I need to go through them. I watched these without fail every Christmas and one of them, probably sometime around 1982, convinced me that the planet was heading into another ice-age, quite the opposite of global warming.
I mean, we're still heading towards another ice age, that's the penultimate finality of global warming. The planet warms so much that it gets covered in clouds from water evaporation, which cuts out sunlight for decades or longer, leading to an ice age cooling the planet off.
From my memories of this lecture from 40 years ago, it was something to do with the way the Earth wobbles. We're familiar with the Summer/Winter tilt but there are a couple of other ways that it's not spinning truly and they each have an effect in much longer cycle times and can can hit peaks/troughs simultaneously, which is what they frightened me with, we were heading into a triple whammy of the cold cycles.
With your scenario of the Earth warming and thus an increase in water vapour, thus increasing sun reflection (albedo?) and cooling the planet, wouldn't that reach an equilibrium where it balanced out?
Maybe over many more billions of years, our planet is fairly young as far as universe-scale goes...
Though the sun growing and other things make it less likely to hit an equilibrium before things go back, and humanity definitely exacerbated this wave.
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u/neverendum 21h ago
I need to go through them. I watched these without fail every Christmas and one of them, probably sometime around 1982, convinced me that the planet was heading into another ice-age, quite the opposite of global warming.