@Ty As most of Earth's landmass and population is in the Northern hemisphere it is fortunate that this portion of the Earth is tipped towards the sun at the point of aphelion.

@syfredrick @syfredrick The South American plate moves ~1.2 inches west/year and African/Nubian plate moves ~0.85 inch east/year. If we imagine these velocities were constants (they're not), that implies these two continents would be some 18.9 mi + 13.4 mi = 32.4 miles farther apart in a million years. (To keep it simple, I'm discounting rotational and N/S movements.) That's not enough to cause major changes to climate, avian or oceanic migration, or - guessing here - topographical upheavals redirecting, cutting off, or creating new rivers, lakes and mountains. A billion years would have these continental plates colliding on the other side of the planet in a colossal remaking of much of the impacted territory. This is how the Himalayas were lifted. Indeed, another Pangaea-like supercontinent may form. Life has existed on Earth's tectonic plates, including the oceans, for some 3 billion years, and thrived throughout their slow dance around its tilted and spinning orb. Evolution assures that life will continue to adapt to changes in the Earth's crust. But life can only survive in a narrow zone of solar radiation. This limit precludes humankind hanging around as one of the last of the planet's lifeforms. That's reserved for microbes, and, perhaps, some small burrowing animals and deep sea creatures.

@PAN I recall from my childhood an “artist’s conception” of what life on Earth will look like when the sun boils our oceans— The not-too-realistic drawing depicted everything in an orange light with a cruise ship laying on its side on dry cracked ground with frightened and confused people running in different directions trying to get away.

Remarkable article. I second your praise for the NYT science section.

@I Gadfly They say only mad dogs and Englishman play in the midday sun. Yes there in mid lat parts of AU the sun is currently almost directly overhead and it is easy to shade your head and face with a hat. Later in the day the blistering sun sneaks in under my hat and hits my whole body, not just the top of my shoulders. Perhaps midday is the right time to play cricket or go for a bike ride or do the farm work?

@Justwonderin Ask a typical high school student? LOL How about asking the average adult on the street? The enormity of the ignorance of most people is astounding! Truly we have entered another phase of the Know Nothings!

@Justwonderin Yes (it's Ottawa; a compromise between Ontario British and Quebec French as it's just about on the border). These are the folks that think Vancouver is the capital of BC (it's Victoria, folks) and Calgary is the capital of AB (It's Edmonton). Don't feel bad, Canada. How many Americans know the capital of SD? It's Pierre. Or the capital of KY (it's Frankfort)? Or MO? It's Jefferson City.

@Michael You're spot on Michael, and 74 million of those adults voted for Trump in 2020. That says it all.

@Independent The two things are unrelated.

@Mike Laird Basically most gases of 3 or more atoms are "greenhouse gases" one of the very strongest is actually H2O (aka water). CO2 is no more of a pollutant then water. As with just about every other chemical known the danger is in the size of the dose. Water will kill you just the same. I suspect the details you are requesting would be lost on most readers as well as many writers. As such they are omitted.

@Mike Laird David's point is well taken, that the details would be lost on people who are not scientists. Very simply, diatomic molecules such as O2 and N2 can vibrate in only one dimension, whereas polyatomic molecules such as CO2, CH4, H2O, N2O, NO2...can vibrate in many modes in three dimensions. These modes absorb energy in the mid-infrared, where the Earth radiates its energy (absorbed from the Sun) back into space. The heat is radiated back into space, but at higher altitud;es, where it is cooler. Molecules such as N2 and O2 are transparent at these wavelengths.

@Mike Laird Sunlight reaches Earth as UV radiation because our atmosphere is transparent to it. Upon irradiating our planet and warming it that radiation changes to IR - infrared radiation - to which our atmosphere is opaque, thereby trapping the heat of IR. Ergo, the greenhouse effect and rising global average temperatures. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with this fact so that you keep from writing drivel.

@Erik Frederiksen A million dollar question!

@Kontum This is still part of the basic science curriculum and is introduced earlier than high school. That doesn’t mean instruction is effective. There was a study done in the 1980s which demonstrated that most Harvard seniors had these same misconceptions.

@Kontum This is still part of the basic science curriculum and is introduced earlier than high school. That doesn’t mean instruction is effective. There was a study done in the 1980s which demonstrated that most Harvard seniors had these same misconceptions.

@Kontum This is still part of the basic science curriculum and is introduced earlier than high school. That doesn’t mean instruction is effective. There was a study done in the 1980s which demonstrated that most Harvard seniors had these same misconceptions.

@GeorgeB Global warming or heating is much more hazardous that most people realize. You only need to go back to about 1,000 years to find the Medieval Warm Period where temperatures were somewhat higher than they are now - and that is just natural variation. There has been natural, cyclical warming and cooling 'forever'. We are now coming to the end of the cooling phase and should expect temperatures to rise again - naturally. However, add to that the undoubted additional warming that industrialization has caused and we could be in very dangerous ground very quickly. The Younger Dryas was a period of extreme cold - an Ice Age. That was probably triggered by a single event stopping the Atlantic Conveyor which pumps heat from the tropics to the Arctic. If you add natural warming (which is seldom talked about for simplicities sake) to anthropogenic warming we may double the projected temperature rise over the coming years. If we melt the Greenland ice cap and drop about 2.9 million cubic kilometers of fresh water into the Atlantic basin, that would stop the Atlantic Conveyor and we'd have triggered a new ice age. A warming planet is generally survivable for most people; an ice bound one - not so much.

@vicki The length of the day has been increasing over the past 4 billion years because tidal forces between the Earth and Moon are causing the Earth's rotation to slow while transferring energy to the Moon, causing its separation from the Earth to increase. This is because the Earth rotates in a shorter time than the Moon's orbital period.

@vicki I do not know how the Earth's orbital period around the Sun is changing, but the length of one day on Earth is changing. This is due to the gravitational interactions between the Earth and the Moon. As we all know, the Moon causes the tides. Ocean water rises on the side of the Earth facing the Moon. The Earth rotates around its own axis faster than the Moon orbits the Earth, and friction pulls that mass of ocean water ahead of the Moon. Because the mass of water is now slightly ahead of the Moon, it ends up pulling the Moon forward. This interaction adds energy to the Moon's orbit and removes energy from the Earth's rotation. The end effects are the Moon drifting away from Earth, the Earth's rotation slowing, and a day on Earth becoming longer. This may be the source of the decrease in days for the Earth to orbit the Sun.

@vicki: Since its formation the Earth's orbit has changed very little, mostly a small variation in how elliptical it is, so the length of the year has changed very little. The *days* used to be shorter, therefore there were more of them in a year.

@Blackmamba They explained that the seasons are caused by the axis tilt in the 4th paragraph, explicitly pointing out that the energy effect from the distance to the Sun is much much smaller. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with the rest of your post, except maybe “Oh well, if we go extinct, we go extinct?”

@Blackmamba What's nonsense? Aphelion is the point in the orbit of a planet, comet, or other body that is farthest from the Sun. The word aphelion comes from the Greek words, apo meaning away, off, apart and Helios. The Earth is at aphelion in early July, about two weeks after the June solstice. It's about 4,800,000 km (3,000,000 miles) farther from the Sun than when at its perihelion in early January. In southern Australia people aren't complaining about the heat, quite the contrary. And yet in Australia generally they are very much aware of global climate change.

@Blackmamba And to complement what you say, 6 months from now, the earth's tilt will bring winter to the northern hemisphere and summer to the southern hemisphere. If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to live in summer all year round.