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A New Ice Age?
barakn writes "Scientists have savaged the new movie The Day After Tomorrow, which depicts global warming causing a new ice age and freezing New York solid. The movie follows on the heels of a report to the Department of Defense in February, written by two guys who are not climatologists, about the implications of global warming triggering the growth of ice sheets in the northern hemisphere. There is a plausible theory which suggests that melting ice may release enough fresh water to halt circulation of warm water from the Gulf Stream, thus significantly cooling Europe and the east coast of North America. Note that this theory depends on melting ice, not growing ice, which may be one reason scientists find the ice age scenario so hard to swallow. New satellite evidence suggests a part of this circulation may already be slowing down. Those on the North American west coast will not have to worry about ice sheets, but changes in Arctic ice could mean the western drought will be permanent. For those of you who would rather do something before it's too late, iron seems to work, but the long-term ecological implications are still unknown."
Maybe because climate change caused by global warming is potentially (note, I said potentially) a man-made disaster waiting to happen, whereas drilling down to the Earth's core isn't actually happening and being hit by an asteroid the size of Texas is highly unlikely for the immediate future.
The attitude of a lot of people here on Slashdot with regards to global warming amazes me. This is something that could possibly devastate society as we know it, perhaps not for us, but for our children or our children's children, but there's a great many people who either dismiss it as never going to happen or something that can be easily controlled without any major shifts in lifestyle or attitude.
Someone once said "This is a fragile ball we're living on. It's a miracle and we're destroying it." That's a hell of a lot closer to the truth than any politician, especially any politician who's made a killing from exploiting fossil fuels, will ever admit to.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Your gross (though common) oversimplification of the claims doesn't counter the fact that the amount of oil is limited ... unless you are hypothesizing either an infinite amount of oil or some currently unknown process that is replacing it as fast as we can use it? When the reserves will run out, whether in 5 years or 50, is a relatively unimportant detail compared to the fact that they will. Yes, there is uncertainty about the timing -- should we gamble that it will be later rather than earlier?
The attitude that "it hasn't happened yet therefore it won't happen" is even sloppier thinking than what you are criticizing.
The only way to avoid be caught unprepared for changes in the availabilty in resources is to prepare for those changes. Why is this so hard to understand?
Generally, in any case by no means every theory/prediction made about climate has been wrong. Case in point James Lovelock (who happens to be one of the two founders of what's generally known as the Gaia hypothesis) and co-researchers *accurately* predicted the medium-long term results of CFC release on the ozone layer.
Science is inherently wrong, because it's the art of better explaining what we don't know. Another related case in point. Up until a dozen years ago physical oceanography uniformly concluded (based on theoretical models and very limited data sets) an understanding that the deep ocean flow was uniform and slow.
A friend of mine at WHOI put some cameras on the floor of the northern Atlantic, one day they were thinking their hardware had flaked 'cause they couldn't see anything. What was happening was silt was being stirred up by a high velocity current. What they discovered was that oceans have 'weather patterns' which operate much as atmospheric weather, fronts, low&high pressure areas etc.
This completely blew away established theories of physical oceanogrpahy (and happens to be directly related research to the abrupt climate change and ocean conveyor research article referenced in this post).
I'm glad you feel safe, however concluding that you're safe because prior research has been wrong is not a great recipe for the long term. The CFC / ozone problem is one of the first instances of scientific results materially impacting environmental policy at the global/international level. If rapid-onset ice-age is a possiblity (this has been pretty well established). And if a 'lens' of low-density fresh water over the northern oceans can trigger this abrupt change we would be foolish to conclude there's no risk worth further understanding.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
And his silly attempts at savagery shows that he never quite GETS it - check out his "review" of The Core. It completely has eluded him that "The Core" is a funny little 50s type sci-fi movie, not a documentary.
* I'm an engineer myself but I've been trained to actually find the truth, not make surmises about what I *think* scientists would say our do - I'd go ask some of them!
--I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
This is a bogus argument. Of course the number of reported cancer cases has increased over the last century. There are two strikingly obvious reasons.
First, people have a much longer life expectancy today than people did a century ago. We've eliminated a lot of the things that used to kill people (simple infections, food poisoning, etc). Many of the people that would have gotten cancer, died from something simple that is non-fatal today.
Second, we know so much more about cancer today. We know how to diagnose it. If you go back 100 years, I would guess that there were thousands of farmers who died of a "cold" but really had skin cancer. And skin cancer is easy to see compared to pancreatic cancer, bone cancer, and other internal cancers.
A century ago people might have died of cancer (if they lived long enough to get cancer), but it's unlikely that it would be reported as a death from cancer. The rise in cancer rates may be related to industrial waste, but that claim cannot be reliably made because there is no way to find valid cancer statistics from 100 years ago.
Although I agree with you that we don't know if global warming is suppose to happen right now anyway, the rate of change is what's alarming the scientists. Records going back hundreds of years give us a pretty good image of the weather pattern we're suppose to receive. The amount of extreme weather occurances and unprecedented warming of land inside the arctic circle is why scientists are concerned. The rate of change is simply beyond anything nature alone could do.
So yes I do agree with you that globam warming and ice ages are normal. Maybe we're suppose to have global warming anyway. But the rate that this is happening is alarming. And it leaves us little time to prepare ourselves to find ways to adapt to the new climate.
All iron seeding studies as of 2003, confirmed the consumption of CO2 but
Fast forward to 2004.
There is an article in nature, published on March 17 2004, whose abstract says iron is not a panacea
Audio interview, (8:36 ogg, 3.3Mb) with one of the authors. Source story.Apparently the study linked to in the original post has two studies who's results will be published in April 2004
So what do we know for sure? Adding iron does cause a bloom, and does drawdown CO2 but other nutrients are used up and the CO2's ultimate fate is debatable.
The conflicting results could be regional variation in ocean conditions, but IANAO.
Either way global warming is real, and the film may bring to light the severity of future changes.
I will generally agree with this, however the conclusion you draw from it is incorrect.
1. There is a small chance that if we do nothing catastrophic damage will be done. Therefore, we must take action.
2. Doing "X" will probably fix the problem predicted by the model. However, we do not have a good model to evaluate all of the outcomes from taking action "X", so we must evaluate the probablities. Because the model isn't good enough, the probablity that "X" will cause different but equally catastrophic damage, is the same as the original problem. Therefore we cannot take action "X". We must take other action.
3. Repeat step two until you've exhausted all possiblities and realize that, without a good model, taking drastic action is not a good idea.
The lack of a valid climate model is the reason that it's irresponsible to take drastic action that will harm people today. Because the model is bad, taking action doesn't remove the chance of catastrophic damage and it creates certain short and medium term damage.
It is not on the naysayers to prove that nothing needs to be done. The burden is on those pushing for change to make a valid case for change and show that the immediate downside is out-weighed by the potential gain. Current climate models do not do this.
Do you know how much CO2 levels have fluctuated in the past BEFORE men came around? How about the ice ages and the warming in the time of the dinosaurs? What about the 15,000 scientists who have signed a petition against the Kyoto Accord because they believe the science predicting global warming is flawed? I am not against the preservation of the environment, but when you use scare tactics on par with the US during the Cold War (We're all going to die TOMORROW unless you do something about it right now!) I refuse to listen to you. Before you ask, I acquired my information by reading the news and searching out information for myself, so find something else to use against me. Maybe the fact I am not as big a linux nerd as you? That should get you points here on Slashdot
As soon as I can see an accurate 5 day weather forcast I'll start paying more attention.
No, no, a thousand times no.
Nothing personal; you're just repeating what you've been told, but you have been told wrong.
The fact that short-range weather forecasts for individual locales lose skill at roughly 10 days does not mean that accurate 50+ year climate simulations are not possible. Why? The short answer is weather != climate.
The climate model is not concerned with predicting the temperature and skycover at London at 3PM on April 1, 2078. It cannot do so. It is interested in the broad -- global, regional -- statistics: means, variances, seasonal/annual/decadal precip totals and averages, etc.. It is possible to get those right even though forecasts at fixed points in space in time are wrong. We're looking at the forest here, not the trees.
If you take a short-term weather forecast model and perturb its starting conditions, even by a wee little bit, you will wind up with a very different result in short order -- in under a week. One simulation might be predicting sunny for a fixed point, the other cloudy. One cooler than normal, one warmer; one wet, one dry. Chaos theory, and all that.
But it's still the same climate. Please understand this. Yes, the skill in assessing "weather" fluctuations about the climate mean has disappeared, but the climate remained the same.
What climate models are trying to do is ascertain whether the climate itself is changing. Are climate models perfect, complete, 100% skillful? NO, of course not. Do they have a long way to go towards improvement? YES. Are they useless? Well, you be the judge.
I have a very nice figure showing how well a climate model was able to reproduce climate (NOT weather) variations -- specifically, global average temperature -- over the last millennium. Model predictions are superposed on climate data reconstructed from proxies. The model was run numerous times, with perturbed starting conditions, to yield an "ensemble", helping to assess the range of uncertainty.
I can't find this image on the web, and don't want to put it somewhere where it might be slashdotted, but if you really care enough, email me at rfovell at yahoo dot com and I will send it to you, along with an explanation of what you are looking at. It's an excellent reconstruction. So good you simply have to pay attention to what these models are saying about the future.
Thanks for reading this far.
Every rule has an exception (except this one).
"Remember that 30 years ago, we were all concerned about the next ice age."
This was something whipped up by the media. Global warming has been under discussion in the scientific community for about 100 years. (Yes, really). On the back of work on nuclear winter scenarios in the early 1970s there was some speculation that particulate matter from coal burning might cause a local cooling in some parts of the globe that would offset it. It is no longer believed that this is the case, and was only an possible theory for a brief period. However the media really grabbed onto the theory and keep bringing up.