Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wait... so you're telling me that a movie writer is being loose with the truth?
What is the world coming to!?
i might be wrong, but arnt people saying were in the middle of an ice age right now and the only thing keeping it check is the amount of CO2 being produced. anyone?
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
I refuse to forget how many times popular science has been wrong.
there is your answer... "popular science"
it diesnt say accurate science, or proper science or even real science... but popular science...
they only print that which is "popular" at that time. Many times their articles are complete bunk and sensationalized to the point of being redicilous... and they have ALWAYS been that way.
Popular science is for the Lay person that likes to be entertained... go grab one of the real science journals for accurate information.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Today, it's like 59 degreees F.
If that recollection is true, then we're still in an "Ice Age" and should expect the world to be getting warmer if the "Ice Age" is in fact coming to an end.
Sorry if this doesn't fit into the "human == BAD, all_natural == GOOD" paradigm, but getting struck by lightning or eaten by a lion does fall into the "all_natural" category too...
I was hoping for global warming! I already had ordered a few 100.000s tonnes of pearly white sand to make some lovely beaches in soon-to-be-sunny Greenland... Damn it!
Hate me!
Sure global warming may be happening... BUT and this is probably why the slashdot people are laisse faire, maybe it is part of the overall scheme of things by none other than mother nature.
When that little warming period and ice age hit, which was not caused by humanity, would the arguments not be the same? EG would the green people would be saying to stop burning all of those fires to heat homes?
Frankly I think the only real way of stopping global warming is to kill off about 2/3 of our planet. There are just too many of us.
Let me give you an example. Germany, which is trying to be green installed a huge number of wind powered generators in the North Sea. They have just found out that because of all those generators the coast is getting 10% more sunshine and 10% less rain. I then ask the question, are we not dammed if we do and dammed if we do not?
So unless you are ready to volenteer your life in the name of "humanity" nothing much is going to change.
BTW I do not agree with your quote as planet Earth has withstood worse things than humans and continued. What might not survive are the humans!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I don't think the parent was referring to the magazine "Popular Science" but rather the current theories that permeate society, eg: "Global warming" and "We only have 20 years worth of oil reserves left". (That second one was popular around the 1970's, and 30 years later they still say we have 20 years worth left...)
Unfortunately, it's popular science that the laymen take as truth. The public has SO MUCH blind faith in science its disturbing. Everyone figures "well these guys are scientists, so they must know what they're talking about" - It's not that that the public is stupid (debatable...) but rather they are just so uninformed about how everything works that they really can't critique the claims.
And all too often the laymen are the policy makers and social/political reactionaries. That's when the problems start.
=Smidge=
It would seem that the Earth's climate is normal, and we're not going to suffer a slow broil (so put away the onions, and get that apple out of your mouth).
As for the ice age theory, one of the last ice ages was caused by a lot of fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic. The difference in salinity caused the warm Gulf Stream waters to submerge, reducing the overall temperature in Europe and North America enough to cause an Ice Age. The effect took only 70 years.
It would indeed be ironic, though, if the only way to save civilization as we know is would be to increase greenhouse gasses, not reduce them.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
The real problem these movies point out is the shocking rise in bad acting. Apparently something in the future (possibly estrogen-like toxins?) is destroying humanity's ability to emote properly. This is what scientists should be studying. At the rate it is occurring, bad acting could sweep the planet in just a few decades. This could have a profound impact on Broadway, Shakespeare festivals, and even school plays.
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
I'm not sure how bunk the notion of Global Warming causing an ice age is (esp. since the article seems to be slashdotted so I can't read it) nor have I watched the movie. I remember when we were studying planetary science, one of the chief questions was what caused ice ages, esp. connections with the Earth's orbit and rotation. Mind you this was some years back, but if I recall correctly, one of the things we focused heavily on was the fact that the geological evidence shows that just before Ice Ages, the Artic regions have record peaks in their temperatures. It seemed that no-one was too sure about why this was the case but what seemed to be popular was how very high Artic temperatures affected the percentage of the ocean covered by ice and the different amounts of heat that land and water absorb (and also how the Southern Hemisphere was different because of its different ratio of land to water). This seemed to be pretty established physics at the time and no-one mentioned anything about global warming. Though the question of just exactly how this all worked was still up in the air. It just seems that people are applying what is known about past Ice Ages and theorising that if record high temperatures in the Artic Circle which preceded previous Ice Ages played a direct role in the Ice Ages (and you have to admit, it's pretty reasonable to assume this), global warming may eventually result in an Ice Age as well due to the same conditions that caused previous Ice Ages.
But _The Day After Tomorrow_ is by the director of Independence Day -- how could it be anything but a quality picture?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Because, for example, the eruption of Mount St Helens put 1 Million tonnes of sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere - these are the things that have the most effect on the worldwide climate, the ash from volcanos is local effect only.
Now, a million tonnes sounds absolutely huge. But it is still only just over five times what, say, the State of Louisiana emits as sulfur dioxide every year.
So in other words - the US easily produces as much sulfur dioxide, and more, every year than the explosion of Mount St Helens.
Or put it this way - you get sulfur dioxide from burning fossil fuels. We mine, worldwide, billions of tonnes of coal every year (the US alone produces just under a billion). How much sulfur dioxide do you think all that lot produces? The answer is that a typical small coal-fired power station (100 MW) may produce from 20 000 up to 30 000 tons of sulphur dioxide a year. In other words, Mt St Helens is worth a measly 40 small coal-fired power stations. How many of them are there in the US alone?
This is a pretty strong argument that the higher lattitudes are temperate because of the regulating effects of the currents. Siberia is a frozen waste because it benefits from no nearby warm current, and the Sahara bakes while the Amazon is merely tropical because of the proximity to a regulating surface current. If the deep ocean current were disrupted, there is reasonable and significant doubt that a different suitable global ocean current system would develop to prevent the low lattitudes from turning into a planet-wide desert while the high lattitudes make Siberia look like a warm vacation spot.
Then it demonstrates in a fish tank how cold water currents cannot descend in fresh water as well as in salt water. This is exactly what happens near Iceland, where the warm Atlantic surface current hits Arctic waters and drops to the ocean floor to fuel the deep ocean current. Already they have scientific measurements to suggest that the deep ocean current is being fueled less now than it was 30 years ago, before which nobody understood the importance of salinity in the oceans and the deep ocean currents. This correlates to the alarming increase in icebergs which have broken away from the polar ice caps over the last few decades (something like a 500% increase, by the way.)
And the documentary takes only 60 minutes, including commercials.
Yeah, your right. Everyone who doubts the human impact on global warming must be ignorant. How can they believe a Shell study when there is so much other literature from Greenpeace out there. The results are so obvious that Greenpeace doesn't even need to do research!
We should force all these ignorant people to submit to our will. From this point forward no one is allowed to drive cars or use electricity. We will go back to a "natural" state.
As you die of starvation, disease and animal attacks, remember that your life and the hundreds of millions of other lives are serving a great purpose of making the climate "right".
Don't be bothered by the fact we don't have a model that has ever accurately predicted climate change.
Don't worry that there were periods of warming and cooling in the past that had nothing to do with humans. The people who think that this might be related to our observations of climate change today are completely ignorant. Your suffering is worth the price.
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.
When I first got into this business in the early 90s I spent a lot of time discussing these topics on sci.environment.
It may be worth pointing out that climate change over the past decade has panned out pretty much as was expected ten years ago. It's interesting that this hasn't affected the cerdibility of the field very much.
I've dabbled a bit in sci.environment again in the last few months, but it's been a lot less satisfying. Ten years ago I had the privilege of getting into flame wars with no less than John McCarthy, as well as many other less famous but comparably intelligent, very well-informed conservatively inclined people.
To be sure, there were also many throughly propagandized folks, mostly aligned in two opposing camps, but it was possible to have a serious debate and even, once in a while, score a point.
The conversation on Slashdot is only marginally better than the decaying thrashings on sci.environment. It's better because most people here are grinding different axes, and so their ill-informed commentary is less shrill and confrontational.
There's a hell of a lot of misinformation going around here, though. It's pretty discouraging to see what gets moderated to 5, insightful or informative.
Even the hacker community, chastened though it should be by the ways in which writing code makes you face your mistakes, is sadly overconfident about its opinions. People make broad and confident statements on matters where, (obviously to those few of us here who are serious students of the matter) they know very little. Moderators sharing the politics of the poster mod these up to "insightful" ore even worse "informative".
Let me review the settled science. There's a lot that's unsettled, but when I see these points debated I despair for democracy:
mt
The Gulf of Mexico is a large tropical sea with very warm water. A major ocean current, called the Gulf Stream, carries warm water from the Gulf up the east coast of the United States, starts to curve to the east as it passes Virginia, makes a sharper turn east near Cape Cod, heads straight for Ireland and Britain, turns south and heads down the French coast to Spain. The heat from the Gulf Stream warms northwestern Europe, and is the reason why London is as far north as Quebec and Moscow, but doesn't get 4 meters of snow every winter.
The mechanism that causes the Gulf Stream to flow is that cold water is denser than warm water. The arctic water up near Greenland and Iceland sinks and the warmer, less dense water from the Gulf of Mexico flows up to take its place.
However, salinity also affects water density. If enough fresh water from the ice cap melts and flows into the area around Newfoundland-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland, the water won't be dense enough to sink. Therefore the warm water will stop flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico.
Now London gets 4 meters of snow. Scandanavians laugh at them.
Of course, this will also cause the ice cap to stop melting in this area, but it will take quite a long time to "prime the pump", perhaps several thousand years. In the meantime, the northeastern United States and Northwestern Europe experience an "Ice Age" where their climate more closely resembles the climate of Russia at similar lattitudes.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth.
My whole point, which you seemed to have completely glanced over during your little crusade, is that scientists make statements that the public in general doesn't completely understand. This half-knowledge scientific rhetoric then becomes so widespread throughout society it "becomes fact", when in reality it's only half the story.
Did I ever say we'd never run out of oil? No. Did I say Global Warming is a myth? No. I never used the words "it hasn't happened yet therefore it won't happen." I think we both agree that's the worst attitude you can have in any situation. My point is that, in the 1970's, we knew we would "run out of oil in about 20 years", and today we know that global warming will destroy the planet as we know it in 10 years (or whatever they're saying nowadays). When in fact what we as a society know is really only half the story. However, it's "popular" that global warming is going to destroy the planet in our lifetimes, and that somehow makes it fact when it's really just one of many, many possibilities we don't fully understand.
=Smidge=
Is it even legitimate from a mathematical-modeling viewpoint to talk about long-term average behavior?
Indeed, in a formal sense it is not easy to make a distinction between climate and weather. The casual statement "climate is the statistics of weather" becomes formally unsatisfactory when one starts to talk about climate change .
Nevertheless, I hope you will admit that I am saying something both meaningful and true when I say that the climate of Kansas City Missouri is more variable than that of Portland Oregon. How to cast this into a formal mathematical statement is not obvious, but probably not relevant for the current discussion. Whether it ought to be a practical issue for the field is something I've wondered about, but I don't think it's a current topic.
Interestingly, "climate" is conceptually better defined in our complex models than in the real world, because our models have finite sets of forcings and of free variables, and thus a clearer distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic variability than the real world does.
The prediction you make about 2304 is reasonable, but hardly long-term by geological standards.
Actually, the prediction is robust for any location at 40 degrees north latitude, at any date, on physical grounds, as long as the atmosphere is not almost totally opaque to incoming shortwave radiation (a.k.a. "sunshine") as on Venus.
I simply use it to illustrate that the predictability horizon of weather (defined as preturbations about the climatological mean) does not amount to a predictability constraint on the climate itself. I will make the same assertion for 30,000 years in the future, if you assure me that "Chicago" will be meaningful that far into the future (which I very much hope will be the case!)
I understand this doesn't go directly to your question, which is mathematical rather than physical. Climate is definitely not stationary, and quite possibly not even ergodic.
Climate is easy to define formally in our models though, much more so than in the real world. Our models can do multiple realizations of a particular year, based on specific boundary conditions and forcings. We capture enough of the variability in these models that the realizations differ. We treat the variations among these realizations as stochastic weather and the commonalities as deterministic climate.
In the real world, as opposed to in models, there is only one realization, and in fact, no clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic processes. So our meta-model, our model of the model, is difficult to justify formally.
In practice we don't dwell on this much. We just treat the real world as a superposition of chaotic dynamic variability (an unpredictable part) and deterministic climate change which sets up the statistical properties of the chaos.
In the simple chaotic dynamics view, weather is the state of the system (the wandering dot), and climate is the shape of the set of permissible trajectories (the whole phase diagram). Things aren't necessarily that simple in fact, but we don't have a better way of addressing the issue. Ultimately, we aren't trying to prove theorems, we're trying to elucidate complex physics, and this view appears to be both necessary and sufficient for most of our purposes.
mt
Not 18,185,947,580,800 kWh. From your own numbers it should be 18,185,947,580,800,000 kWh available from solar (you were off by a factor of 1000).
Completely moving to solar electric would be very expensive with current technology, and use a lot of land, but it probably could be done.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)