I really like what you write about the split between CO2, mechanized agriculture, and urbanization. I think this provides a testable framework that is "synthesizeable" with the existing conventional wisdom on climate change. I don't see a huge incompatibility in what you're saying here with "CO2 causes warming," just with the Greta-Thunberg-Egregore's insistence that any modification or extension of the conventional wisdom is heresy.
The culture war part of this is so sad because I think protecting forests and building nuclear power are culture-war-agnostic solutions that are plainly good ideas on their face.
If you go back and look at ye olde "hockey stick graph" for warming it begins with the invention of mechanized agriculture, not with major CO2 releases. I'd like to simply see a massive multivariate analysis that includes as many possible warming drivers as possible and let an ANN fit the data to see what it comes up with. I also think some of the stuff I've read in AR5 smelled quite a lot like activism.
There was a study in AR5 that said that outside of the carbon sink issue, deforestation of 50% of the world's old growth forests had a net cooling effect on the planet. It made me want to punch babies. There's no way I believe that.
If someone showed their work on deforestation leading to net cooling I could get behind that, but it seems pretty ridiculous! Are all scientifically rigorous discoveries naturally intuitive, or are we surprised some times?
I understand the justification because I read the methodology. They figured deforesting areas that are snowy increased the amount of light reflected by the snow. I just don't buy it in a global sense.
Sep 11, 2023·edited Sep 11, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Per this study, these effects can be subtle? Thinning out temperate zone forests can, in fact, sometimes actually increase snowpack – even beyond just exposing more of it to the sky. And that in turn might keep snow (with its high albedo) on the ground for a longer time during the year, reflecting more sunlight and contributing to cooling. But that also may be dependent on altitude. (Real world narratives are so frustratingly often this complicated.)
And noting this study, in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, applies specifically to "thick, dense stands of replanted Douglas fir trees in second-growth forests," and only to selective thinning (or potentially, to changes in initial planting practices?). It doesn't cover clear-cutting or other, more extreme deforestation. Nor the impact of deforestation in the tropics or other regions.
The world's #1 cultivated non-productive crop: lawn grass.
How much? I dunno. It's been a waste of effort and resources and decimated natural landscapes since a bunch of French royals decided it was a great way to show off their fabulous wealth and it got fashionable.
Whoever demands that lawns be banned for the sake of the future of our climate is sure to catch heat from both sides and I'm here for that.
Depends on what you replace the grass with. If you replace it with asphalt it's likely to vastly increase warming. White concrete, maybe not as much as you'd think, because of albedo effects. You could also consider that mowing grass is a carbon sink. ;)
I would love to do a Great Reset on lawns. Imagine how much more healthy, resilient, and peaceful America would be if we replaced lawns with vegetable gardens.
I mean yeah, but I've got 2 acres and I can barely keep the damn thing mowed, to say nothing of cultivating it all into vegetables which the deer are just going to eat.
The real nasty stuff about lawns is suburban ones that are regularly treated with stuff that gets into the runoff. Rural lawns are mostly just pastures without the cows.
Great analysis, and that is basically where I have landed myself after years of loving simple sounding solutions, then finally sitting down and doing the math and then learning everything I can about energy. Sure AGW is happening partly because of CO2 emissions. So what, everyone who can afford it is going to get an air conditioner so strap in because energy is what makes life worth living.
Long story short- we need to make energy 10-100x cheaper so we can have vertical greenhouses and recycle CO2 from the air into synfuels. Then we let nature be nature and keep living our best lives making everyone on the planet richer. So basically- we need as many nukes as possible of every flavor because nothing else has the energy density to accomplish that goal. Everything else is bullshit.
Well, I'm very pro nuclear but nuke plants aren't free either. Free energy solves all the world's problems, but I think the only path to truly free energy is probably to figure out what kind of weird ass perpetual motion machine runs those UFOs.
As a shitty engineer, I would just say... what kind of shitty engineer does one have to be to squander a six order of magnitude energy density advantage? A 10x cost reduction is easy, we just have to go back to 1960s regulation levels when it was around 0.5 cents/kWh. 100x will be more of a stretch, but it is completely possible, and that would literally allow us to green the desert if we wanted to.
Well, if you're a practicing engineer you realize that solving the engineering problems is only at best 5% of your actual job, and the other 95% are a weird bastard child of law, psychology, and liability management. ;)
NASA has a satellite called CERES that monitors and measures, among other things, downward shortwave(light) flux and how much is reflected. For the last twenty years the show the amount reflected has been decreasing. There is consternation about this. Is it instrument drift, fewer clouds, change in surrface reflectivity, or a combination of all three. and yes, industrial farming and massive urbanization is also mostly ignored or brushed away as not important.
IPCC AR5 basically dismissed urban heat islands as a global warming driver, which infuriated me because you can see the damn things from space. In several spots of that report (I read the whole thing, it was awful and long) I felt as if they were intentionally downplaying other warming sources that they were worried would take attention away from carbon.
did you see anywhere when researching for this piece about the aerosol effects and albedo associated with tanker fuel? I can't remember where I read it now but I saw that EU regulations forced dirty, sulphur-containing tanker fuel to be made cleaner, which lead to less sulphur emissions which significantly reduced the albedo and caused a non-negligible raise in sea temps...though the energy involved there seems enormous so idk
I've heard several people bring up tanker fuel and aerosols, and that seems interesting but I have done zero research regarding that. Link me if you have a good comprehensive source.
Interestingly, the author notes: "a number of other factors are likely contributing to the ocean heatwave ... a recent spike in global sea surface temperature."
"These include a massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the south Pacific [the subject of HF's current post], an unusual absence of Saharan dust ..."
I live in rural South eastern Australia. After a very dry late winter and early spring all the signs seemed to point to a hot dry summer. (Particularly the IOD ,which is normally more important the further south you go, went max for dry.)
Yet its turned out to be a summer of well above average rainfall and around my area a bit cool definitely not above average maximums .
Don't know what to make of it ; in November while i thought the predictions of extremely dry conditions seemed a bit of a stretch, the indicators were not that clear, i didn't expect that we'd get the equivalent of about four fifths of a average years rainfall in about six weeks either.
I'm not the best person to ask TBH. That moisture from Hunga Tonga would have propagated in a band in the southern hemisphere and wouldn't have migrated much to the north of the equator, but it's not clear how much would have dropped down in to the troposphere or when. Could just be "the weather."
thanks the weather for Australia is famously always "extravagant " .
Wasn't thinking of Hunga tonga as a direct source of the rain, rather that it might have in someway simply made the weather trends hard to predict.
Ive been following the main indicators for years for mostly pragmatic reasons - i live in the bush
An example of strangeness; the IOD data goes back to about 1980 .
There has never previously been a period when the IOD was at max dry for southern Australia and we actually had sustained above average rainfall -some years it was just' dry enough' and other years 'dryer than a dead dingo and on fire' but never this wet.
(And up far north some places had around one and a half to even two meters of rain in a few days.)
"Most “runaway” climate models have an increase in water vapor as a main component without a corresponding increase in cloud cover and therefore decrease in global albedo."
I may simply not have understood what may be a very clear meaning on your part, but did you instead potentially intend to write something like this? "... without a corresponding increase in cloud cover, which would *increase* global albedo and thus reduce warming"?
Seeing this, confirming that increasing cloud cover also has the effect of increasing global albedo ...
"Because a cloud usually has a higher albedo than the surface beneath it, the cloud reflects more shortwave radiation back to space than the surface would in the absence of the cloud, thus leaving less solar energy available to heat the surface and atmosphere. Hence, this "cloud albedo forcing," taken by itself, tends to cause a cooling or "negative forcing" of the Earth's climate."
Sep 11, 2023·edited Sep 11, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Does climate change partisan disagreement really fall under the ambit of "culture war"? It's not a cultural issue, and to my knowledge "culture wars" has not subsumed good old fashioned partisan polarization.
I think so. Partisanship nowadays is less about police and more about whether you like or dislike country music and guns. Those two indicators are more predictive of your opinions about global warming or Ukraine than anything else I can think of.
Of course, since it was human industrial activity that caused that volcano to erupt, the only possible answer is for us to stop growing food. Humanity Must Die. So demands Gaia.
Great work. I imagine the timeline though will depend on how the heat the next two years fires the authoritarianism of the globalist left. I'm glad I know a lot about building, fermenting, hunting, fishing and growing food.
Global warming: How about the effects of nuclear & conventional weapon testing and endless bombing wars over greed & power 🤦 But by golly, us peasants better suck it up and buy an electric vehicle.
I looked into that a while back, and I don't think the direct heat from bomb testing moved the needle much, and if it did, it was only temporary. I do think bomb testing increased the permanent background radiation on the planet, which may have something to do with modern cancer rates. I don't know if bomb testing did anything appreciable to the atmosphere.
The earth is not in any danger from anthropogenic warming or even the natural cyclical warming you get between ice ages. It's the more brittle aspects of human civilization that might be in danger. As always, the earth abides.
I’ve lived in Illinois my whole life. Back when I was a kid and into my early 20s it seemed like the summers were much hotter for much longer. If I’m remembering correctly,around middle of June till beginning of august we could count on 90s-100s for the average temp. We called it the dog days of summer. While we still get some days like that now it doesn’t seem as bad for as long. Even this year. Mid to high 80s seems to me the average around here now days. Doesn’t seem like it’s warming in Illinois. But I will say this. Even if it is,better that than an ice age. The cold sucks. One more point. I kinda find it very egotistical of man kind to think we can make the weather perfect all the time. It’s the weather,it runs in cycles and while we may have some effect on it I’m thinking it’s around the same effect a flea has on a dog.
I'm the exact opposite. I think we're warming the planet in more ways that we can possibly control, that CO2 is only half the problem, that the scientists are barking up the CO2 tree because they're looking for an easy fix even though it's not easy, and the only thing that's going to slow it back to natural rates is a population collapse.
Georgia now has a Florida climate. South Carolina has a Georgia climate. NC has a SC climate. Etc. I think that's a good way of visualizing it.
If this summary's accurate, the cooling impacts of a supervolcano eruption last "from months to years." (For instance, the cooling impacts of sulfur dioxide gas releases can sometimes persist for at least three years.)
Presumably, the Earth's longer-term warming trend would continue thereafter, if the conditions contributing to that are still present? (Noting that I haven't looked into whether that's accurate.) And if so, we'd also benefit by looking at existing research on what the historical record tells us, regarding how many years might be required to get back to trend, following a multi-year drop due to such eruptions.
That's for a land based volcano, and for one who's SO2 and such were largely still trapped in the troposphere. I'm not sure how long a supervolcano's effects would last if they were all the way up in the stratosphere - most volcanos simply don't get that high in their effects.
Q: Does warming further north really cause us problems? Different time periods, but I know we have been warmer historically. (IE millions of years ago) I mean wouldn't it allow for greater harvesting at higher latitudes? Which if I read you right, may also increase warming due to further deforestation. (maybe?) Thanks for the informative post.
I think in a larger sense the only real "problem" that warming actually has is it floods the coasts. We could go farm in Canada just fine. Animal migration patterns would change but they'd still migrate or whatever. The vast majority of extinctions we have today have zero to do with warming, they're mostly related to loss of habitat and importation of invasive species, with real toxic pollution rounding them out.
And while some areas in rain shadows would get dryer, on net the world would get more rain. We go into that here:
As the Earth's geomagnetic field weakens - an ongoing and accelerating phenomenon - particles from the solar wind and CMEs are more able to bombard and heat the atmosphere. Since we're at the peak of the current sun cycle, the effect is in full show. It's not just irradiation. That's why the polar regions heat the most - it's where the particles are funneled in.
I really like what you write about the split between CO2, mechanized agriculture, and urbanization. I think this provides a testable framework that is "synthesizeable" with the existing conventional wisdom on climate change. I don't see a huge incompatibility in what you're saying here with "CO2 causes warming," just with the Greta-Thunberg-Egregore's insistence that any modification or extension of the conventional wisdom is heresy.
The culture war part of this is so sad because I think protecting forests and building nuclear power are culture-war-agnostic solutions that are plainly good ideas on their face.
If you go back and look at ye olde "hockey stick graph" for warming it begins with the invention of mechanized agriculture, not with major CO2 releases. I'd like to simply see a massive multivariate analysis that includes as many possible warming drivers as possible and let an ANN fit the data to see what it comes up with. I also think some of the stuff I've read in AR5 smelled quite a lot like activism.
There was a study in AR5 that said that outside of the carbon sink issue, deforestation of 50% of the world's old growth forests had a net cooling effect on the planet. It made me want to punch babies. There's no way I believe that.
If someone showed their work on deforestation leading to net cooling I could get behind that, but it seems pretty ridiculous! Are all scientifically rigorous discoveries naturally intuitive, or are we surprised some times?
I understand the justification because I read the methodology. They figured deforesting areas that are snowy increased the amount of light reflected by the snow. I just don't buy it in a global sense.
Per this study, these effects can be subtle? Thinning out temperate zone forests can, in fact, sometimes actually increase snowpack – even beyond just exposing more of it to the sky. And that in turn might keep snow (with its high albedo) on the ground for a longer time during the year, reflecting more sunlight and contributing to cooling. But that also may be dependent on altitude. (Real world narratives are so frustratingly often this complicated.)
https://www.opb.org/news/article/snowpack-trees-logging-impact-willamette-research/
And noting this study, in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, applies specifically to "thick, dense stands of replanted Douglas fir trees in second-growth forests," and only to selective thinning (or potentially, to changes in initial planting practices?). It doesn't cover clear-cutting or other, more extreme deforestation. Nor the impact of deforestation in the tropics or other regions.
You know what probably isn't factored in enough?
The world's #1 cultivated non-productive crop: lawn grass.
How much? I dunno. It's been a waste of effort and resources and decimated natural landscapes since a bunch of French royals decided it was a great way to show off their fabulous wealth and it got fashionable.
Whoever demands that lawns be banned for the sake of the future of our climate is sure to catch heat from both sides and I'm here for that.
Depends on what you replace the grass with. If you replace it with asphalt it's likely to vastly increase warming. White concrete, maybe not as much as you'd think, because of albedo effects. You could also consider that mowing grass is a carbon sink. ;)
I would love to do a Great Reset on lawns. Imagine how much more healthy, resilient, and peaceful America would be if we replaced lawns with vegetable gardens.
I mean yeah, but I've got 2 acres and I can barely keep the damn thing mowed, to say nothing of cultivating it all into vegetables which the deer are just going to eat.
The real nasty stuff about lawns is suburban ones that are regularly treated with stuff that gets into the runoff. Rural lawns are mostly just pastures without the cows.
You're behind the times. Blue America has already decided that lawns are the devil and "xeriscaping" is the only rightthinking way to go.
Not that the Obamas' yard will be filled with weeds any time soon.
Great analysis, and that is basically where I have landed myself after years of loving simple sounding solutions, then finally sitting down and doing the math and then learning everything I can about energy. Sure AGW is happening partly because of CO2 emissions. So what, everyone who can afford it is going to get an air conditioner so strap in because energy is what makes life worth living.
Long story short- we need to make energy 10-100x cheaper so we can have vertical greenhouses and recycle CO2 from the air into synfuels. Then we let nature be nature and keep living our best lives making everyone on the planet richer. So basically- we need as many nukes as possible of every flavor because nothing else has the energy density to accomplish that goal. Everything else is bullshit.
Well, I'm very pro nuclear but nuke plants aren't free either. Free energy solves all the world's problems, but I think the only path to truly free energy is probably to figure out what kind of weird ass perpetual motion machine runs those UFOs.
As a shitty engineer, I would just say... what kind of shitty engineer does one have to be to squander a six order of magnitude energy density advantage? A 10x cost reduction is easy, we just have to go back to 1960s regulation levels when it was around 0.5 cents/kWh. 100x will be more of a stretch, but it is completely possible, and that would literally allow us to green the desert if we wanted to.
Well, if you're a practicing engineer you realize that solving the engineering problems is only at best 5% of your actual job, and the other 95% are a weird bastard child of law, psychology, and liability management. ;)
Completely agree. Hence the “shitty” part 😊
The other thing worth looking into is to do what Sweden is doing with their plastic .... incinerating it.
NASA has a satellite called CERES that monitors and measures, among other things, downward shortwave(light) flux and how much is reflected. For the last twenty years the show the amount reflected has been decreasing. There is consternation about this. Is it instrument drift, fewer clouds, change in surrface reflectivity, or a combination of all three. and yes, industrial farming and massive urbanization is also mostly ignored or brushed away as not important.
IPCC AR5 basically dismissed urban heat islands as a global warming driver, which infuriated me because you can see the damn things from space. In several spots of that report (I read the whole thing, it was awful and long) I felt as if they were intentionally downplaying other warming sources that they were worried would take attention away from carbon.
did you see anywhere when researching for this piece about the aerosol effects and albedo associated with tanker fuel? I can't remember where I read it now but I saw that EU regulations forced dirty, sulphur-containing tanker fuel to be made cleaner, which lead to less sulphur emissions which significantly reduced the albedo and caused a non-negligible raise in sea temps...though the energy involved there seems enormous so idk
I've heard several people bring up tanker fuel and aerosols, and that seems interesting but I have done zero research regarding that. Link me if you have a good comprehensive source.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
Taken at face value, that seems as if the switch would be about Half a Hunga Tonga, but would last a longer time.
Thanks for the share!
Interestingly, the author notes: "a number of other factors are likely contributing to the ocean heatwave ... a recent spike in global sea surface temperature."
"These include a massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the south Pacific [the subject of HF's current post], an unusual absence of Saharan dust ..."
I live in rural South eastern Australia. After a very dry late winter and early spring all the signs seemed to point to a hot dry summer. (Particularly the IOD ,which is normally more important the further south you go, went max for dry.)
Yet its turned out to be a summer of well above average rainfall and around my area a bit cool definitely not above average maximums .
Don't know what to make of it ; in November while i thought the predictions of extremely dry conditions seemed a bit of a stretch, the indicators were not that clear, i didn't expect that we'd get the equivalent of about four fifths of a average years rainfall in about six weeks either.
Any thoughts?
I'm not the best person to ask TBH. That moisture from Hunga Tonga would have propagated in a band in the southern hemisphere and wouldn't have migrated much to the north of the equator, but it's not clear how much would have dropped down in to the troposphere or when. Could just be "the weather."
thanks the weather for Australia is famously always "extravagant " .
Wasn't thinking of Hunga tonga as a direct source of the rain, rather that it might have in someway simply made the weather trends hard to predict.
Ive been following the main indicators for years for mostly pragmatic reasons - i live in the bush
An example of strangeness; the IOD data goes back to about 1980 .
There has never previously been a period when the IOD was at max dry for southern Australia and we actually had sustained above average rainfall -some years it was just' dry enough' and other years 'dryer than a dead dingo and on fire' but never this wet.
(And up far north some places had around one and a half to even two meters of rain in a few days.)
Do you have an article where you describe your concerns about the impacts of mechanized agriculture on the climate?
Not yet. If I put one together it would be highly speculative and require a lot of research and I don't really have the time yet.
I was confused by this sentence:
"Most “runaway” climate models have an increase in water vapor as a main component without a corresponding increase in cloud cover and therefore decrease in global albedo."
I may simply not have understood what may be a very clear meaning on your part, but did you instead potentially intend to write something like this? "... without a corresponding increase in cloud cover, which would *increase* global albedo and thus reduce warming"?
Seeing this, confirming that increasing cloud cover also has the effect of increasing global albedo ...
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Clouds
"Because a cloud usually has a higher albedo than the surface beneath it, the cloud reflects more shortwave radiation back to space than the surface would in the absence of the cloud, thus leaving less solar energy available to heat the surface and atmosphere. Hence, this "cloud albedo forcing," taken by itself, tends to cause a cooling or "negative forcing" of the Earth's climate."
Yeah I think that's a typeo, I'll fix it. I always get that mixed up in my head, whether albedo is a measure of reflectivity or absorption.
Just remember that “albedo” has the same root as “albino” - I.e. it’s a measure of whiteness/reflectivity. :)
Does climate change partisan disagreement really fall under the ambit of "culture war"? It's not a cultural issue, and to my knowledge "culture wars" has not subsumed good old fashioned partisan polarization.
I think so. Partisanship nowadays is less about police and more about whether you like or dislike country music and guns. Those two indicators are more predictive of your opinions about global warming or Ukraine than anything else I can think of.
I dislike country music and like guns. WTF am I? haha.
I have similar issues. I'm a nationally known gun writer but I produce techno music and play dungeons and dragons. Good luck finding a tribe that way.
I'm on a discord full of people who would fit right in with that.
It's not the sort of tribe that has any national-class presence though.
Of course, since it was human industrial activity that caused that volcano to erupt, the only possible answer is for us to stop growing food. Humanity Must Die. So demands Gaia.
If we’d just thrown a few virgins into Hunga Tonga back in 2021, this would never have happened.
Great work. I imagine the timeline though will depend on how the heat the next two years fires the authoritarianism of the globalist left. I'm glad I know a lot about building, fermenting, hunting, fishing and growing food.
Global warming: How about the effects of nuclear & conventional weapon testing and endless bombing wars over greed & power 🤦 But by golly, us peasants better suck it up and buy an electric vehicle.
I looked into that a while back, and I don't think the direct heat from bomb testing moved the needle much, and if it did, it was only temporary. I do think bomb testing increased the permanent background radiation on the planet, which may have something to do with modern cancer rates. I don't know if bomb testing did anything appreciable to the atmosphere.
The earth is not in any danger from anthropogenic warming or even the natural cyclical warming you get between ice ages. It's the more brittle aspects of human civilization that might be in danger. As always, the earth abides.
I’ve lived in Illinois my whole life. Back when I was a kid and into my early 20s it seemed like the summers were much hotter for much longer. If I’m remembering correctly,around middle of June till beginning of august we could count on 90s-100s for the average temp. We called it the dog days of summer. While we still get some days like that now it doesn’t seem as bad for as long. Even this year. Mid to high 80s seems to me the average around here now days. Doesn’t seem like it’s warming in Illinois. But I will say this. Even if it is,better that than an ice age. The cold sucks. One more point. I kinda find it very egotistical of man kind to think we can make the weather perfect all the time. It’s the weather,it runs in cycles and while we may have some effect on it I’m thinking it’s around the same effect a flea has on a dog.
I'm the exact opposite. I think we're warming the planet in more ways that we can possibly control, that CO2 is only half the problem, that the scientists are barking up the CO2 tree because they're looking for an easy fix even though it's not easy, and the only thing that's going to slow it back to natural rates is a population collapse.
Georgia now has a Florida climate. South Carolina has a Georgia climate. NC has a SC climate. Etc. I think that's a good way of visualizing it.
None of it will matter after one of the worlds super volcanoes erupts anyway. Relax!🤣
If this summary's accurate, the cooling impacts of a supervolcano eruption last "from months to years." (For instance, the cooling impacts of sulfur dioxide gas releases can sometimes persist for at least three years.)
https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/how-volcanoes-influence-climate
Presumably, the Earth's longer-term warming trend would continue thereafter, if the conditions contributing to that are still present? (Noting that I haven't looked into whether that's accurate.) And if so, we'd also benefit by looking at existing research on what the historical record tells us, regarding how many years might be required to get back to trend, following a multi-year drop due to such eruptions.
That's for a land based volcano, and for one who's SO2 and such were largely still trapped in the troposphere. I'm not sure how long a supervolcano's effects would last if they were all the way up in the stratosphere - most volcanos simply don't get that high in their effects.
Q: Does warming further north really cause us problems? Different time periods, but I know we have been warmer historically. (IE millions of years ago) I mean wouldn't it allow for greater harvesting at higher latitudes? Which if I read you right, may also increase warming due to further deforestation. (maybe?) Thanks for the informative post.
I think in a larger sense the only real "problem" that warming actually has is it floods the coasts. We could go farm in Canada just fine. Animal migration patterns would change but they'd still migrate or whatever. The vast majority of extinctions we have today have zero to do with warming, they're mostly related to loss of habitat and importation of invasive species, with real toxic pollution rounding them out.
And while some areas in rain shadows would get dryer, on net the world would get more rain. We go into that here:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/concept-design-for-the-worlds-dumbest
NOAA offers historical temperature data for various US locations, and you can play around with various reporting options.
Here's Chicago ... (it looks like their data goes back at least as far as the early 1870s.)
https://www.weather.gov/wrh/climate?wfo=lot
Thanks for the article. What do you make of this about methane?
Uh Oh, Methane Evidence Suggests We Entered Ice Age Termination Event
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72uza9JpT-I&t=691s
Re: solar radiation
As the Earth's geomagnetic field weakens - an ongoing and accelerating phenomenon - particles from the solar wind and CMEs are more able to bombard and heat the atmosphere. Since we're at the peak of the current sun cycle, the effect is in full show. It's not just irradiation. That's why the polar regions heat the most - it's where the particles are funneled in.