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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?"
Yes, they work great. Being a Canadian, we live throu all extreems of weather, it gets above 40 C and below -40 C where i live, so a little colder just means we have to cuddle up with the women some more.
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
The mini ice age is expected to arrive within the next 3 months. But, don't panic. It's a mini ice age and is only expected to last for, perhaps, 4 months.
Good for overclockers, bad to cooler makers =)
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.
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.
Does anyone know how to build an igloo?
I'm still living in my igloo, is Y2K over yet?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Yeah, at the staff meeting on Thursday. They say we're looking at fire, brimstone, and a 60% chance of efficiency experts. Didn't you get that memo?
It seems that these mini ice ages happen once every 1/2 cycle around the sun, switching hemispheres... They have been suspecting that the cause is a fat man with a red suit for the northern hemisphere, but are still unclear as to the cause of the southern yearly iceage...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Where are those global warming nutcases now? Methinks they'll be very quit until the ice age ends, then get all worked up about the ice sheet over Calgary thinning.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
If the Ice Age was this long:i iiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii(x400)
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
The period from the end of the Ice Age till now is this long:
i
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...
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I HAVE THE MEMO.
This is actually good news, at least now we can hold another "Elfstedentocht" again here in the Netherlands. Then again, having -20 degrees celcius all year round might not be as fun as it seems, though it would rock for once to have said "Elfstedentocht" in July... ^_^
Then again, I was expecting global warming which would place my town right next to the sea. I already had a burger stall planned out to make money on the German tourists... :(
Hate me!
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.
You can buy a bunch of them here.
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!!!!
Kyoto bans red suits. News at 11.
Yeah, right. These guys can't even forecast the weather a month from now! Heck, they can't even figure out where a hurricane is going to end up.
Good for overclockers, bad to cooler makers =)
Actually, your OCed Athlon will reverse the ice age and induce horrendous global warming.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Damn, now I'm confused. I thought we were to blame for global warming? How am I supposed to feel guilty, if I can't keep track what I'm guily of? Oh, that's right, it doesn't really matter does it?
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.
pumping more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere then....
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Ah, survival is an excellent teacher ...
Infuriate left and right
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
... 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...
I have no doubt that drastic climate flucuations have occured consistently in the past and will in the future if left on its own. But there is one distinct difference today than in all the Billions of years of climat history - we have the technology. Right now is the first time in Earth's History where we have the capability (but do we have the will?) to change the weather.
There has been tons of research into technologically induced climate change. Keep in mind these climate changes are happening as a result of gas changes in the atmosphere. Changing the mixture of gases is not a big technological hurdle now. Simply adding iron to the oceans could decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Now, coming soon, nanotechnology will enable us to effect the mixture of atmospheric gases substantially. If we do start to get some dramatic cooling effects, procedures could be set into motion to change the gas mixtures to compensate for said cooling. And as the decades go on, our capability in this are will only accelerate. If not, its probably because the humans blew themselves up.
www.enthea.org
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:)
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 ...)
So now we have two ways to prove that CO2 is affecting the climate of the Earth:
The Earth's climate is getting warmer.
The Earth's climate is getting cooler.
Whichever we see, we know it was the fault of CO2, right?
If only Compaq hadn't EOL'd the Vax, we might have easily laughed off a puny 10 degree drop in avg winter temperatures. Is it any wonder southern California is a desert? You youngin's might not be aware of it, but 50 years ago it was a tropical paradise. About that time, California universities and colleges started ordering various DEC computers, and the damage was soon irreversible.
I kid you not, last year NASA published an article claiming that from the years 1976-1984, that side of the planet actually heated the sun, not the other way around.
Our only chance, is to pull as many MicroVaxen as we can out of retirement/storage, and strategically place them throughout the North Atlantic. If we start soon, maybe we can end this ice age before it even begins!
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.)
See, now you don't want those CPUs running so cool, do you? Gonna use my box as a foot warmer.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
The thing that gets me about such stories, especially from scientists is the simple conclusion: What they are saying is either true, or false. We have no idea if he is right or wrong. But it is a fact that it is true or false.
Given the news in the headlines about such massively important earth changing risks that is reported in the press I believe we all tend to dismiss any doomsayers. We have become oversaturated by the news that comes almost monthly. I don't know if this is a fault of the media or of people's inability to accept the possibility of danger. In either case, the I believe the observation is true. People just don't care because they don't know what to believe anymore.
So is this the Boy who cried wolf or are have we been warned warned of impending danger? Personally, I just don't know, but the implications are sure as hell worth some serious, multi-national investigation.
--
I found a story about this in a Discover magazine, in a friend's bathroom (of all places) a couple of weeks ago. A very interesting read.
I remember thinking about how I always say in the winter time up here: it's sure not global *warming* us up any here.
All I know is, if the winters here get worse than they already are, I will be heading for the equator.
"the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia"
5 degrees fahrenheit is 15 degrees celcius to us canooks.. and an average temperature drop of 15 degrees celcius will definately have me packing my bags. An Average January temperature of -25 degrees is bad, but you learn to deal with it. (plug the car in!) -40 are particularily bad days (maybe I won't go to work today) but -40 as a new average is a serious concern (to me at least).
I know, I know, the folks up in Tuktayuktuk are saying, "what a candy ass"
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
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).
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?
Finally, there will be salvation for the Canadian National Igloo!! I have been so worried about it melting due to global warming!
people are willing to pay money so others can write newsletters telling them how smart they are. I would not be surprised if many people pay money to be told that their contributions are making things A-OK...
i mean -- look at all the charities out there: MS foundation; AIDS societies; make a wish foundation etc etc etc. not saying they are not worth donating to -- but they do operate on a principle of "your money makes things A-OK".
on the other hand -- I bet if i contribute $$ to WHOI -- the money will be comming back to me in a way of "Well we are still fucked, but at least now we know how fucked and what we did to get ourselves there"...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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
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 ^_^ ??
A change of 5 degrees F is a change of 2.78 degrees Celsius, not 15 degrees C.
:P
So if your average temperature in the winter is -15F and it went down to -20F your temperature would be 2.78 degrees less than it was before.
A good place for this is http://www.convert-me.com since, apparently, Canadian schools aren't any better than American schools for science.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
nobody have touched on this: but my understanding is that the extremeties of the earth will cool off big time -- but the Earth is still recieving the same amount of heat every day / month / year -- and considering that there are more and more greenhouse gas accumulating -- the earth as a whole should be getting hotter, not colder. It would simply have much more varied climates between near the equator and the poles.
not that this is a good thing. the northern parts cooling 5-10 degrees means that the heat that would be warming it up is now heating up the equatorial section (mexico, egypt, mid. east, india, indo-china, S. china, and some others, of course) by 5-10 degrees. Africa would be fscked with even WORSE famine, and weather in the aforementioned regions will probabbly become quite unbearable. hence even though right now we are pretty much able to inhabit almost all of the earth -- if the weather changes occur we will only be able to live in some band of reasonable weather maybe between 30-60 degrees from equator...
but if humans actually leave the equator alone, we might get some rainforests back... hmm... and the poll (which city you want to live in) will recieve a TON of (city in) ohio / kansas votes)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Does anybody know the energy ratio for heating and cooling?
For example, does it take more energy to cool a house from 95 to 75 F than go up from 50 to 70?
Also, I have read that more people die of cold than of heat. Thus, if the average tempurature of the Earth is going up, then less people should die it would seem.
(However, it seems that *change* from what people/countries are used to may be the biggest drawback of global warming. People not used to surviving extremes may never get a chance to learn.)
And, what will this do to my plan to sit on Alaskan real estate waiting for it to get warm and populated?
Table-ized A.I.
You can always put on more clothing, but you can only take off so much. Given a choice, I'll take colder over hotter anyday.
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.
I've honestly been getting pissed at the fact that snow levels have been getting worse and worse every year in Tahoe. But if global warming decided to give us an 'about face', I'm not going to complain ;)
:)
Perhaps Squaw Valley will offer some sort of special Ice Ace season pass
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
With responsibilities come rights, if the US gets paid by all the countries that benefit from the change, I think we might just come out ahead. But then again, what you're proposing would lead to the US essentially taking over the world. Is that what you're really advocating or are you just an anti-american taking cheap shots?
Some countries will lose, others will win *whenever* the climate changes. If the losers have to get paid, the winners should pay.
Those countries put out less in absolute numbers, more in greenhouse gas/dollar of GNP. In other words, the solution given by most rad-enviros is to make the world significantly poorer by devasting the leading efficient producer.
The Ice Age will balance out Global Warming and we'll wind up with normal temperatures on the planet once again! [/sarcasm]
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
... Yes, seriously.
Provided we're not looking at severe glaciation, just a mini-ice-age like we had a few centuries ago, Europe can probably take it. Most of us live in artificial urban environments anyway, and there's plenty of room to improve our insulation. A colder climate could devastate our agriculture, but Brussels already pays out billions of euros to people just for them _not_ to farm!
And, to be honest, we're fantastically rich by global standards. Look for English and Germans to go buying places in Spain, Italy and north Africa if things start getting a little chilly at home...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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
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.
When was the last time that happened literally?
http://www.discover.com/sept_02/featice.html
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
When will people realize that "begs the question" means asking a question that has already been answered. It does not mean "presents the next logical question!" Think circular reasoning, not linear reasoning.
Mouhahahahaha!
Our time is coming!
Soon the weak will be crushed by the ski-doo riding hordes from the north!
Step 1: Ice age
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Canadian world domination!
You can't take the sky from me...
Yes, I believe it is called Winter.
Sheesh, the things that mkae headlines nowadays.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've heard that the first "Earth Day" was intended to raise awareness of the issue of global cooling. Can anyone confirm or debunk this?
.
I tried writing the Earth Day Network (http://www.earthday.net/) about this about a year ago, but they never replied . .
-Peter
Personally, I always found it ironic that many conservatives are against conservation. Of course, they're for a conservation of a different kind. They would rather preserve the past of burning coal and gas and chopping down every tree in site, instead of researching and pursuing other options.
I don't know why I just bothered replying to a troll.
What?
Just one word:
Chapsticks.
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.
Can anyone say "soilent green"?
I also hear insects can be quite tasty..
Now go take that bad mood and your dumb joke and shove it somewhere else.
Bleh!
I whole hartedly agree. Which brings to light an intresting observation: If it is chaotic and unpredictable how can we assume that we know the effects of an increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
C02 is a greenhouse gas, but a green house gas with very small impact when compared to water vapor. Water vapor by far the most effective green house gas, is 50 times more effective than CO2 based on abundance and how much of the IR band it absorbs.
Global warming theory assumes that a change in a realitivly insignificant greenhouse gas will effect the temperature enough to increase the amount of water vapor in the air. The water vapor is then assumped to cause a runaway chain reaction by increasing the temperature and allowing more water vapor to be adsorbed by the air. While it is a fact that the CO2 concentration has gone up significantly in the past 100 years; from 290 ppm (parts per million) in 1900 to 366 ppm in 1998, if a change of that magnitude can set off a chain reaction then we would have been gone a long time ago. There are obviously mechanisms that prevent this from happening.
I think its foolish to believe that we can predict the future of an extremely chaotic system when there are so many factors included. Geography, photosynthasis, ocean currents, weather patterns, ocean absorption, sun spot cycles, seismic and volcanic activity, photoplankton dynamics etc.: all things that are chaotic in them selves and on top of that, hard to measure effectively.
Beyond all of that, I find this particularly funny:
If you can read that without laughing, I think you need to read it again.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
That's it. There wasn't any money left in the educational system to teach you people sarcasm and comedy. Oh well, at least you got an irrigation system.
After all, he's only the President and Director of the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute, probably the most prestigious in the world. Remember, all scientists are crackpots. Rush Limbaugh said so, and that's good enough for me!
Great. I'll just go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo. Thanks a bunch.
Alas, I live in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Mini Ice age is scheduled to start in about 2 weeks or so and scheduled to end some time around mid-april...
Why?
Longer skiing season! Woohoooo!
If you remember high school physics, there's something called the heat of liquification. It takes heat to convert ice into liquid and it takes heat to convert water at 212 F into steam at 212 F. Actually, water is at it's densist at about 4 C, and solid water (ice) is less dense then liquid water (otherwise ice would sink). You cn obeseve this by looking at the water in a glass of ice water...there's a definite layer of denser water at the bottom of the glass that can be seen.
It has been in the low 40 degrees farenheit here in Rochester NY the past couple of nights... I'd rather not have snow in September.
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.
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
Of course a 10% drop looks a lot less impressive when you realize that 2000 years ago was the strongest field intensity that the Earth has seen in the last 70,000 years. We still have to lose another 75% before we are in the regime that is generally associated with magnetic reversals.
Sooner or later the field will reverse again, but I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.
this page shows that this has been predicted as far back as 1993. It is nice to see climate theory match up with experimental evidence. Actually "nice" is the wrong word, I would certainly prefer if the whole global warming thing turned out to be a hoax. So far I am having very little luck on that wish.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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
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!
You haven't debunked anything. You said he was wrong, called him names, and made a statement wihtout providing any references or supporting arguments.
'Debunking' usually involves proving, to some degree, that the data and premises the theory is based on are incomplete or inadequate, the logic combining the data and premises is flawed, or that there are other (possibly more likely) conclusions that can be drawn from the same data.
You haven't done any of that!
In leu of this, I see nothing wrong with the theory. Earth warms, icecaps melt, ocean salts get diluted, transport of heat stops, earth cools, ice forms, ocean salts become concentrated, transportation of heat resumes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you're going to cling to the current "global warming" theory, that CO2 production and other man-made gasses are causing the earth to trap more heat, then I'd like to know how the whole Medieval Warm Period came about... I don't think it was because of all those Knights and Kings driving their Cadillac SUVs.
That article also discusses history of global climate in general. It's a good read, especially since it indicates that maybe mankind hasn't managed to make THAT big a dent in the environment... yet...
=Smidge=
I'm sick of these woosy winters in New Jersey. It's not winter if there is no snow and last year sucked.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
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.
One way of generating heat in the earth is through tidal forces. The earth is slowly being kneaded like a big doughball by the sun and the moon. This converts rotational energy into thermal energy, slowing the earth's spin down. A violent illustration of this effect is the Jovian moon IO (ok, this whole post was just to use the term Jovian). Io's volcanic activity is almost all generated heat in the core by tidal effects from Jupiter. Since the core is mostly thermally isolated the Earth really doesn't dissipate this energy well. Of course, the tidal forces for Earth are really weak and I have no idea what effect they have on core temperature, if any. But, take a look at Io in a decent astrophysics text.
Another possibility which has happened in the Earth's history is deposits of fissile material moving past one another due to geological plate movement and reaching critical mass. It takes millions if not billions of years, so it doesn't act like a nuke, but fission does occur and heat is created. One such occurance has been discovered on the African continent. I think there was an article in Nature about 4 years ago about it.
Anyway, two mechanisms for the Earth generating heat with no obvious external source (tidal forces come from the sun and the moon, but nothing as noticable as the sun going nova). So no, you aren't showing ignorance (both of these scenarios are less than impressive on the Earth), but there are possibilities (and they do obey Thermodynamics).
Cheers,
Chris
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
I can't remember the name of the event now ("Lesser something," from the name of a plant that became widespread over the period. It's probably even mentioned in that article :-), but a similar thing happened at the end of the last ice age (and there's evidence it happened before). Europe was getting warmer, then suddenly got very cold again for close to a thousand years. Then gradual warming resumed and we entered the current pattern.
The cause is believed to be the melting of the continential ice caps. This dumped a lot of cold water into the Atlantic and turned off the Gulf Stream, and it took a long time for it to turn back on.
In this case, the only question is how quickly polar ice and melt and how much is required to turn off the Gulf Stream. For a long time it was assumed that it wouldn't be enough to cause problems, but now geologists aren't so sure.
Europe may be in for a rough time, but overall temperatures will continue to rise. At least the ships from the American west coast and Asia will be able to sail directly to Europe through the NW passage. (Seriously, I was just reading about how the US and Canada are starting to think about what will be required to support maritime traffic as the polar ice melts.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
parent post was extremely informative - thankyou
here's a little word gloss for a couple of the more uncommon words in the article
thermohaline :
thermo meaning temperature
haline meaning salty
boreal
of, or relating to the north
in this context, the northern hemisphere
from the greek god of the north wind, boreas
finally there was a typo on equitorial
(no, i am not being a spelling nazi),
which is correctly typed equatorial
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.
...on abrupt and extensive climate change say, August of 2012????
Of course, that's just a rough estimate based on made-up evidence with a full support of studies that were conducted entirely within my head.
| - | - |
but are still unclear as to the cause of the southern yearly iceage
Thousands upon thousands of penguins living in the southern polar cap. They constantly inhale and exhale the cold air there. Every time they exhale, the air move a little bit north (as everyone of them is always facing north). After some months the whole polar air mass is above the southern continents and it takes another three months for the tropical heath to disperse it. At the same time the penguins are hibernating. Then the penguins wake up and start moving the air again.
An international consortium formed by Autralian, Brazilian and South African tourist industry representatives have a project to kill all penguins (bringing an ethernal summer to the region), but they are being prevented from implementing it by the Greenpeace and a bunch of Linux zealots.
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).
They are terraforming the earth to their liking - preparing to move in!
(Or perhaps alienforming is more like it
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
When we were told to expect global warming, that was going to be bad. Crops would fail, diseases would spread, people would suffer. Now we are told to expect at least localized cooling, and that is going to be bad too. More crop failures, more suffering.
The lesson, clearly, is that "change is bad". Any change, either warmer or colder, will make things worse. If the sea level rises or falls, that will be disaster. Whether winter or summer becomes longer or shorter, it is harmful.
Apparently most analysts believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds! The only situation which would be acceptable to them is perfect stasis: no change, no novelty, nothing different from what it has been for centuries in the past.
Isn't this an awfully limiting philosophy? Should we always judge the future against the present, with the assumption that any change is automatically something to be avoided?
I wish that we could adopt a more dynamic perspective. It is guaranteed that the future will bring new changes and new challenges. Climate changes are going to be only the smallest part of what we are going to see in the next century. "Creative destruction" is an inherent part of the scientific and technological progress which has led to a world where people are living longer, healthier and more productive lives than ever before.
Let's try to think a little more flexibly and creatively as we look towards the future. Change is not necessarily bad. Any way you look at it, change is going to happen. We need to be prepared to accept and handle change, and not fear it as something which is always threatening and harmful.
An excerpt:
Got Wisdom?
This is all about salt water ceasing to flow like it does now when fresh water comes in and disrupts it, right? So what would happen if suddenly all the salt in the ocean dissapeared? If we could somehow assume that the deaths of all the animals in the ocean that need salinity won't have an effect (which I know we can't). Would the conveyor work the same with all fresh water?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Someone mod parent up as funny, just based on the link.
Omg, and check out young-earth's posts too. Thanks, now I can test out the new /. system for modding down foes.
In Australia we had a problem with a couple of types of insect eating our sugar cane crops. So we imported 60 non-native cane toads from the Americas to eat the bug... they quickly multiplied, but failed to impact on the cane destroying insects.
Now there are millions of poisonous cane toads slowly spreading throughout northern Australia. The have become a pest and compete with native species.
The moral? Be wary of quick fixes, no matter how scientific (i.e. GM!). Mother Nature is complex and can react in unforseen ways and the possiblity of unintended negative impacts is very real!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
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
Maybe if you actually read the article, you'd see that both global warming and this possible mini ice-age would be due to greenhouse gas emissions. We don't know which is going to happen, but if either happens, the US would carry a large share of the responsibility.
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.
1. Make sure the snow is really hard on top, and at least 4' deep. Make sure you're wearing your snow-shoes or you'll fall through!
2. Use a long, thin, "snow-cutting" saw to cut the snow into curved-rectangular blocks.
3. Starting at the base, line the outside of the igloo with the blocks, being sure to leave room for a doorway. You'd be surprised how many hosers forget this!
4. After each layer, have a beer. This only works if you drink Canadian beer. That's MOLSON Canadian, not that "Canadian budweiser" crap. You can rest your beer on the ice blocks to keep it cold.
5. As you get to the top and can no longer reach high enough to put any more blocks up, just give up. Who needs an entire igloo anyway? That can be your "breathing hole".
6. It'll still be freezing, because this is Canada, after all. Build a fire inside your igloo.
7. If your hole isn't big enough, some of the ice on top will melt. This is normal. If your entire igloo melts, it's too warm for igloos right now. Wait until igloo season.
8. Since there's no power outlet, you won't be able to watch Hockey Night in Canada in your igloo. Go back to your house and watch it there.
9. ???
10. Profit!
Howard Dean for president
You're quite right. Everything is modelled on JIT delivery these days, because stock languishing on shelves is wasted money
And you're not even factoring in the effects of Panic Buying. Last year when we had the petrol strikes in the UK, and the public suddenly realised that no petrol (and diesel) meant no product deliveries to the local supermarkets, a wave of panic buying swept the country. Warnings on TV not to panic buy had exactly the opposite effect, and within days supermarkets had all but run out of the essentials. If the situation had lasted for more than a week, people would have found themselves with empty larders and no way to re-stock. Hunger driven chaos and anarchy would have followed soon after.
It was quite an eye opening experience and unpleasant experience.
The question is what are we going to do about it? You just like to stick your head in the sand and find childish excuses. Bush says there is no problem at all. I think it makes sense to reduce our emissions voluntarily. Even if we can sleaze our way out of the responsibility by waving our revolvers, it is still our moral responsibility to avoid these outcomes or pay up for them.
Climate is not like a thermostat. Over thousands of years, maybe Siberia will become a tropical paradise, but in the short term everybody loses when the climate changes: flooding, ecological devastation, etc.
what you're really advocating or are you just an anti-american taking cheap shots?
I didn't take any "anti american cheap shots". As I pointed out, if Bush is right, there is nothing to worry about. But if Bush is wrong and greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for climate change, the it's a simple legal principle that the US, being the largest contributor, ends up with a huge net liability for the damage (other nations also will have net liabilities, of course).
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.
Some ski bums and snowboarders are jumping for joy. (Obligatory on topic adjustment: Linux ski bums)
The crux of the article is that the earth's climate system is complicated and multivariate. Global warming is not as simple as "the world will get warmer and we'll all live in a tropical paradise." Messing with the relevant factors won't necessarily bring about the 'obvious' consequence.
Now if only we could get Slashdotters to understand this the next time they make one of those quasi-informed pronouncement about economics (e.g. give away software to sell your hardware, music sharing increases sales).
-a
How to rationalize theft.
" True, the general consensus is to generate numbers that indicate a general heating, but it's partly political - the funding agencies that support climatology don't want to support models that generate negative numbers, and so predicted cooling=no funding."
What basis do you have for this statement. It seems to me that it would be the opposite. If I wrote a paper saying that global warming was a hoax every republican, oil company, the chamber of commerce, etc would throw enough money at me to drown me. If I wrote a paper saying we will all die from global warming who is going the fund me? The national science foundation? the sierra club? who? Exxon/Mobil can outspend the sierra club AND the national science foundation by a hundred times and not even notice it.
Take for example Bjorn Lomborg the guy who wrote "the skeptical environmentalist" He is now a very rich person wheras most climatologist are still in the middle class. Even though most of Bjorn's arguments have been discredited he still get paid immense amounts of money to expound on his views by the republicans and big business.
So where are your numbers? has anybody done a study that shows that scientists that argue for global warming get more funds then the scientists that disagree.
War is necrophilia.
I was just wondering if you could point me towards the peer reviewed scientific journal which Humphries published his work in?
Oh wait, did the great scientist conspiracy stop him from publishing?
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
If you're going to cling to the current "global warming" theory, that CO2 production and other man-made gasses are causing the earth to trap more heat, then I'd like to know how the whole Medieval Warm Period [nationalcenter.org] came about... I don't think it was because of all those Knights and Kings driving their Cadillac SUVs.
I'm not the poster to whom you replied but I fail to see what your example of the medieval warm period has to do with global warming.
Human produced CO2 isn't the only variable effected the climate.
Besides, there is considerable scientific evidence that the medieval warming period was a series of local events, not a global event.
If you want a good read on climate science and global warming, I would suggest this over some ideological charged think tank.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
While a native can certainly build an igloo by themselves, slashdot's readership is overwhelmingly not native or trained in winter survival skills - a partner is a safety measure for those who haven't made one before. In other words, my post still stands on it's facts and merits. Whilst I am certainly not an Intuit native, I can assure you that the art of igloo building is hardly limited to the Arctic circle. I learned my skills in a Boy Scout winter survival training camp, as many others have.
Incidentally the camp was a joint facility used by the US Army for their winter survival training when there were no Boy Scouts around. They supplied the cold weather survival gear, Boy Scouts provided the facilities - camp Ootpik if that name rings a bell with any readers.
1. Self correction mechanisms, (and I'm not going to argue about whether or not they really exist), can very easily kill off 99% of human life. There were periods of Earth's history where there was virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere, and different kinds of living things thrived. --Keep in mind as well that there have been something like 35 planet-wide die-outs of pretty much every complex organism over the last few million years. Simply moving to another part of the planet is an unrealistic option for about 5.9 billion people. Mass death is a good possibility, I think.
2. 150 years ago, this nation was so smoggy the buildings had to be scrubbed. Sure. But 150 years ago, the planet population was a great deal less than it is today, and heavy industry was also in its infancy. --Sure, things are going to get dirty in places where dirty fuels are burned, (coal), but back then, those zones were very small as compared to the pollution centers today. Also, keep in mind, that India and much of China is going whole-hog with starting up heavy industry in the dirtiest of ways. These are BIG population centers producing BIG pollution which make St. Louis from 150 years ago look like a bug fart.
Essentially, I think you're more or less on the right track with some of your ideas, but I would caution you about leaning towards wishful thinking in other areas. There are better, more respectable ways to come to terms with the world condition today. Why frightened? Why indeed? If the human race dies out, it won't be too soon! Talk about self-correction!
-Fantastic Lad
The same argument can be used to show that the World's forests don't have much effect on CO2. Yes, they absorb CO2 but when the trees die it all gets released again. It'd be OK if, when a tree dies, we bury it so that whatever civilisation is around in 100 million years gets some new coal reserves.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Actually they are not. Blair for example cares very little about the environment - he's more interested in licking the boots of Bush and big business. But even he recognises that climate change is a real threat.
Female Prison Rape in NY
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.
"it's a simple legal principle" under which law system? Farting in a crowded elevator is not legally actionable even though there might be real emotional and aesthetic damage. You're talking about a huge application of ex post facto law, a no no in a lot of legal systems.
The fact is that if the PRC or Russia or most any other country were a larger share of global production and the US were a smaller one, the net global emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases would go up as the US is a very clean producer. Going after the cleanest producer is a good secondary marker for somebody with a hidden agenda.
The thing people like you don't understand about environmentalists is that they're not arguing about the grand purity of the natural world as much as they're saying "Wake up, we're killing ourselves." This debate is about our survival, not about the world's ability to shrug and adjust. No doubt, the world will make do -- the question is whether human beings will be able to live in it.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in one of his collections in which he tried to make that point like this (paraphrasing):
It isn't that environmentalists think we can destroy the world. It's that they think we can make it unliveable for ourselves. Your glib "I'd like to have six more degrees, what the heck?" is completely ignorant about the potential effects of mean temperature changes on that scale. Take a look into how the Sahara desert came about, will you?
You're playing with your own future, and you dismiss anyone who wants you to think about the consequences as a "whiner." Pretty rash attitude to throw back in the face of the overwhelming weight of the world's scientific opinion. Gee, I hope you're way the hell brighter than the climate scientists who look at ice cores from Greenland...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Actually I do and I have. ;)
Igloos are actually quite warm and I ended up having to sleep on top of my sleeping bag because I got so warm.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Lived there for 3 years and attended UND back in the early
'90s.
Did they have to completely gut the downtown after '97?
Yeah, pretty much although I'm not that sure about what it looked like before (I'm also a UND Student from the cities. Started here in fall of 99). Mid April is really only an estimate...We got snowed on twice during finals week last year. (The one in May...)
Why?
as long as we have this
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you studied paleloclimatology at all, you wouls see a constant cycle for millions of years, very regular. HEs right, we are just coming out of the last MAJOR ice age.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Under the US system of laws.
The fact is that if the PRC or Russia or most any other country were a larger share of global production and the US were a smaller one, the net global emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases would go up as the US is a very clean producer.
But they aren't because they are producing and consuming less. Overproduction and overconsumption are just as much of a problem as inefficient manufacturing and energy use when it comes to pollution and greenhouse gasses.
And, as most people already learn in kindergarden, "Johnny does it too" is not a good excuse for behaving badly yourself.
The real problem is that the US tax system does not properly account for the externalities associated with energy consumption: if fossil fuels were several times as expensive as they are, the US would become more efficient.
Going after the cleanest producer
Who is going after anybody? I'm not saying that anybody should "go after" the US preemptively to stop greenhouse gas emissions.
All I'm saying is that if destructive climate change due to greenhouse gasses occurs, then the US will have the largest share of responsibility because the US has emitted the largest amount of those pollutants.
People need to keep that in mind when deciding whether to vote for people who proclaim that greenhouse gasses are not a problem. Are the benefits we derive from cheap energy worth even a small chance of causing the deaths of billions and facing trillions of dollars in liability?
I also think that the right's rhetoric of "responsibility" is smoke and mirrors. They talk about "responsibility" when it comes to welfare mothers, but don't often apply the principle to their political constituencies, or the US as a whole relative to the international community.
What people believe may be a threat is of little relevance.
If Blair was afraid that one day a lunar eclipse was going to permanetly block out the sun, would you be concerned?
There's plenty of people that have no idea what they are talking about, and it's just possible that this article was meant to manipulate people into believeing that global-warming is a real threat.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Female Prison Rape in NY
"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."
Isn't it QUITE clear? A whole lot of us are going to die premature deaths.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
When will people realize that language evolves? Language is only defined as how people use it. Some words or phrases change meaning over time, or even reverse completely. Is the dictionary some rulebook we are eternal slaves to? No. Shakespeare invented over 1600 words. Did you know that "awful" used to mean "deserving of awe"? Or that "sophisticated" used to mean "corrupted"?
Did you ever consider that "Begs the question"'s contemporary meaning is changing for a DAMN GOOD REASON? It's just 3 simple words people. Now, ignoring antiquated idioms, apply language comprehension skills. Is this closer in meaning to "requests the question" or closer to "repeating the question". I think "begs" is WAY closer to "requests" than "repeats", don't you? So why not just accept it, instead of nitpicking a dead horse?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
The fact is that greenhouse gases are considered pollutants for their non-greenhouse effects, not because they are greenhouse gases. The biggest one, CO2 is not considered pollutant at all. Industry also issues albedoizing emissions. Do they get credit for that? No, they don't since a lot of those are categorized as pollutants as well.
The US legal system has specific laws and schedules for which emissions are controlled and anything that's not on the schedules is just not controlled, including CO2. Sorry, any greenhouse effect in other countries is just not covered at all unless there's a treaty specifically delineating the relationship.
Making stuff up is just not an answer.
Which is exactly my point. Something had to cause the warming, and arguably Human CO2 production was nowhere near what it is today... therefore, maybe there is some other mechanism at work.
It's well known that the global climate isn't static. Many of the mechanisms are well known to climatical scientists. Unsurprisinging, the vast majority of climatical scientists believe that humanities actions are causing global warming.
As for the medieval warming period, it is thought to a series of local events because it appears to be irregular. The cold and warm peaks don't correlate with respect to large geographic areas. In particular evidence from the Southern hemisphere shows very irregular temperture change.
It has been suggested that the warm period is due to gradual change in the North Atlantic Oscillation.
The crux of my argument is that this is all a global cycle that is simply misunderstood, and that it's foolish to simply assume that we're responsible for it, the reason being any action taken against a problem that is not understood may (and generally will) make matters worse.
While this is possible, the worlds climatical scientists disagree with you. As my knowledge of global warming is spotty (to say the best), I'll stick with them over your view.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
Well Mims was badly treated by a popular science mag (hardly in the same category as peer reviewed science journals), it is interesting to note that several organisations which have attacked creationism in the past did come to his defense, and Mims work is hardly not being published in mainstream science.
This is more a illustration that creationists can get published if they present science not propaganda. Sadly this appears to be a barrier that the majority of them cannot overcome.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
And the point was to show that the in-place orthodoxy (Neo-darwinism) has tried to block anything that challenges it seriously.
Get a sense of perspective. The orthodoxy that you speak of, is a small group of people who run a popular science mag. Mims was defended by scientific organisations which have zero respect for creationism.
It's this constant propaganda barrage that pervades young earth creationism, which kills any hope that it has of being even remotely close to science.
Also, well we are on perspective, nothing comes close to challenging the theory of evolution. Sorry but wishful thinking doesn't count.
The bottom line to me is that I accept supernatural explanations for some things; but the orthodoxy is pure naturalism, rejecting all supernatural causes.
Science deals with what it can see and measure. Rather than accepting supernatural explanations, it's far better to keep on looking for answers to things that you don't understand.
That however takes at least as much faith, since how can you explain the laws of physics, origin of matter, origin of energy, etc. arising from naturalism?
I don't know.
And that's what I see as sciences greatest asset. It doesn't provide a set of truths about the world, but rather provides a method for approximating them.
Given the success rate of science vs. religon in showing us what the physical world is like, I know what horse I'd bet on.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
However to your point, the Bible has had scientific truths in it that scientists over millennia have ignored. For centuries, it was thought that you needed to drain blood in order to cure disease. But in the Bible it clearly states "the life is in the blood". And for years scientists taught that the earth was flat, whereas the Bible clearly indicates it's a sphere. For years it was taught that the stars did not move, whereas the Bible says God "stretches out the heavens" - stars in motion did not gain acceptance until relatively recently.
The problem with these "scientific truths" is that they are terribly vauge. To take one of your examples, that the earth is a sphere, if it was suddenly found that the earth is in fact flat, then one could just as easily say that the Bible predicted it. For example, the devil takes Jesus up a high mountain to show him all of the kingdoms in the world. Something which is clearly impossible if the world is spherical. There are more passages which can be intrepeted as promoting a flat earth (I'm not suggesting that they do say this, but rather that they can be intrepeted this way).
Also, I take exception to your suggestion that many of these "truths" where ignored by scientists. The Greeks even had a go at calculated the diameter of earth, can the Bible even come close to telling us what the earths diameter is?
If Christians had been shouting out for years that the earth is a sphere, that the stars move etc then you would have a better arguement. But it only seems that these "scientific truths" only come out after everybody knows about them.
There are many other things in the same vein. No other sacred book has anything like that record.
And yet many Muslims feel that there are scientific truths in the Koran (click here for an example of this). What makes your claims better than theirs?
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
The Koran (or Qu'ran, transliteration makes it tough to be exact) clearly states both that to disbelieve anything in it is heresy, and that the earth is flat.
Yes the phrase "Stretches out the heavens" was not understood in relation to redshift, there was no such thing as redshift known until pretty recently. But regardless of the failings of human understanding, it is an accurate fact.
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I believe that one of the Koran's passages reads "and the Earth, after that, He made it like a deheya", where deheya apparently means "egg". The Islamic-science website which I pulled this off, claims that this is evidence for a spherical earth with a bulge, which is pretty good in itself.
The Bible is a very large book. Write any book of that size, with enough mystical statements, and it's not that surprising, that with the benefit of hindsight, a few will seem accurate. It's no different to Nostradamus.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
I said it was a bad idea to use the term universally because it has conflicting definitions. You respond with an example of exactly what I'm talking about when you list three different definitions. Then you go on to say I was right for some "different reason" than the one I gave, even though everything you said up until that point backed up exactly what I said. I'm confused.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I have no doubt that the Koran is out of touch. My arguement is that the Bible is just as out of touch.
This isn't meant to be a slur against either, it's just that works by humans aren't perfect. And this especially applies to ancient works, as there were many more misconceptions about the world floating around then.
Morris's work with creationism is enough to put me off (I'm a chemist, so the one area relevant to creationism that I know lots about is thermodyamics - HM is either ignorant or a lier). However, I would apprieciate it if you could summarise HM's strongest, most "infallible" proof.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
I would pick Dr. Morris's point about the hydrologic cycle (oceans, evaporation, condensation, precipation, aggregation, flow to oceans) which is made repeatedly in the Bible. Of course I can't pick what would be most impressive to you.
Just curious, what (I gather about 2nd law of thermo) bothers you about Dr. Morris's work?
Got Wisdom?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I know you should never respond to a troll, but what a glaring mistake: Ouzo and Ricard could, I guess, be mistaken for each other and are aniseed flavoured, clear and strong. And they do turn milky white when water is added.
But Absinthe is green and doesn't taste like any other drink!!!
You can get it in most specialist alcohol shops in the UK and it is an interesting addition to a night out as various bars stock it too.
Although it is gaining popularity in cocktails, the classic way to drink it is this:
dip a spoonful of sugar in the Absinthe
set fire to the Absinthe soaked sugar
once it has melted, stir into the glass of Absinthe
Allow the mix to burn a little longer
Enjoy!