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Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute (whoi.edu) has made some very nice animations illustrating the ocean currents, including what happens when increasing amounts of fresh artic melt water enter the North Atlantic -- the Gulf Stream is blocked, and the prevailing westerly winds are no longer warmed, and then Europe enters a new little Ice Age, just like 1400-1850.

See Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
and Abrupt Climate Change.

-- Jim

Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute (whoi.edu) has made some very nice animations illustrating the ocean currents, including what happens when increasing amounts of fresh artic melt water enter the North Atlantic -- the Gulf Stream is blocked, and the prevailing westerly winds are no longer warmed, and then Europe enters a new little Ice Age, just like 1400-1850.

See Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
and Abrupt Climate Change.

-- Jim

Where we live, it's illegal to think about that. ;-) We don't need that many new nukular plants, what we need is an awareness that it's time (for a lot of reasons) to stop spending resources we don't have and it's time to think about rebuilding our energy systems to adapt to the circumstances. When the oil runs out, it's too late.

Look, it's very simple, logically: You detect an adverse effect which we shall call E. Just before this effect was noticed, possible causes A, B, C and D also occured. A, B and C are beyond our control, but D isn't. Now, is it logical to keep doing D just because E could be caused by any of the other three reasons, in combination or alone? I put it to you that the logical conclusion must be to stop doing D and see if it helps E any. Going on about an imaginary "risk" that would suddenly appear when stopping D is just silly, after all we did just fine not doing D just moments ago.

Cows are more likely to cause any effects compared to cars.

And rows upon rows of millions of cows (Dr. Seuss would be proud of me) are a natural phenomenon since when, exactly? Humans do other things than drive cars, you know. For example, I drive a bike. ;-)

(Not to mention that 65 million years ago the mean temperature of the earth was 10 degrees celsius higher. I guess the dinos drove a lot of SUVs ...)

So you are advocating not only that we skip cutting back on emissions, but also that we deliberately increase them, try to create a few thousand more active volcanoes, killing off all the large mammals (including ourselves) and crawl back into the holes we lived in before we took to the trees? Is this a plan to manufacture more crude oil?

Well, I don't think Gaia would mind, but there are a few billion others that may have a problem with that plan. While we're at it, 4 billion years ago, it was waaay warmer than that. Let's go there instead, shall we?

The current increase in temperature is a bit drastic to be natural. We're not talking 10 degrees in 65 million years here (and just look at the changes in climate we've had since then) but in the range of tens of degrees in the last decade. At this rate, we will not have time to adapt.

Wood's Hole Research Center - The Warming of the Earth

Why then are the most recent increases of such concern? First, because the most recent increases are occurring at rates that have not been observed since the last ice age (IPCC 1995) and have only previously been observed in association with dramatic shifts in climate. Second, the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over the past 150 years (from about 280 parts per million to about 360 parts per million) is largely due to anthropogenic (human-caused) effects (IPCC 1995).

Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute - Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?

In an important paper published in 2002 in Nature, oceanographers monitoring and analyzing conditions in the North Atlantic concluded that the North Atlantic has been freshening dramatically--continuously for the past 40 years but especially in the past decade.4 The new data show that since the mid-1960s, the subpolar seas feeding the North Atlantic have steadily and noticeably become less salty to depths of 1,000 to 4,000 meters. This is the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments.

At present the influx of fresher water has been distributed throughout the water column. But at some point, fresh water may begin to pile up at the surface of the North Atlantic. When that occurs, the Conveyor could slow down or cease operating.

Signs of a possible slowdown already exist. A 2001 report in Nature indicates that the flow of cold, dense water from the Norwegian and Greenland Seas into the North Atlantic has diminished by at least 20 percent since 1950.

Ice Age's tend not to last millions of years. The last one only lasted about 120,000 years.
But if you are interested in whether an Ice Age could result from global warming, here is a link that my interest:
www.whoi.edu/home/about/whatsnew_abruptclimate.htm l.

So, yes, you are missing a large part of the Global Warming argument - the effect on ocean currents, and their impact on the environment.

Counter intuitive, but it is the influx of fresh water that is the problem, not volume. The decrease in salinity will have devistating effects on our weather patterns.

This was covered in slashdot, but i can't turn it up at the moment.

Here is what the Director if the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has to say about it:

"When I say "dramatic," I mean: Average winter temperatures could drop by 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States, and by 10 degrees in the northeastern United States and in Europe. That's enough to send mountain glaciers advancing down from the Alps. To freeze rivers and harbors and bind North Atlantic shipping lanes in ice. To disrupt the operation of ground and air transportation. To cause energy needs to soar exponentially. To force wholesale changes in agricultural practices and fisheries. To change the way we feed our populations. In short, the world, and the world economy, would be drastically different.

And when I say "abrupt," I mean: These changes could happen within a decade, and they could persist for hundreds of years. You could see the changes in your lifetime, and your grandchildren's grandchildren will still be confronting them.

And when I say "soon," I mean: In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold. If we cross it, Earth's climate could switch gears and jump very rapidly--not gradually-- into a completely different mode of operation."

--Dr. Robert B. Gagosian, President and Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Full article text:

Triggering Abrupt Climate Change

Heat Shortage Coming?

It's expensive and nominally rated to last up to 24 hours in a salt-spray environment. In reality they don't hold up so well, and are always crashing. Screens and keyboards are particularly vulnerable. The failure time on them probably isn't worth the additional cost. Plus they're kinda slow. Fast, cheap (disposable-cheap) and out of control would probably have been a better choice.

The story broke shortly after tea yesterday, troll favorite and family entertainer Goatse.cx is dead at the age of 3. Goatse was best remembered for famous roles with friend Woods Hole in movies such as "Hole-In-One", "Hole it right there, mister!"

He is survived by his children The Black Hole Gang as they are collectively known. A true legend in his field, he will be missed.

Cutting down on CO2 the way GreenPeace wants to do it (i.e. by limiting emmissions and thereby limiting economic activity) will kill our already weak economy. It's a typical socialist non-solution by people who hate our modern world anyway. Besides, it is still very arguable that CO2 levels (or changes thereof) have nothing with human activity (or are drowned out by natural carbon-cycle processes, which is saying the same thing).

Besides, there are ways to deal with excess carbon dioxide that don't involve economic sucide, including the excellent idea of putting iron into the ocean. Sounds like an "undo" to me. If we ever need it. (Actually we may do it anyway for fish-farming reasons - in which case the chicken-little's of the world will start screaming about the coming ice age, like they used to before they got on the "global warming" band wagon. Always gotta have a crisis...)

Don't get me wrong, this sound's pretty cool, but the article makes false claims:

There are around 20 non-tethered undersea exploratory robots in the world, but they are of limited utility as they all run on expensive silver-zinc power cells that can be recharged no more than 50 times or so before they become useless.

I worked on a building a brain upgrade for ABE. The original system runs in FORTH and C on an agglomeration of hand-coded microcontrollers and Transputers. The new system (still under development) is a PC104 stack... running Linux.

Don't get me wrong, this sound's pretty cool, but the article makes false claims:

There are around 20 non-tethered undersea exploratory robots in the world, but they are of limited utility as they all run on expensive silver-zinc power cells that can be recharged no more than 50 times or so before they become useless.

I worked on a building a brain upgrade for ABE. The original system runs in FORTH and C on an agglomeration of hand-coded microcontrollers and Transputers. The new system (still under development) is a PC104 stack... running Linux.

Don't get me wrong, this sound's pretty cool, but the article makes false claims:

There are around 20 non-tethered undersea exploratory robots in the world, but they are of limited utility as they all run on expensive silver-zinc power cells that can be recharged no more than 50 times or so before they become useless.

I worked on a building a brain upgrade for ABE. The original system runs in FORTH and C on an agglomeration of hand-coded microcontrollers and Transputers. The new system (still under development) is a PC104 stack... running Linux.