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Abrupt Climatic Change Coming Soon?
rRaAnNiI writes "Just read an extremely interesting article about the possibility of having a 'little ice age' quite soon - within a decade.
The frightening thing is that it makes a lot of sense to me. Does anyone know how to build an igloo?"
Here are instructions on how to build an igloo, if anyone is interested.
But if you ask me, I think global warming is the trend.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
won't put us into what we think of as an 'ice age'
Are you aware of what an ice age is? An ice age is characterized by summers that aren't hot enough to melt back the advancing ice sheets that developed over the winter. 1C - 2C changes in temp can affect this to some degree. The thing with long ice ages is that they are measured in geographic time, so even a few feet advancement a year can leave much of North America under ice in several tens of thousands of years.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Wouldn't an entire year without crops have a seriously fucked up effect on our food supply?
Holy shit, Ben's even cooler than I initially thought!
[o]_O
Read the damned article. The ice age may be caused by global warming via changes in ocean salinity.
The climate is a chaotic nonlinear system. The results of twiddling its parameters may be counterintuitive or unpredictable. There never seems to be any shortage of armchair climatologists who can't comprehend this fact.
You need a long saw / chainsaw and it helps to have an ice auger.
Drill a hole in the ice (at least 8" deep) with your auger - this is your starting point.
Use your long saw (they have speciality ice saws for this used by ice fishermen) to cut away from the hole. Make your cuts parallel from each other. Cut longways before crossways. Make your blocks about 8 inches cubed.
Once you have your first row cut, remove the ice with special tongs made for the purpose. Do not try to remove these by hand as you'll throw out your back and likely end up in your now open hole in the ice.
Work parallel from your hole towards shore, do not work towards the center of the water, and the ice can thin dramatically and quickly (especially over rivers with strong currents).
As a good safety guide, have someone else with you and a large ladder nearby if available.
Once you have enough ice blocks, you will want to choose a place to put them. As heavy as the ice blocks are, it may be tempting to build the igloo right next to where you removed them. This is a bad idea as the finished igloo will be quite heavy and could easily crash through the ice. Be careful to build this over stable flat terrain.
Arrange your first row of largest ice blocks in a circle. It doesn't need to big. The smaller it is inside, the better it will preserve warmth. Once you have the first row done, pack the crevices with snow. Put snow on top of the first row as a sort of mortar. Remember to put a hole for getting in and out!
Add one layer at a time, adding in a small opening for crawling in and out of. The opening needs to in the form of an arch, and no taller or wider than about 1 1/2 feet at most. Just barely big enough to crawl through is good.
As you build up, you can start to discover that you are bring the ice blocks towards the middle. This is the tricky part to get right. Have one person on the outside, and one in. The snow that you have been using a mortar can help or hinder here, depending on where you got it. Try to find stick snow
Cap the igloo. For your first igloo, this can be pretty tricky. If you have built it tightly, it will lean in on itself and support itself. The top piece needs to be a pressure fit piece. For this, you'll want to start with a bigger piece and cut it down to size.
You can also build an igloo out of snow, the process is much the same, but not all snow can be used for this.
Finally, pack all the crevices with snow. This will help preserve warmth and keep the wind out. All things considered these things are actually pretty comfortable for winter camping.
Remember, your just building a big Roman arch, get help, and you'll be fine. It helps to bring ice fishing gear to go ice fishing when your done:)
But if you ask me, I think global warming is the trend.
Hey Sherlock, how about you take your foot out of your mouth and read the article? The issue is that global warming *is* melting the polar ice caps, which in turn could cause a local cooling effect in northern Europe -- to the point of ice age.
That global warming doesn't make it hotter everywhere is old news, too. The BBC wrote about about this exact scenario (temps up --> ice melts --> atlantic currents change --> temps down...) years ago. It plays out with a rapid & general failure of agriculture across the British isles and western Scandanavia, due to massive increases in snowcover.
(There is some debate about how the Gulf Stream moving south from the British Isles to Iberia would affect the weather in Spain, and Portugal. One camp thinks it would bring traditionally British rains; another argues the local heating effect of the Gulf Stream would rapidly create more arid/desert conditions. Either change devastates local agricultures however, destroying traditional grape & olive industries of the region.)
Wouldn't an entire year without crops have a seriously fucked up effect on our food supply?
Define 'ours'. If you mean the US, and for only one year, then no. Prices would go up, but more because of a perceived threat than a real one (much like gas prices go up within hours of something happening in the middle east.) The US stockpiles, and let rots generally, a tremendous amount of food. Our exports and handouts would most certainly be affected.
On the other hand, having a year where every single growing season failed across this entire nation would be
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Exponential growth is a poor model for population change. In the short term, it can seem like a nice, simple approximation, but in the long term, populations are affected by factors besides initial size and time. Catastrophes are possible of course (like the Black Death), but also gradual slowdowns. For example, throughout the developed world, the birthrate is near the replacement rate (i.e. 2 children per woman). Whereas in the past people had large families so that, after war and disease, there would still be children to care for their elderly parents; now between pensions and government assistance, individuals can have a comfortable old age without any children.
Extrapolating populations using an exponential model is overly simplistic. Don't let the enormous results scare you.
Go talk to you local geologist and he will explain to you that we are STILL in an ice age right now. Here is some more info.
What?
I am working on a master's degree in Oceanography...and I have studied the subject a little bit.
n ode8.ht ml (American Geophysical Union)/ sem-abs95/ASc hiller.html (Aussie coupled ocean-atmosphere-ice model)
The global thermohaline circulation, better known as the great oceanic conveyor belt, transports warm, salty water from the equitorial pacific ocean to the far North Atlantic via the Agulhas Current (south Africa), North Brazil Current, and the Gulf Stream. In the southern hemisphere, water temperature at the surface is essentially 0 C at 60 S latitude. In the north pacific, the same is true at 60 N latitude. In the north Atlantic, at 60 N latitude, the water temperature west of Greenland is 0, and the water temperature east of Greenland is +10. This warm water is the reason that Norwegian fjords are ice free in winter, despite the fact that they are located far north of the arctic circle. It is also why Labrador, Canada and Iceland have wildly different climates, despite their being near the same latitude.
During the boreal spring through fall, the (relatively) warm, salty water enters the Norwegian, Greenland, and Labrador seas. When winter sets in, winter storms cause the surface waters to cool (through mixing and heat flux into the atmosphere) until the water is of constant density to depths of 1000m or more. Further winter storms cool the surface waters even further, making the surface waters more dense than the deeper waters. Under these conditions, oceanic deep convection occurs. Deep convection is a rare thing--it only occurs in 6 places worldwide. Most of those are in the northern North Atlantic (Labrador Sea, Greenland Sea, Irminger Sea, Norwegian Sea). One is in the Mediterranean (Gulf of Lyons) and one is in Antarctica (Weddell Sea).
Oceanic deep convection is a fragile thing. There are three conditions that must be met before it can occur: A closed, bounded circulation; weakly stratified or unstratified water to depth; and sudden density change (e.g. rapid cooling at the surface). If any of these conditions is absent, deep convection cannot occur. This is why global warming presents a problem to the conveyor belt--fresher water from melting glaciers, melting multi-year sea ice, and increased rain and snow sits on the surface, but even though it might be strongly cooled, the density will not change enough for this cooled water to sink to depth. If the surface mixed layer is only 50m deep, and the layer below the surface mixed layer is cooler saltier than the surface layer, then even if the surface layer is cooled to the same temperature as the next layer, *it will only sink to that same level*. That is, 50 m. Here, deep convection is not possible.
If the conveyor belt stops, then we have a thermohaline catastrophe. In thermohaline catastrophe, then certainly the climate of western Europe would change dramatically. A lot of models are being run on this. They are trying to couple the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice, and are running simulations such that 2x, 4x, and 8x the present level of CO2 is in the atmosphere. Thermohaline catastrophe occurs in a few of them, and doesn't occur in others. In some, the conveyor belt fails for a few years, but then starts up again as the a salinity gradient develops between the tropical oceans (where evaporation is high) and the subpolar oceans.
There is one other weak link in the conveyor belt--the Agulhas current. The Agulhas winds down the east coast of South Africa before leaving the coast, heading south, and then bending back east again. Occasionally the current sheds warm, salty Indian Ocean eddies into the south Atlantic before bending back on itself. These eddies, called Agulhas rings, transport heat and salt from the tropical pacific into the Atlantic basin. A Dutch-South African experiment (MARES) tracked a few of these rings for a while. The Dutch team came to the conclusion that if the Agulhas ring-shedding breaks down, that there is a risk of thermohaline catastrophe.
Here are some websites with a bit more info:
*http://earth.agu.org/revgeophys/schmit01/
*http://kellia.nioz.nl/mare (MARES experiment)
*http://www.marine.csiro.au/seminars
----yellowcat >- ??
yellowcat ^_^ ??
Much of the world ocean is fairly uninhabited, microbiologically speaking. Iron plays a large aprt in plankton growth and most of the planet is very poor in it. Experiments have been performed with pumping large quantities of iron sulfate into one of these dead zones. The ensuing microbial bloom was impressive, especially considering the quantities of CO2 that it could suck up. But it's not yet certain that this sort of thing would work on a large scale.
Dyolf Knip
You can throw more money each year at telling people to turn down the heating, but each year the human population increases closer to (or perhaps beyond) the carrying capacity of the planet. This is the real problem.
Sorry, I'm in a foul mood but shove this up your ass. We are no where near the capacity for the planet. Here's something to prove my statement:
Land area of Texas: 678,054 km^2
Land area of Tokyo: 2,187 km^2
Population of Tokyo: ~26 million
Population of World: ~6.2 billion
Population density of Tokyo: 11,888 people per KM^2
Population density if the world lived in Texas: 9,143 people per KM^2
That's 2,000 people less per KM^2, and Tokyo is a very livable area.
What's orange and yellow and looks good on hippies?
Fire
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
No concern exists over whether we can all fit on the planet (or Texas); your plan fails in that you have a person every 10m x 10m, even though a 10m x 10m square of the soil with highest fertility, and constant ideal amounts of sun, rain, wind, and erosion, will not be able to feed you. There isn't enough food, even if you're just growing plants. If you must eat meat, you're even more doomed, due to the high metabolismic requirements of the livestock. This is the only point in favour of vegetarianism that I truly believe and respect. Eating meat has a dramatic effect on the size of our ecological footprints.
true && more || less
If the usual suspects were "sinners", then Franklin also being a suspect really isn't all that unusual. He was not well liked by many church leaders, who already considered him heretical because of his tendency to spread inventions to the public that helped them evade "god's wrath". He was already disliked by some for the lightning rod because lightning was viewed as God's rightful wrath, and if it hits your house God must have had a good reason for doing so. Trying to evade the wrath of God via an invention was seen as excessive hubris. (That argument ended when it became apparent that churches also benefitted from having lightning rods installed. It looks bad to keep claiming lightning rods are sinful when churches that install them get destroyed from lightning much less often than churches that don't.)
A little ice age would not destroy all farmable land. It would just destroy a large amount of it, leaving only the areas nearer to the equator as usable farmland. It would also reduce rainfall, as more of the earth's water is locked up in ice instead of circulating in the rain cycle (or whatever that cycle is called where it rains, runs off to the ocean, evaporates into clouds, rains again. etc)
An full (not "little) ice age would certainly mess up most of Canada, except for thin strips of land right near the oceans (Vancouver wouldn't be covered, Nova Scotia wouldn't be covered, but everything in-between would be.) Further south, the last ice-ages had glaciers reaching down into northern Michigan and Minnesota, and the southernmost point being an elongated lobe covering most of Wisconsin. Where I live (Madison, WI) was just barely inside the southernmost extent of that lobe, and the effect on the geography was drastic. What was under the glacier got sanded down into smooth gently rolling terrain. What was not under the glacier still looks like it did before - rocky outcroppings, hills with cliffs, rugged and pretty terrain. The difference is drastic. Those things must have been very thick.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
During the last 750 thousand years, the ice age cycle seems to last about 100,000 years with ~10-15% of that as warm interglacials (with 10-15 depending on how you define warm). We have been in an interglacial for about 8000 years, so empirically we are due for a switch in the next 5000 years or so, but we know that some interglacials have been shorter than 8000 years, so it's hard to say.
Incidently from 750k years ago to more than 2.5M years ago, the ice age cycle was ~41 thousand years long. The full fledged ice age cycle is generally explained as being forced by changes in the Earth's orbit (due to perturbations of other planets). Two of the most well known such perturbatins have 41 and 100 thousand year periods.
Of course he's not talking about an actual ice age, which would result in a global temperature dip ~15 F, but rather a locally important dip whose global impact would only be a degree or two. Such as the "Little Ice Age" that froze much of Europe circa 1700.
The current interglacial period has already lasted longer than any of the three others seen in the last 400,000 years.
The same cannot be said for the current day.
Actually, according to the UN's population growth report the world's population should stop growing by around 2050. This is due to the replacement rate trends going down throughout the world. Of course, there is no guarantee that the report will be accurate and certainly the large population at that point could be a problem, but it's not the doom and gloom scenario you propose.
I have read Ishmael and it was quite interesting. I agree with some of Quinn's points about having to think about the consequences of our actions and how we're all immersed in a "story." I don't believe that we have to reject all of our current "story" however. And some of his points about population growth are not born out by the UN report. Read it.
Steve
And what effect does dumping iron in the ocean have on that biosphere, and by extension, the climate? Killing off the Great Barrier Reef doesn't seem like the answer.
.
Your first bit is an outstanding question. The second is jumping WAY too fast to a conclusion. For a more detailed analysis of what all is being talked about here, please refer to the Wired article Dumping Iron by Charles Graeber
More interestingly are the counter viewpoints to the approach be described in this article. First off, the folks who don't think this will do anything but burn dollars. The second group of those critical are concerned with the notion that we're not 100% certain that the globe is warming, or if it is, by how much.
What if we took corrective action to cool things off, only to find that it wasn't as bad as was thought. The cure would definitely be worse than the symptoms.
I do find myself in agreement with Dr. Gagosian's main point from the original article. We need a LOT more data, and a much more complete understanding of exactly what is going on before we seriouly consider corrective actions.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I'd also like to see some proof that the Amazon rainforest does not contribute significantly to the oxygen content of the air.
Here it is:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020408/020408-7.htmlNote that this is NOT from an anti-global-warming site. It's a site that promotes the notion that human activity is warming the planet.
Proof enough?
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Yes, its true that in certain parts of the South Ocean the limiting nutrient for certain types of phytoplankton is iron. It is also true that adding that nutrient will stimulate growth and reproduction of that phytoplankton. And of course phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
BUT, how does that solve anything. Its a temporary fix for a much larger problem. Shouldn't we use that time, money, research, etc. and put it into preventing the need to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the first place? I assure you the same thing that any ecologist worth their degree can tell you -- your fix won't last. We will end up with the same problems that we started with. If you stop playing with knives, then you need less band-aids.
-dr. layyze f. tooth PhD
I was just discussing this idea last night in company fairly educated on the subject.
Yes, you get a great bloom of CO2 absorbing algae, but when it dies, it sinks and decomposes. Then it absorbs oxygen, giving off CO2 and Methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25X as effective as CO2. The ratio of CO2 to Methane given off is dependent upon water temperatures.
Yes, it would be a grand experiment with some huge results. I first read about this 5 years ago. The article talked about what one barge loaded with powdered iron and fans to disperse it could do. It sounded amazing.
Open source- the greatest equalizer mankind has ever seen.
home.no.net/gedra/igloo_bg.htm
First, the theory isn't new. Here's a good article from The Atlantic.
Second, as the article explains, this has apparently happened before with drastic results. (How does a 13 degree Farenheit change in 50 years sound?)
Obviously it can happen due to natural processes. There's also a chance that human-caused warming could kick it off. Either way, the results wouldn't be good.