Al-Battani Shield

CHAPTER 2 WHAT IS CLIMATE? The phrase ‘Earth’s Climate’ is used quite frivolously by most people. The climate, in reality and as it concerns humans and other living things, is the sum total of temperature, winds, barometric pressure and precipitation etc. over a surprisingly narrow band (narrow in vertical sense) occupied by all living things. Since the ocean is nowhere more than seven miles deep and no life in any form is known to exist more than five miles above the sea level, we are talking about a twelve mile wide band, at most, where those elements matter to us. We shall show that what happens below and above this band (loosely called the biosphere, the home of life.) massively impacts on what happens to the climate within the biosphere but these influences are neither linear and straightforward nor predictable. Nor are they even well understood. Without doubt, they interact mutually in very complex ways. The fact is, however, that all that matters to us is what happens within the biosphere. I point this out to underscore our need to acknowledge that in our desire to control or modify or somehow influence what happens within the biosphere, we must, at all times, be cognizant of our limits as far as what happens either above it or below it. What we do within this biosphere, say, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, may not produce the expected results; in fact our zealous efforts may backfire for the reasons we don’t completely understand. Measures taken to modulate the lower atmospheric conditions may alter the conditions in the upper atmosphere in ways that we may not like. The climate of this home of life is the sum total of very many factors that impact upon the final result in a myriad ways; the impact of some factors is minimal, short-lived and easily reversible; of others, it is very profound, it may be far-reaching and, perhaps, irreversible. Some factors can be controlled or, at least, modulated by man. Others are completely beyond our ability to modulate. Consequences of some of human endeavors to modify these factors may be reasonably predictable, such as building a shelter to avoid excessive cold, winds and rain, albeit over a very limited area. When we get inside the shelter, we avoid getting wet, excessively chilled or spared unpleasant winds. When we drain swamps, we change eco-system (e.g. get rid of mosquitoes). The impact of other, larger, measures may not at all be what we intended because each change – whether spontaneous or induced by man - may set off secondary changes. The final outcome of those changes may not be what we had intended or foreseen. We don’t always know or understand what secondary changes may follow and over what period of time when we execute a particular action to modulate the goings on in the home of life. This is the concept of chain reaction. These chain reactions may acquire life of their own and the final outcome may not be what we set out to achieve. It is for these reasons that we must continue and intensify scientific inquiries into the workings of nature and be very cautious, humble and also philosophical about what we can and cannot do at this juncture................... CHAPTER 4 THE CONCEPT OF DYNAMIC BALANCE AND RUNAWAY HEATING AND COOLING .......................The contention is that if there was to be a repeat of the so-called ‘Maunder Minimum’, a seventy five year long spell of cruelly cold climate in Europe from 1640 to 1715, we may forget about curbing our appetite for fossil fuels and resume to sleep-walking thugh a disaster underfoot. Then, when the cold spell naturally ends, we may find out that the greenhouse gases have, meanwhile, reached irreversibly ‘toxic’ levels and the global warming was to unfold in earnest. Mankind would then be watching a runaway heating helplessly because we may have passed the tipping point while in grips of a short-lived Little Ice Age! More on Maunder Minimum and related phenomena later (see Appendix D). CHAPTERS 9 OF TRANSITS, OCCULTATIONS AND ECLIPSES. ....................solar eclipse is far more spectacular. When the eclipse is total, meaning that the lunar disc completely covers the solar disc, the effect is said to be dramatic and eerie. Total eclipse of the sun, although infrequent for any given location, is not all that rare. Only it is visible over very small areas of Earth and it lasts for a relatively short time (totality lasts a few minutes). But during those few minutes, the daylight seems to vanish and darkness descends upon the scene when moments earlier it was full daylight. Atmospheric temperature drops several degrees in short order. Birds return to their perches and fall asleep. Nocturnal creatures spring into action and others go to sleep. And when the crescent-like outline of sun emerges from behind the Moon and it is daytime again, roosters actually crow, the animals and birds wake up and resume their activities and the nocturnal ones again retire. So dramatic is the scene that all cultures across the globe, over millennia, ascribed divine – sometimes malevolent – hand in the happening and concocted ways to assuage the gods!