temperature rises firstly, and the concentration of greenhouse gases begins to increase later, with a lag of several thousand years. The growth of gases concentration is faster than that of temperature and soon outruns the latter. With a turn from warming to the next phase of cooling, the concentration of greenhouse gases inertially grows for a while. Then their concentration begins to decrease, which soon gets faster than the temperature decrease. This tendency progresses until glaciation phase that closes each climatic cycle.

This trend is observable only within large time intervals such as hundreds of thousands of years. If a short time interval of about 20 thousand years is considered, then one can conclude that the growth of temperature follows the growth of greenhouse gases concentration and not contrariwise. Which of the two theories is correct still remains a question.

Sergey Komarov | Source: alphagalileo
Further information: www.informnauka.ru

next article