The Earth is Shaking!

Today I had one of those oh my gosh moments.  I've taken Ecology courses that discuss how environments differ in thousands of ways and they affect what lives there, how species interact, and so on and so forth.  I've also taken a course about Astrology, and how Earth has a tilt in its axis and this affects the angle of the sunlight on it, I could bore you for hours.  However, did you know, that the axis tilt can actually change?  Better yet, that this change in axial tilt and the consequences of it can affect global climate? The concept blew my mind, but it makes a lot of sense as well.  http://science.jrank.org/pages/3059/Global-Climate.html This is a link to a free "Science Encyclopedia" with information showing how the earth's axis moves on a wobble every few thousand years.  This changes how directly the sun's rays strike the earth, which in turn determines how much of the heat is absorbed by our planet and how much just deflects back out into space.
   The mind blowing part is that there are theories out there, theories with pretty convincing data, showing the ice age/warming cycles this planet  has been going through since it formed correspond with axis tilt.  What I'm thinking is that maybe this global warming thing could be a result of part of the cycle where the planet is leaning towards the straight part of the "axis wobble." More direct sun would warm the atmosphere, and this atmosphere will hold that heat.  This cycle is apparently 41,000 years old.  Furthermore, judging from mass extinctions (shown by dated fossil records) occurring at the peaks of this cycle, the effects were powerful enough to wipe out anywhere from 60-90% of the current flora and fauna species. 
   Now, which is more frightening to you?  Would you prefer if the earth getting hotter and threatening economic and ecological de-stability as OUR fault, and thus correctable or at least preventable next time around?  Or would you rather this cycle be some natural, unstoppable, uncorrectable event which we will just have to learn to live with?  I think moving to the moon someday might be a good idea.

First Post - Phenology

I am currently in an Ecology course at college, and it's a class I enjoy very much, if only for the amount of fieldwork we do.  One of our projects is to follow one of the trees on campus and track it's phenophase changes.  (Phenophase meaning what the tree is doing at that point in time.) Last Spring, myself and several other students noticed something odd, the plants were flowering and fruiting MUCH sooner in the season than normal, and some even managed to flower and fruit twice.  This prompted me to do a little research, and http://star.arm.ac.uk/nci/docs/100562.pdf <--- THIS is what I found.  This article by Allison Donnelly, Nicolas Salamin and Mike B. Jones discussing how warmer springs could be triggering early phenophases in trees.  Now, a lot of people believe Global Warming is a hoax, and because temperature fluctuations happen yearly, they might be right.  However, no one can argue that the last decade has seen higher average spring and summer temperatures.  Another point to note, this paper's study took place in Iceland, and the warm spring/summer trend is happening not just here, but all over the world. 
   The article talks more about some fairly serious implications, and more than hints at carbon emissions from human activity as a likely cause.  But, I just found it interesting that whether it's our fault or not, the trees are being fooled into reproducing earlier in the year.  (Phenophase changes are often  caused by average temperature changes that accompany season changes.) It's making me wonder, if it's all just a hoax, I wonder how the trees on campus are being fooled.