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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."
Wait... so you're telling me that a movie writer is being loose with the truth?
What is the world coming to!?
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"
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
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?
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