Climate “Cycles”

There is no such phenomenon as a natural “cycle.” There are forces that act on matter over time in a ways that suppress or reinforce their activity in periodic fashion. But the “cycle“ emerges from the forcing, not just because the physical world is bound to conform to some purported cycle. Those forces can come from Earth (like tectonic activity or biotic influences) or from space (solar sunspot storms). So when people say that our current radical climate change is the result of a cycle, that the climate is always changing, and so on, it ignores the fact that this “cycle” is moved by forces, and these forces can be identified and measured, just like all physical events. What scientists have realized through this process of measurement is that the principal force operating here and now to warm the Earth is the increased surface retention of the Sun’s energy resulting from the marked increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity.

Just like the annual processions of the seasons isn’t the result of a “cycle.” It’s the result of the obliquity of the Earth’s axis in relation to the Sun, which results from the orbital relationship between the two bodies, itself not a cycle but a consequence of mass and velocity. And so on.