Transcript: Ice ages are periods of global cooling by a few degrees, up to ten or so degrees, that occur at irregular intervals of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. The causes of ice ages are complex, but over the past few million years, there is good evidence that variations in the Earth’s orbit has contributed to the cause of ice ages, in particular the Earth’s tilt on it’s axis, which is varied from twenty-two to twenty-five degrees, influenced primarily by Jupiter. ...

Transcript: There is over 100,000 times more carbon dioxide locked up in the ocean and the rocks of Earth than there is in the atmosphere. If even a tiny percentage of this carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere, it would lead to a runaway greenhouse effect that would raise the temperature of the Earth to the level Venus and beyond, and make life extremely difficult. Thus, there appears to be a fundamental connection between the regulation of carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide...

Transcript: In addition to gradual change over billions of years, Earth’s climates has been fluctuating and subject to instabilities that have taken it to extremes that are hard for us to imagine. In a period of six hundred to seven hundred and fifty million years ago, Earth was subject to a series of deep ice ages when glaciers reached nearly to the equator, and the oceans froze to a depth of about a kilometer. This is hard for us to imagine. It got this way because a normal fluctuation...

Transcript: The stability of the Earth’s atmosphere over billions of years has been impacted in part by the carbon dioxide cycle which has acted as a thermostat to regulate the temperature of the Earth, even over time spans when the Sun was changing its brightness or the amount of tectonic activity was varying. The basic chemical principle is that the rate at which carbonates form depend on temperature, and carbonates from faster when it’s hotter. Thus when the temperature increases, the...