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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?"
... that it is us causing this?
Almost everyone knows that the Earth's climate shifts over time, sometimes dramatically. What is still unclear (despite best efforts of people to firmly convince you one way or the other) is how much impact human activity has on the climate. Volcanic emissions dwarf global emissions due to human activities, for some gases and chemicals. The past has seen dramatic climate changes without humans having anything to do with it
The question is not if we are bringing about an ice age or a warmer period (depending which scare of the day is going around). The question is if we are accelerating the change and by how much. If we bring an ice age about 100 years sooner than it would have occurred naturally, it hardly matters in the long run (but this generation might think otherwise). I believe in cutting back emissions and energy usage, cleaner factories and recycling and all that. But I am tired of the "we are killing the Earth" line.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Planets do not have self-correction mechanisms. They are not alive.
I do agree with your broader point that it is foolish to expect to "freeze" nature at a particular point. You're right - life will go on. Bacteria and the cockroaches will probably be just fine.
However, it is downright idiotic to just throw up your hands and let anything go. The future is largely in our hands, and we can determine what kind of environment we will live in. (e.g. Our cities and waterways are less polluted now than 100 years ago because of a profound cultural shift and stringent regulations, not because they just "got better").
You can choose to live in a world without old-growth forest or spotted owls or wild areas, a world with a Sahara desert covering half of Africa and matching deserts on each continent. I'd rather be a little more careful and preserve some of the pretty stuff for my grandkids.
Just ask Venus and Mars whether they "self-corrected" their climate change...
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A sudden change in crop growing patterns would be very, very destabilising to international security. It's bothered me for some time that the WTO and free-trade politicians in general believe that food is just another commodity. And yet they are elected (one of the fundamental underpinnings of democracy) to provide security. That doesn't just mean hi-tech armed forces in my book, it means ensuring consistency of supply of the basics needed for survival - amongst those are the crucial elements of water, food, shelter and fuel.
:)
The politicos seem to 'get' the argument about physical security, but where is the discussion of security of food supply? Living in the UK - as I do - it alarms me to see that the only argument about agricultural subsidy is one based on trade. So before long we could easily be in a position where to feed the population there is total dependency on shipping the staple part of the diet over thousands of miles. What happens if there is a huge oil price shock? Or some similar catastrophe that disrupts the supply and which can't easily be fixed.
Seems to me that there is a fundamental duty of care amongst the elected elite that famine should be guarded *very* carefully against. It's not that long since significant starvation occurred in Europe, but I don't hear voices clamouring to ensure it doesn't again.
And before flaming me about ignoring the poor souls in the rest of the world who are starving already, or telling me it doesn't matter 'cos you live somewhere else, that's not what my post was about
This is a common misconception. Just because its hard to understand small parts of the system, does not mean that it is impossible to understand the whole system. For example, heisenbergs uncertainty principle states that you cannot know the exact position or velocity of a single subatomic particle. however, if that subatomic particle happens to be in my car, and im going down the freeway at 60 mph, and ive got my gps on, Ive got a pretty good idea not only of its position and velocity, but the position and velocity of its surrounding particles. Each particle is going to have lots of other velocities due to heat, collisions etc, but I know that at least one component is 60mph. My point is, its hard to predict what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, its relatively easy to predict what the weather trend is going to be, warming cooling, wetter, drier. Take el-nino for example. We know that when el-nino occurs, it will be a milder winter. We dont know that its going to snow on the 21st of december in buffalo, but we do know that when the winter is over, buffalo should have recieved less snow than normal.
Now go take that bad mood and your dumb joke and shove it somewhere else.
Bleh!
It's ridiculous to draw conclusions from a sample of 2 data points.
Especially when the second data point, has a beginning, but no fixed end yet. You really don't know anything about the length of the second time period.
So in reality you're taking a single observable fact, the length of the historic ice age, and extrapolating wildly from that single point of data.
Completely meaningless conclusions are all you can draw from a single point of data.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke