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Pentagon Climate Change Author Interviewed
cynical writes "Just in time for the opening of The Day After Tomorrow, the futurism/technology/environment blog WorldChanging has an interview with futurist Doug Randall, co-author of the "Abrupt Climate Change" scenario [PDF] commissioned by the Pentagon earlier this year. The report generated a storm of controversy a couple of months ago, and drew attention to the possibility that global warming could disrupt things enough to trigger a rapid-onset ice age. Now that the furor has died down, Randall can talk about climate change, how the report came to be, and just what he thinks about the new disaster movie."
People in audiences have apparently found it incredibly funny... too bad it isn't a comedy. It's based on a book by Art Bell, the Coming Global Superstorm. I hear the only thing that would've made the movie worse is if they ended up defeating nature by uploading a virus they wrote on a Mac.
It does, and this gives an influx of fresh water in the Polar Oceans. In a normal freezing season, theres extensive rejection of brine, which produces dense, saline water, which sinks to form water masses usually called Deep Water and Bottom Water. These form a large part of the Thermohaline Circulation (THC), a global scale conveyor belt of water, of which large scale surface currents like the Gulf Stream are but a part. Turn off the dense water formation at the poles, and that may be enough to retard or stop the THC.
If that turns off, you switch off the major heat transport mechanism from the equator to the poles, and that means abrupt cooling for the mid-latitude and polar regions.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There was a number of programs on BBC/Discovery in the horizon series. One of them is about global warming, the other one was about the fall of the Maya empire which happened during one of these abrupt events.
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The thing which people do not understand about global warming is that it sooner or later brings the gulfstream to a standstill due to decrease in water salinity in the arctic. As a result New England, Iceland and most of Wester Europe freeze as the temperature drops down by up to 9C. After all, London is at the lattitude of Alaska and the only thing keeping it warm is the Stream.
Latin America overheats and goes into a draught. There are some effects going as far as changes in the monsoon patterns and draughts in South East Asia.
This is also the reason why you cannot indiscriminately use historic data sets about climate without weighting. This is also the reason why a recently published right-thinking-tank flamebait (honoured on Slashdot) that the original global warming research is flawed because they did not use all data including Texas is what it is - flamebait. Texas is probably the only place to go cooler in such an event because the rain that currently drops on Latin America will drop there.
The simulations have been run many times and the result is always the same. In fact sod the temperature, the most scary fact of global warming is the gradual decrease of flow in the antigulfstream and water salinity which have been picked up for the last several years.
For a lamers overview see this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/bigchil
For non lamers - see Science as well as a few other magazines where the results have been published over the years
Also, I am not amazed that the Pentagon has asked for this. The most scary part of global warming is the stop of the gulfstream and the 2+ billion of hungry and thursty armed people on the move. Some of them with nuclear weapons...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Worldwatch Institute has a Climate Change Online Feature targeting The Day After Tomorrow, and trying to use this movie as a chance to educate people about more reasonable climate change realities.
We know that over the last 100 years that the world-wide temp has gone up by roughly 1 degree. But before that time period, there is no climate data at all. So, how can we conclude that this is unnatural or not?
/. post.) However, all of them are investigated by groups of very intelligent and trained people who know about the problems and do their best to compensate. Furthermore, you must remember that our picture of the past is a jigsaw puzzle and every piece must fit; for instance, it is not enough to observe that ancient beetles whose hard anatomy is the same as modern might have had different soft anatomy (and thus different temperature sensitivity.) You must also explain why the other evidence appears to match the beetles.
There is not much direct temperature evidence before the 19th century, but there is plenty of inferential evidence. Isotope ratios in Arctic ice give a good record going back 10s of thousands of years. This might sound doubtful, but the earlier part of this evidence can be cross checked with more obvious sources, such as tree rings (more than a thousand years) and sediment layers in lakes (thousands of years.) There is a great deal of fossil evidence, of which the best comes from pollen and hard-shelled micro-organisms (e.g. diatoms.) These (when embedded in countable sediment layers) tell us when conditions allowed the organisms to live in a particular locale. Beetles are also very useful, with many temperature-sensitive species having conserved their morphology for quite a long time (a million years.) In general, the most useful species are small organisms with hard parts; these leave more remains and travel less than larger organisms (a rare fossil could easily be in an atypical location.) Geological evidence tells us about glaciations over quite long time scales (millions of years.)
All of these sources of evidence are beset with problems and complications, and therefore highly technical (i.e. beyond a
maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
The world's climate does indeed vary on many different timescales and for many different reasons - it even gets a little hotter every 100,000 years or so! In fact it's in a hot period right now; that is why you haven't noticed that we are living in an ice age. The reason for the cycle is not magnetic fields, but rather the shape and timing of the earth's orbit around the sun (the amount of eccentricity, the amount of "wobble", and the timing of northern summer relative to the orbital position are not constants.) This is the "Milankovich cycle."
The people who think that human activity might make dramatic short-term changes in the earth's climate know all this and try to take it into account.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."