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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."
New York City will be flooded by seawater, the temperature will plunge at a rate of 10 degrees per second, and people will be transformed into ice statues where they stand. Tokyo will be bombarded with killer hailstones! The polar ice caps will MELT. This sounds like the perfect storyline for a really shitty mov-- oh, right..
from the article
"The evidence is clear that a major climate change is underway."
President George W. Bush disagrees with this. Therefore more study is needed.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This story is a dupe from 3196 B.C.
i see how it is. i finally get a girlfriend and now the planet's going to freeze over.
thanks a fucking bunch, environment.
Uhmm.. G.W Bush claims that "Global Warming" (henceforth referred to as "G.W") will melt the poles and ....
Whitehouse later retracted the claims when they realized NYC will be under 20 feet of sea water. The Gaia theory has been proposed along with Alaskan ice to fix the issue in concern.God shall call forth another great flood to cleanse the world.
Of course he blames the entire problem on Iraq and the fact that they set fire to oil wells in Kuwait in 1991 leading to a rise in temperature of the Free World. Also Canadians contribute to this problem in no small amount as a comparitive study of houses with central heating in Miami and Tornoto showed.
Mmm... twisted newsQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I think it's a bit much to claim that we're headed for an ice age or that our own emissions are the cause for it. However I do think we should take better care of our enviroment. Regardless of ice ages and such we're fucking up our enviroment and it is disgusting. Driving towards LA is revolting and it's not much better in other major cities. We need to replace our road systems with effecient electric train systems and more people need to go back to walking and biking. It'd certainly not hurt if people would stop throwing their garbage on the ground wherever they go. People, and especially us Americans, are slobs. We need to change our lifestyle before we live in total filth.
I live in Las Vegas right now and most days you can't see across the valley even. Driving through town is a horrible experience. The Strip is especially bad. That area at least should be blocked to non-commercial and non-emergency traffic (ie firetrucks, FedEx, and taxis should be able to go through). I'd not get rid of roads entirely but I'd cut them down to one or two lanes and I'd encourage non-commercial traffic to come by train or taxi rather than driving.
Most places I've lived it's been all but taboo to walk or bicycle. Tell a job that you're going to walk or bicycle or even take the bus to work and they're a lot less likely to hire you. Often there aren't bike lanes or sidewalks. Bicyclists and even walkers get hid by careless drivers all the time. Small effecient vehicles like the recently popular scooters are often against the law to use on either street or sidewalk. Not exactly encouraging to those that'd like a cheaper and more enviromentally friendly way of getting around.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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
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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Hey, fella, guess what? You're in luck!The consensus on human CO2 emissions causing climate change is about as solid as you can get - despite what the oil-lobby, uninformed trolls and assorted net.kooks would have you believe.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
"I'll believe in global warming the minute 'scientists' find something to agree on."
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You hit on the operative word--"believe."
Environmentalism (as opposed to conservation) has deteriorated into a religion, which by definition mandates belief from followers. If you doubt this, witness two of the topics that generate the most comments and flaming "Flamebait" moderations on
Post something questioning religion (mainstream), global warming, or man's impact on the environment, then sit back and watch the zealot fireworks show.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
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.
show me a solution to the problem and will back it
The problems are:
1) Convention. We have infrastructure in place to burn fossil fuels, and inertia being what it is, we continue along that course. Maintaining the status quo is bad for the environment. It also results in an unfavorable balance of trade for the US. I was amused by the public service announcements equating drug use with funding terrorists. The US is addicted to oil from the Middle East, and that addiction is the real source of funding for Middle Eastern terrorists.
2) Subsidies. There are pseudo-subsidies which make it difficult for alternative energy to compete with fossil fuels. These aren't direct government subsidies to the oil industry, although some amount of that wouldn't surprise me. Many of the costs of burning fossil fuels are not paid by the fuel infrastructure. Pollution is paid for in a number of other places, including everything from the EPA budget, to the increased cost of insurance and health care relating to environmentally related illnesses, to the increased maintenance costs we all pay for tasks such as repainting because smog damages almost everything it touches. And who pays for medical care of coal miners with black lung? How much of our taxes does the US government contribute to cleaning up oil spills? If fossil fuels paid for all the problems they cause our society, solar and wind power would be more than cost effective in a fair comparison.
3) Fuelish Government Policies. As one example, the US government offers a substantial tax break to businesses who buy trucks of a certain size. The idea was ostensibly to encourage small businesses to buy delivery trucks and farmers to buy farm related vehicles. But the policy was almost instantly exploited. It encouraged automakers to produce the land barge sized SUVs. Almost every auto maker has a model large enough to qualify, and they're sold to businesses that provide them as company cars. So the government is encouraging auto makers to build 12 mpg SUVs, by offering tax incentives for businesses to buy them.
GM created the EV1 electric car. They leased them to many customers, and the customers loved them. They were very low maintenance, requiring no oil changes and even reduced brake wear because they employed regenerative braking. Best of all, there was never a need to stop for gas. It charges automatically while parked in the garage at night when the off peak electric rates are low. It's easy to imagine solar charging for the EV1. But GM decided to focus 30+ years down the road on the hope of hydrogen cars. Despite angry protests from their customers, they pulled the EV1 off lease. Some of their customers wanted to absolve GM of all liability and support for the EV1 and purchase it outright, after essentially already buying it during the lease period. GM refused. It sure looks like an attempt to suppress technology.
So, here are the solutions to the problem. Start backing them.
We could have electric cars today that pollute much less than internal combustion engine cars, even when they're ultimately powered by coal powered plants as an interim solution. Solar power is available almost everywhere and even though Moore's Law does not apply to solar cells, a similar effect seems likely. Once we converted our energy system to mostly solar, huge economies of scale apply and the price drops enormously. Solar panels have proven to be low maintenance with long term reliability. If we get the initial cost down, the payback period will be shorter and this technology will appeal even to short sighted American businesses.
We need less expensive solar cells, more efficient energy storage devices, and a change in our infrastructure to support alternative energy solutions.
Finally, one obviously simple technique that would have the single largest impact in our energy policy would be to drastically reduce the amount of fossil fuels being burned for space heating and water heating.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
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.
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