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Abrupt Climatic Change Coming Soon?

Posted by michael on from the move-to-florida dept.

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?"

4 of 672 comments (clear)

  1. What makes you think... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.

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    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    1. Re:What makes you think... by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Much of the time we have no freaking clue what the real impact of our actions will be on the environment.

      Yes - and the green lobby keeps forgetting to apply Occams' Razor to that ignorance. No - I take that back, most are too dumb to know what it means in the first place. And it's a crying shame, because unlike most who ridicule the greenies, I recognize that there really ARE environmental issues that are important, and SOME of what they say is valid - but only SOME of it. A lot is pure speculation disguised as science. Why oh why do I live in a world where the only real political choices are: support the lying extremists who make the environmental situation look worse than it is, or support the lying extremists who won't even acknowlege the obvious environmental problems that have already been proven?

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      Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.

  2. Re:Scaring pocketbooks open. by cybercuzco · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They talk as if its fact, but the best anyone can do is an educated guess. We don't understand the earth. If we could you wouldn't hear "60% chance of rain" on the nightly weather report.

    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.

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  3. Huh? by crisco · · Score: 5, Insightful
    While I might agree with you about the carrying capacity of the planet your example is about as flawed as they can get. Tokyo's 2,187 km^2 is nowhere near enough to support those 26 million people. Just because it is nice to live there doesn't mean it would continue to be if they were cut off from the food imports (even if we ignore ocean products), energy in its various forms, raw materials and other niceties of life.

    Now go take that bad mood and your dumb joke and shove it somewhere else.

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    Bleh!