What we have here is a failure to commutate.

[Bart]

The magnetic north pole has left Canada. It is now in international waters headed for Siberia. Canada no longer has to rescue those of us who wish to be at the magnetic north pole. This will not save Canada any money for a while since they will still rescue the people who get in trouble going to the magnetic north pole. I have never been there.

It is now moving faster (50 kilometers per year or so) in the last few years, than it has since we have written history. That is a long time for me. We do know the magnetic poles switch position and switch off on occasions. It will be in Siberia in less than 75 years, maybe! If you have ever been on this planet and looked to north from a compass, North has moved many degrees. You may be lost.

Yipes, the world is warming. What has the movement of the magnetic pole have to do with the “warming”? Nothing, you say. Well, you are an uneducated boob.

Will someone please explain this to me?

ps: We have no way to control or influence the magnetic poles.

 

[Harmageddon]

I'll give it a shot.

I don’t know the mechanisms behind it (I’m not a geologist) but I do know that the magnetic poles shift every other 10s of thousands of years: i.e. the magnetic north becomes the magnetic south. It has happened many times before, as discoveries studying ancient rock formations have shown. Rock is made up of silicates or other hard materials, and is solid. The atoms in rock don’t wobble around as much – hardly at all. But all the atoms in the rock have their own polarity, and they are aligned in a direction that corresponds to the Earth’s magnetic field.

In ancient rock formations, magnetic poles of the atoms are shifted in the opposite direction (magnetic north in the geological south), and this process reverses as older rocks are studied. And so on, back and forth, all the time. This shift goes slowly at first, and as it is speeding up (currently 50 kilometers a year or so), it will continue to do so until a critical threshold is reached – and then it will abruptly flip/flop. When it reaches the geographical south pole, it will bounce back and forth until it somewhat stabilizes there, and the whole cycle will then begin anew.

Now, as for global warming and the shifting of the poles; the shifting may influence the climate, but not the other way around. Thing is, as the flip/flop occurs, Earth will temporarily have a weakened magnetic field – and many more of the particles that the Sun bombards us with will find their way to the surface of the Earth. When that protection is off, it may accelerate the warming of the Earth, but there is now raw data to confirm this hypothesis.

What is known is that the sun itself shows cyclic patterns of activity. And we know that when the sun is at its most active, we experience global warming. We also know that Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas, as are numerous others. We know that we emit many millions of tons of greenhouse gases more than the Earth can accommodate. For example, trees, but more so algae, need CO2 to live, and they absorb this and emit oxygen (O2) as waste. We know we are cutting trees at a very fast rate to accommodate farmland and housing – and thus we accelerate the rate at which CO2 is emitted and at the same time we slow the rate at which it can be absorbed into the cycle of life.

Since life has been around all this time I would not expect many difficulties, although it is quite likely that many species that have specialized themselves a little too well to their environment (such as polar bears or penguins) all die. Birds (and other animals that use the Earth’s magnetic field as a compass) may move in the wrong direction in the first year after the complete shift, but they will then adapt and then we say: “life goes on”.