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Major Climate Change 5,200 Years Ago Could Repeat
An anonymous reader writes "The climate was altered suddenly some 5,200 years ago with severe impacts. Famouse glaciologist professor Lonnie Thompson have found clues that show history repeating itself. Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe. He outlined his fears today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. 'The evidence clearly points back to this point in history and to some event that occurred. It also points to similar changes occurring in today's climate as well,' he said."
i've read that this climate change could have been the spur for the start of civilisation. the drying environment in the ancient middle east caused people to migrate from drying marsh areas to near rivers and irrigation (and hence cities, civilisation, writing et cetera) may have developed to counter the drier weather.
The US somehow agrees that global warming is a reality when they use that reason to deny giving Diego Garcia back to its native inhabitants.
It's too dangerous, they might get flooded.
I hate so-called scientists who can predict global warming but not predict the weather tomorrow
That is because there is a difference between weather and climate. Can I predict that it will be warmer in summer? Yes. Can I predict which days will be sunny and which cloudy next summer? No. That a system is too chaotic to predict on a microlevel does not mean we can't understand or predict it on a macrolevel. Though we know the exact half life of a substance, we can't tell which atoms will be affected. Do you hate "so called physicists" too?
In the same way, we can predict that the globe is getting hotter, and approximately how many degrees. The question is why, and if we can do anything about it.
Some researchers notes that the earth were four degrees warmer around 1000 BC (my memory may be wrong with the year) and that the climate also were significantly warmer 800-1200 AD which let to prosperity up until the colder middle age. So let us look forward to a bit of warming!
Doubtful. Most climate models predict an increasingly chaotic weather as temperature increases - floods, tornados, draughts, increasing desertification. Any economic benefits we get from higher crops or less energy going to heating is quickly going to be eaten up.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
What's interesting, is that global warming might trigger an ice age, at least for the northern hemisphere. As I'm sure many /.-ers are aware of, much of the reason for the mild climate in northern and western Europe, is the Gulf Stream.
What happens in detail, is that warm surface water flows from the equator towards the northern parts of the Atlantic. As the Gulf Stream moves north, some of the warm water evaporates, which increases the salinity level of the remaining water. At the same time, the water temperature becomes lower as the current dissipates its heat to the atmosphere and colder ocean waters in the northern parts of the Atlantic. When the current finally approaches the same temperature as its surroundings, it sinks (because the water is saltier than usual, and therefore heavier) and flows south again as a deep sea stream. So the North Atlantic is basically one huge conveyor belt that transports heat.
Now, what has this got to do with global warming? Well, if the ice on Greenland and the North Pole melts at an increased rate, the fresh water might lower the salinity level of the Gulf Stream so much that the water won't sink and the heat transport system gets seriously messed up. If the northern hemisphere stops getting this added heat, winters will be longer and increased snow and ice coverage will reflect more sun light, accelerating the cooling of land areas.
What's even worse, is that findings in ice cores from the glaciers on Greenland, seem to indicate that this change from status quo to (small) ice age has happened very quickly earlier in history, single digit number of years. I'm not saying this is guaranteed to happen, but it's worth considering that global warming might actually make the northeastern America and western Europe colder, not warmer. And yes, it might happen in our lifetimes.
The Maya's an Aztechs are announcing this with their calendar that includes 'new suns' every 5200 years and with the new sun comes an enormous climate change. Guess what according to the maya's the new sun is coming in the year 2012.l l2/silburyhill2004b.html
More information about this can be found at a site about cropcircles, a certain crop which one the title 'cropcircle of the year' which is a doomsday calender which is warning for the new sun. The site explains the maya calender which fits exactly over the 5200 years of the old sun which according to the calendar will be replaced by the new sun and climate in 2012. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2004/silburyhi
Yes and no. The energy input to the planet as a whole may remain roughly constant but that doesn't mean that the heat stored in the planet will remain the same.
Consider a perfectly ordinary greenhouse with no heating other than sunlight. The temperature inside is markedly hotter than that of a similarly sized and shaped volume outside, even though the energy input is essentially the same.
For a more extreme example, compare Venus and the Earth. Despite Venus being closer to to sun, less energy is deposited in its atmosphere and surface than we get in our atmosphere and surface layers. The reflectivity of the Venusian clouds is so much higher than the reflectivity of the Earth's. Nonetheless, despite getting more energy it is much colder near the Earth's surface than it is near the Venusian surface.
Conclusion: it's entirely possible for everywhere to get hotter. It's also entirely possible for everywhere to get colder. You can't conclude, purely on energy input grounds, that either will be the case, or that a redistribution of temperature variations will take place. If you take into account other factors it does indeed seem likely that some places will become cooler and others warmer, but those other factors must be evaluated properly.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
So a catastrophic climate change took 5200 years ago?
...
Bible believers have been talking about an ice age taking place a few hundred years after a world-wide deluge took place 5000 years ago...
'After the Flood you would have both', says Mike. 'The water that the Bible indicates came from under the ground during the Flood would have been very warm or hot. This water mixing with the pre-Flood ocean would result in a significantly warmer ocean, right after the Flood, than today. Warmer water means more evaporation. So you have more moisture in the air available for storms, generating snow and ice at middle and upper latitudes, close to the developing ice sheets. And the ash and gases in the air is what gives the cooling of the summers.' All this, he points out, would have been like a 'loaded gun' at the end of the Flood. 'There would have been no way to delay it, an ice age just had to start.'
Mike Oard's calculations show that a likely estimate for when the Ice Age reached its maximum would have been around 500 years after the Flood, with about another 200 years to melt. He warns that this is only a 'ballpark' figure, which could vary by hundreds of years--'but that's still a short time for evolutionists.'
[Link ]
Global ice age information
Link to discussion of other evidence...
Actually there was once a 'total' ice age. Well it's a hypothesis, but gaining in credibility. It was a doozy, but a long time ago. Check it out : Snowball Earth. The global ice age was ended by volcanism producing CO2, as normal, but this built up because the rocks that would remove the CO2 through weathering were under the ice, so a warming period began which brought the world back ... one almighty feedback. Long long time ago Precambrian, still it probably did happen once ... could happen again if the CO2 and methane was low enough I guess.
Bitter and proud of it.
To raise a question, and put my Fatalistic hat on:
If Act of G-d similar to Jacob and the famine in Egypt is definitely going to occur, why not make Hay while the sun shines, in preparation for the famine??
So the scientists would have to show that any Kyoto-agreement like cut would be beneficial overall, not just putting your finger in a dyke. If we concentrate on trying to avoid it, and fail to make preparations, it could end up worse. This is not to deny that some companies and countries are evil and irresponsible muthafukkas. All this impending doom stuff is still unsubstantiated beyond this guy.
The scientists need more funds to conduct studies.
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Actually- and I know this will annoy the rabid nay-sayers who always post their ill-informed strawmen, non-sequiturs and logical fallacies to these Slashdot stories - a quick Google search will demonstrate that nowadays, even the Dubya regieme accepts that human CO2 emissions are causing climate change, just like the world's climatologists have been saying. They just aren't going to do anything about it.
In other news, a Greenland glacier has dramatically speeded up and is now running more than twice as fast as the current models assume (hint: this is VERY BAD NEWS)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Wasn't that a FOX picture???
It was awfully hard to tell, what with the billion product placements for Fox all over the movie. Every single news station they tune to is a Fox station.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
The most recent theories actually ascribe the widespread Great Flood stories in the Middle East to creation of the Black Sea.
The Black Sea was originally a lake that was fully separate from the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the sea level rose in a dramatic way, and sea water started pouring over a pass now known as the Bosporus at a tremendous speed.
The National Geographic has an informative article on this theory.
From the article:
Imagine such a catastrophe. No wonder descriptions of the event remained in human memories for millennia to come.
Does that mean that all climate change is beyond our control and that we shouldn't worry about our climate, as you so cynically imply? Quite to the contrary. The author himself continues:That answers your question of "by 'who'?": it "was altered by increased solar output".
Ask yourself this: when 9/11 happened, did the Bush administration say "oh, well, shit happens, let's just forget about it"? Or did they start two wars costing hundreds of billions of dollars to attempt to reduce the threat by addressing those aspects of the threat they could target?
So, as summers get hotter and the polar ice caps are melting, wouldn't the prudent thing by to reduce one big factor that we know presents a threat to climate stability and that we have influence over, namely carbon emissions?
Oh, but I forget, the Bush administration only takes action if it aligns with the short-term financial interests of their donors, not if it aligns with the long-term interests of the American economy or the American people.
This is the same line of crap that I heard back in the 60's. That is all the DDT that we were spraying could not impact nature. Companies everywhere were saying that they could not possibly impact nature and while there might be some minor local issues it would never travel.
To put forward totally false assertions (volcanos dump more CO2 than all of mankind does) is the same tripe that is being spewed by the oil companies. Mankind dumps a lot more CO2 than all but the very large super-volcanos (think Yellowstone).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When you have hard data, you don't need consensus.
In the case of global warming, the only data you'd probably accept would be a couple of centuries with melted polar ice caps, massive species extinctions, and catastrophic climatic change.
Yeah, hard data is generally preferable to informed opinions, but not when collecting the data is a planet destroying process. We sometimes need to extrapolate from incomplete data to derive a prudent course of action.
The fact remains that the vast majority of climatologists believe humans are contributing to a process of global warming, with undesired results. Only a few vocal fringe elements have their theories amplified to create enough doubt to justify the policy of continuing along our present course while we "study the situation". Credible scientists believe the time to do nothing but study this situation has passed, and we now need to study it as we try to correct the problem.
This is another case where big money dictates public policy. US energy policy is driven by fossil fuel suppliers, much to the detriment of our national security, balance of trade and environment. There are already plenty of viable renewable energy resources and technologies that would convert the US from an energy importer to an energy exporter, and many more promising technologies await in the near future. Promoting these energy technologies would be good fiscal policy, good defense policy, and good environmental policy. But it won't happen in an administration that invited Enron CEO Ken Lay to secret US energy policy meetings.
Didja know that Condoleezza Rice had a Chevron oil tanker named after her?
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
IANACS (I Am Not A Climate Scientist), but while there are areaa w/ warming trends, there are also some odd cooling trends. Interesting quote from a link below:
Some links:
Fun quote from a actual MIT climatologist, Richard S. Lindzen :
Check out the Reason article - some knowledgeable people have doubts about global warming, or question it's magnitude. It's bizarre that one pole is warming, the other is cooling...My favorite quote from the Reason article:
We're not, tree-hugger. First of all the one thing I agree with is that we need to cut down on environmental toxity, not only on atmospheric emissions but also on other sources of disease such as for example the less than nutritional food that is forced upon us.
However, tree-hugger, just as healthy foods such as hormone-free meat, eggs without antibiotica, salad and fruit without pesticide are far more tastier than the crap they sell at the supermarket, there is no reason whatsoever to cut down on the amenities of modern life. Forcing everybody on a train with set schedules and set destinations is communist. Our road system gives us the freedom to go where we want exactly when we want and on top we also get the who we want because we don't have to share our car with total strangers. Hydrogen powered cars will sooner or later replace cars running on petrochemicals and electric trains will sooner or later exclusively carry cargo but not people.
As to throwing garbage on the ground, maybe we should look into improving and streamlining the process of getting it removed FROM THE GROUND before putting up a waste-basket every 200 feet or so or even making people take their garbage home. Undoubtedly in the mid-term future, "garbage" such as paper, plastic or even organics will be a much in demand commodity. Just consider the fact that once we run out of oil we also run out of cheap plastic.
Driving through town is indeed a horrible experience, I'll give you that. Most of it however is due to the fact that the demand we put on the road system in general has risen exponentially while existing infrastructure is geared towards the demand of the fifties. Japan is one of the worlds most space constrained countries and cities in the west will adopt japanese traffic solutions such as stacking multiple stories of roads on top of another or moving stores, amusements and even offices below the ground. Small to medium cities and towns will increasingly divert dense traffic from downtown areas to city limits, offering commerce growth at the perimeter. (You, upset walking/cycling dude will have to walk a hell of a lot more, of course),
Tell you what, you are indeed a member of an odd minority that insists on inefficiency, something an employer is least likely to appreciate. I would suggest that you take your car to work and then in the evening ride your bicycle in a Bicycle-Park or other designated area where it can not interfere with traffic nor be endanged by it.
Whatever you do, however, don't bitch at us because we do not literally go the extra mile. Bitch at the people that deliberately hold back both technology and society.
You point out what you think is bad wording in the submission, yet ask if cavemen or mammoths altered the environment, 5200 years ago?!
5,200 years ago would be just slightly before 1st dynasty egypt, not pre-historic cave men in giant mammoth land. Actually it would be intersting if this climate change was the catalyst to lower and upper egypt uniting, after all, there would have been only roughly 100 years between the climate changes and the beginning of Menes' reign.
I don't think the the wording is bad at all ; a volcano can alter the climate suddenly, a tidal wave can as well. If you associate alteration of the climate with human or mammoth intervention that's your interpretation and not the author's fault.
Sure, and in WW2, recruits were doused with DDT powder to get rid of body lice, with no ill effect, as is agreed by anyone who knows anything about the subject.
The key is that the form in which a substance is delivered determines if it can be absorbed into the body and delivered to the right places to do damage. This is the same reason that the idea of spiking a water supply with plutonium to kill millions of people is not going to work.
DDT is not all that acutely toxic. But it can be delivered to animals, particularly predator birds, in a very harmful way.
The key is that DDT persists in the environment. It is not broken down by organisms ingesting it, it is mainly stored in their tissues. Thus it disappears from the environment very, very slowly. Exotic organic chemicals that behave this way, or that break down into other chemicals that behave this way, are a problem even if they don't necessarily have immediate impact on the environment. If critter A ingests the rather low concentrations in the general environment, no particular harm occurs. What people immediately missed is that if critter B eats critter A, he'll get a somewhat bigger dose of the material than critter A did, because terrestrial animals need to consume something like ten pounds of food to create a pound of body mass. Critter C gets an even bigger dose, all the way down to critter Z which gets a huge dose.
This process of amplification of the background concentration of a non-biodegradable substance is called bioaccumulation. Birds are particularly vulnerable because their energy requirements are so high, especially raptors like eagles.
Yet, even so, the effect of DDT on birds is not very acutely toxic. It has a subtle effect. Unfortunately that subtle effect happens to be that they lay eggs with extremely brittle shells.
Personally, I don't think DDT should have necessarily been banned, however, it was overused. It could have been used in emergency situations for a limited time at a rate close to the rate at which it would eventually disappear (if that rate could be determined). However it was used in typical 50s fashion as a miracle quick fix agent. The spirit is not completely lost -- we use antibacterial agents in soap, even matresses, for absolutely no good reason.
In any case, materials now in use, such as permethrin (targetting adult insects) do break down in the environment. This means that they don't bioaccumulate. The disadvantage is that you have to use them more frequently. The advantage is that you use them in response to an actual problem. Other materials such as BT that target larval stage insects not only biodegrade, but target smaller habitats. Rather than saturate broad swathsw environment with an agent that kills adult insects (including beneficials), you target the specific habitat where insects develop in their early larval stages. Furthermore with integrated pest management, a combination of strategies are used such as targetting and reducing specific habitats important to precise life stages of specific insects.
The bottom line is that properly and wisely applied, the world probably could make use DDT. But we were wrong to use it the way we did, and probably right to ban it so we'd be forced to develop effective and environmentally responsible strategies and materials. And we have. If we hadd DDT in our armamentarium, it'd only make a marginal difference.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> The "biblical" flood is actually just a retelling of a story from the epic of Gilgamesh;
No. Its the other way around..
> as such, it likely refers to the flooding of the Persian gulf.
Both the book of Genesis in the Bible and the epic of Gilgamesh, as well as other cultures like these Indian ones and Native American -- all these claim a global flood for which there is evidence.
I guess the reason why some people are eager to pass off the Biblical account as a bad copy of the recently discovered Gilgamesh epic (despite clear evidence to the opposite) is the influence of Christianity in their own lives. People generally don't like being told uncomfortable things by the Bible.
See my posting history for posts with more evidence.