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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?"
Abrubt climate changes aren't new. In 1816, there was no summer. Volcanic side effects from the year before blotted out enough light to cause a winterry year.
"Valley Forge might not have been so cold, and Washington's crossing of the ice-bound Delaware River wouldn't have been so dramatic, if he had done it a century later--because our climate conditions have shifted since then, and today, the Delaware River rarely freezes."
I would attribute that to the amount of chemicals being dumped into that system as well, I pity the idiots who put their bodies into that water.
If the Ice Age was this long:i iiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii(x400)
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The period from the end of the Ice Age till now is this long:
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As you can tell, the non-Ice Age time is an aberration, not the norm.
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I saw something on the discovery channel the other night that mentioned the same thing, it was called ocean mysteries or something similar...
Showed how if the planet got just a wee bit warmer, it would frell with the ocean's thermal regulation system and frell it up for a while...
And yes, just a drop of a few degrees will really frell things up! Look at the florida citrus farmers - they are teetering on the edge now. they can't exactly move further south when they want - even a slight freeze, and their fruit is worthless...
if rivers freeze at the wrong time, it could interfere with salmon spanning and the like, causing small cascades in the food web. Oh nature as whole will handle it, though we will suffer during the adaptation...
After all, even one degree is the difference between freezing and melting point, no?
This ain't Joe Blow, grad student and paranoid geek extraordinare...
....in the end, it'll probably resort more in the deaths of millions, but fuck em...as long as the SUV on the heater works, right? It'll just kill off the poor and infirm and save us having to pay so many taxes for social programs..
This is the head of the Woods Hole Oceanagraphic Institute...and he's basing his model on what he sees taking place in the oceans...this is fairly reliable scientific analysis...it can't be duplicated thru experimentation, but it's an interesting hypothesis nevertheless.
If he's right, we are seriously fucking this planet up,
yes...that was sarcasm...you dig? not pretty...
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global Warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
These scientists always seem to oversimplify the complex system that is the earths weather pattern.
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.
I wonder why they do it.
From the about WHOI page:
Funding
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is supported by a mix of grants from federal agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, private contributions, and endowment income.
Oh, I guess people are less likely to contribute to the "Everything is A-OK" foundation.
Not that I'm against them, they're better than other eco-groups which do nothing but spout speculative doom-and-gloom prophecies. At least these guys are scientists, not activists. The article warned of possible climate changes, not an end to all life as we know it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
All we're seeing here is our planet's self-correction mechanisms at work. There is likely nothing that we mere humans can do to permanently change the planet. It's design contains a complex system of checks and balances that we might actually be able to understand a fraction of in another 1000 years or so. We argue on the basis of the understanding of a few variables in a system with nearly infinite variables and it laughs at us.
But why fright? I would love a 10 degree drop in St. Louis. Enough to cut the oppressive humid heat out of the summers and get the snow cold enough to stay snow instead of becoming mucky slush in the winter. It would be a refreshing break. And the glaciers of North America need another boost. They've been disappearing in places.
The problem with us is that our cities are now too large and our roots too deep. We build expecting the rivers and coasts to stay where they are, not realizing that where they are is not where they were 50 years ago. Then we try to hold nature back. We confine rivers to courses that bottleneck their flood waters, we build dikes to keep the ocean at bay, we water to keep the deserts at bay... STOP!!! If nature wants to move a river or change a coast, let it! If people have the money to build there, let them! But don't get upset when their homes are swept away. They should know and accept the risk. We need to learn to build with the expectation of change... even welcoming it. Build so that change enhances.
And all you environmentalists out there, stop whining. 150 years ago this nation was so smoggy the buildings had to be scrubbed of soot every year. We were in a little ice age just 200 years ago. Its the cycle of life. You think way more of us then nature does if you think we can actually put any real dent in it. Things will change. And over the long term, they'll get better (my dream is a society with enough clean energy that we can all afford to move to massive underground complexes and restore the surface to be one big park)(oh, that means NO SOLAR PANELS MUCKING UP THE HORIZON TOO). This planet can afford for us to make our mistakes and learn from them.
If you had read the article, you would have learned that these climactic changes are common. They have happened many times in the past, and will most likely happen again in the future.
The only thing mentioned about global warming in the article (other than the hype^h^h^h^hheadline) was the assertion (un-supported) that "It is reasonable to assume that greenhouse warming can exacerbate the possibility of precipitating large, abrupt, and regional or global climatic changes."
Hardly a statement that the climate change is "BECAUSE OF" global warming.
So, perhaps you should consider reading the article before calling people "bonhead", eh?
Earths mag field periodically reverses too, which could cause all sorts of mischief such as affecting climate.
Nature reported that the magnetic field off the southern tip of Africa has already flipped. Anomalies like these have already reduced the strength of the planet's magnetic field by about 10 percent.
This story has an interesting echo with Larry Niven's story "Fallen Angels," available from the Baen Free Library. It's the story of what happens when the anti-scientist green-earthers get their way and ban greenhouse gasses. Ironic that WHOI seems to think greenhouse gasses may cause an ice age.
-- Brian T. Sniffen
If I recall correctly, most of the time they live in houses made of dirt and/or driftwood.
(To be fair, all the ekimos I've known lived in houses much like the house I lived in. But then again, I only lived in Anchorage and never really got to know anybody who was living way out in the styx.)
(ObPC: The Eskimos are only one of several types of natives living in Alaska, but they're the ones known for making igloos ...)
Sooo, basically the WWII Nazi wolfpack subs helped stop the greenhouse effect?
Money for nothing, pix for free
Enter Sarcasm:
No, really! When the date goes from 99 to 00, the nuclear missles will all launch, and your bank account will be emptied... Really... Now did I mention that our $500,000 patch will fix the problem?
_______________________________
No, really! By polluting the atmosphere, the globe will warm up, which will then cause a severe drop in temperature. Businesses will fail, and people will die.... Really... Did I mention that I'm a die-hard supported of Green Peace?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Note that from 1965-1990 (a period of a general mild warming trend globally, depending on whose graphs you look at), the North Atlantic went through a period of exceptional salinity, especially on the eastern seaboard. The article makes no attempt to comment on this.
What it raises alarms based on are the last 10 years of data, in which the North Atlantic appears to be abnormally fresh. Unfortnately, we have no centuries-long data series for seawater salinity at depth, so what the article really means is "fresher than we've seen in the last 40 years," not "fresh is a manner that is historically significant."
But we've been dumping carbon in the atmosphere all century long. If human activity is to blame for the recent freshness, how can we explain the previous salinity when the human activity in question has more or less continued unchecked throughout the whole time period?
Personally, I think the truth is scarier than any environmental alarmism can paint. Articles like this would have you believe that
The climate is a delicate balance that can change suddenly.
Human activity can cause such changes.
Such a change appears imminent.
Therefore we should stop certain human activities to avoid the disaster.
All fine and good, but the truth is more like
The climate is a delicate balance that can change suddenly.
Human activity can cause such changes.
So can a whole lot of other stuff.
Supercomputers and all, we still have minimal understanding of how the climate actually works.
It's possible that major climatic change could happen within the decade as a result of human activity.
But ceasing that activity might not make a difference.
In fact, for all we know, ceasing that activity might at this point cause a climatic change that otherwise would have been avoided.
Chaotic dynamics can make you want to go run to mommy sometimes.
Now may be such a time.
If you could just go ahead and remember to let us know when that's all done, that would be greeeeeat. Until then, no one cares about your stupid USA-is-to-blame-for-everything nonsense.
While the difference of 5 to 10 degrees may not sound like much given the range of temperatures that we experience in Europe or North America just in a single day much less throughout the year, an average drop of 5 to 10 degrees is very significant and would create agricultural havok.
Crop plants are very sensitive to climative changes and have particular temperature/rainfall ranges in which they thrive. Make the local weather a little too hot, a little too cold, a little too wet or a little too dry and suddenly your fruit trees fail to produce, your vegetables wilt and your grains fail to pests, if they growq at all. Minor changes in the average temperature greatly effects the success of fungus and insects in damaging crops, allowing them to spread into new regions.
To put this into better perspective, during the peak of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, the average temperature in was about 9 to 12F cooler than today. Even an average change half of that would create dramatic changes in natural plant distribution.
During the so called Little Ice Age from 1650-1850, a 3F temperature drop caused serious crop failure in Europe, leading to famine and disease. And that is just a 3F degree average drop.
Animals are also effected my temperature changes. Here on the Pacific NW coast, salmon require stream temperatures to be within a very delicate range in order to spawn. This is why cutting down trees (which shade the streams) causes a decline in salmon runs. That's just one of many examples.
Humans are much more adaptable to climate change than most other plants and animals. But with 6 billion+ mouths to feed, its not quite clear how we'd adapt to a climatic problem of this kind of scale.
As for the ocean conveyor belt, it naturally seems to have some tiny warming and cooling cycles which in turn effect rainfall and storm formation in many parts of the world. For a nice overview, go here: Climate Rides on Ocean Conveyor Belt. Over the past century+ a 20-year cycle of minor warming and cooling has been found in the conveyor belt, and supposedly the conveyor belt should be in a strong cycle right now, based of previous trends. But is it?
If global warming (natural cycles or man-made) causes too much melting of the Greenland glaciers, all of that extra fresh water poses quite a risk to the ocean conveyor belt.
Perhaps what we should be saying about the steady warming that has happened over the past 150 years is "enjoy it while it lasts."
I spent all of those years as Anonymous Coward and all I got was this lousy number (204976).
There have been many rapid climate changes over the history of the earth, some minor ones even in the last thousand years. It could happen at any time.
The point is that we must, as a species, grow our economy and technology globally to be ready to meet whatever climatic changes we encounter (regardless of cause, natural or because of us).
In sub-saharan Africa, nearly 300,000 people will die this year because of famine, partially due to a drought. Depite a major drought in the US this year, no one will die, since the US has an advanced economy that can effectively move food from place to place.
It is also far easier for an advanced economy to handle the sacrifices of environmentalism. The US has been able to do a lot to clean up rivers and ozone/sulphur in the air. But even the West is only slowly nearing the technological capacity to truly deal with CO2 pollution, and the rest of the world will lag.
Economic and technological growth of developing countries are most hindered by their governments. Corruption, dictatorship, red tape, inflation, civil war, trade controls, and price controls are the big killers of economies. Appropriate economic policies are highly linked with economic growth and poverty reduction. Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were very poor countries during the first half of the 20th Century, but have grown into nearly Westernized countries.
BTW, IMF and World Bank loans are mechanisms for countries to funnel money to corrupt politicians and their friends, as well as provide incentives for countries to run high budget deficits which often leads to inflation. So yes, capitalists should dislike the IMF and WB. They may be a major reason why developing country growth has actually slowed down to near zero over the last two decades.
Burke then goes on to say that we are currently having the same drastic effect on the environment today with our polution and pumping out greenhouse gasses way too fast for the environement to cope. His prediction, is that global warming is going to come upon us hard here soon. Unfortunately, he leaves this same scenario out to off-set global warming. This makes his presentation somewhat lacking. However, I found his video-essay very enjoyable anyways. And yes, this is the same James Burke that did the 'Connections' series you may have seen on the Learning Channel.
But changing the oceans is more difficult than changing the atmosphere. Even if we're close to being able to deliberately change the atmosphere, we'd have a long way to go before being able to have the same effect on the oceans. And, as the article mentions, the oceans are relatively slow to change; meanwhile the changes mentioned in the article are already on their way. Finally, the problem we are facing with the oceans is not weather/temperature (at least not directly) but rather the salinity level of the North Atlantic. So, maybe you are on to something after all; let's just dump a bunch of salt into the ocean.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Also what damage could we do to the system by trying to stop it's natural changes? If we adjust the system to hold things at our comfort level we could possibly break it for all time. What if the changes are needed to keep the system from just coming to a stop and sending us Red Planet. If it's a balancing act I certainly don't want to play god.
We're human, we can live in space, on the Moon, in Antartica, in extreme desert wastelands, etc. We should adapt and not try to adapt nature to us. Might be a good time to start thinking of those futuristic domed cities from movies and indoor hydroponic gardens and so forth.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Calm down, everybody.
If you studied English in college you'd know that there was a "little ice age" in Europe from around the time Elizabeth I came to the throne (think Shakespeare) to about the time that George I came to the throne (think Defoe). (Disclaimer: both "thrones" are that of England -- I'm not that up on the history of other European countries. Sorry)
It wasn't that big of a deal. People lived. Massive migrations didn't happen. Life adjusted -- in fact, you barely hear about it in writings of the period -- the most knowledge we have is from paintings, like this one.
Besides, they're getting these conclusions from only 40 years of oceanic data? I'm not even an engineer or scientist and I understand that in massively complex natural systems fluctuations happen.
For those who are interested in other dramatic changes that could happen to the Earth, check out this website: http://www.habtheory.com/
Why I know about this, in a nutshell: several years ago, I read a book my Dad had called The HAB Theory. It was about how the changing mass of the polar ice caps could introduce a "wobble" to the Earth's rotation, causing it to suddenly flip over and create a new axis of rotation about 80 degrees from the old one. Pretty far-fetched stuff, but the scientific conferences in the book presented all this interesting information, such as why many ancient civilizations seem to have almost started out advanced technologically, but then inexplicably declined (Egyptians, Mayans), reasons behind the myths of Atlantis and Bible flooding, and even other geological phenomena that could be described in this way as well. The book also was kind of held together by a poorly written love story, sort of to make it more palateable to female readers, but which failed pretty miserably. The science was pretty well done, but not so that you would actually believe it.
But imagine my surprise that the book was based off of the research of one Hugh Auchincloss Brown, who did publish a book on it. I actually found the book in my college library, and sat down to read it (I was a Physics major, so it wasn't too hard to follow). What he said made sense, until he came to the crux of his argument: that "cosmic rays" have mass, and they contribute to the rotation of the Earth. Hmmm, that's one thing that wasn't mentioned in The HAB Theory!
In any case, the website I mentioned above collects together most of the better pieces of "evidence" for this theory, some of which are pretty intriguing. Personally, while I find the theories interesting, there are enough loopholes and jumped conclusions that I can't really believe it, but I thought I should let others know. Enjoy!
Neil
Global warming? Panic, panic, panic!
Ice age? Panic, panic, panic!
*sighs* The only constant in climate science is the overblown claims to predict the unpredictable, intended to suck up to / interestingly challenge the ecopolitical orthodoxy and stir up panic for the purpose of getting grants.
Shesh.
The REAL weather forecast, by moi: weather will happen, the climate will shift to and fro, people will adapt just like they always do and get on with their lives.
This is NOT worth abandoning your SUVs for, people!
I think it was in 1993, that there was no real summer in Japan. They had to import rice and they had to import a lot of it. It was one wierd summer. The rainy season never ended. It just went on and on and it wasn't until the very end of august that there was the slightest sign of summer but by then it was too late.
This article reminded me of something I read in S. Junger's "The Perfect Storm", which told the tale of a N Atlantic storm and its effects. Keeping in mind this is an undocumented, nonscientific source, and the fact I'm neither oceanographer nor marine biologist, the passage reads (p. 121):
There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising, and that freak waves of eighty or ninety feet are becoming more common. Wave heights off the coast of England have risen an average of 25% over the last couple of decades. One cause may be [less oil pollution, since oil] inhibits the generation of capillary waves, which in turn prevent the wind from getting a 'grip' on the sea. Plankton releases a chemical that has the same effect, and plankton levels in the North Atlantic have dropped dramatically...
Presuming the author got his facts straight, I wonder whether the ostensible plankton disappearance is related to changes in the salinity levels discussed in this article.
Every rule has an exception (except this one).
Well, I think the point is that if you cram everyone living into the surface area of Texas, you leave the entire rest of the world available for doing things like farming, mining, etc.
In other words, the planet can support the current world population, and then some. Rough guess, we're probably at least a good order of magnitude away from a "maximum" population limit. Whether or not human nature is such that we as a species can cooperate well enough to support a 10x increase in world population is another matter entirely.
Thanks weaselgrrl, you put it better than I could. You are just
too right....I grew up in farm country, and it takes very, very
little to create major problems for farmers on a local basis. If
we saw temp variations all over the US like the ones being discussed
the results would be devastating.
All too few people in the US know just how delicate their food
supply is. If they did know, they'd be growing their own food as
much as possible in backyard/rooftop/deck/porch/window gardens.
For anyone who wants to read more about this, I recommend
Countryside magazine, or even Backwoods Home. There are more
mags devoted to this, but these are the best I've seen.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.