2014 Officially Hottest Year on Record (Depending on Who You Ask)

a reply to: mbkennel

Cool, thanks for the links! That snippet from skeptical science is exactly what I was looking for actually. I wasn't very clear in my post above sorry - I was concerned with eccentricity because I'm trying to understand how Milankovitch Cycles affect mean-global insolation specifically.

I'm writing something up that examines how GHGs factor in to the full picture, but step one is explaining why we know Milankovitch Cycles are too weak on their own. Since obliquity and axial precession don't change the amount of sunlight incident on the planet, I was looking at eccentricity exclusively. I figured it's a pretty trivial calculation, but couldn't find an actual resource to back me up (probably because it's so trivial). That formula as a function of eccentricity is perfect though.

Once we factor in precession things definitely get much more complicated, but that's also of course where GHGs help solve the puzzle Thanks again.