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Failing Ocean Current Raises Fears of Mini Ice Age
Designadrug writes "This article from Newscientist paints a picture of a major climate control mechanism teetering on the brink:
"The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age. The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.""
They could always create some device to push warmer water in to suppliment the lack of warm currents I assume....
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If the current is pulling all that energy from the warm waters up north and dissipating it in the process, what will happen to all the excess warmth if the current stops? Will it find another way to go? Maybe create a new current or even restart the same current again? That heat has to go somewhere, it is water after all.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
http://www.beyondcommunion.com/superstorm.html I've read this and many of the initial indicators are coming to pass like clockwork. Sensationalist, maybe. Eerie, definitely.
It's something that real climatologists are considering... but they're certainly not of the opinion that it will suddenly and dramatically flip the global warming to global cooling... unless you consider a decade or two fast.
They're not even suggesting a "flip" to "global cooling". What is being suggested is that despite gloablly getting warmer, locally eastern North America and Northern Europe are going to get colder. That just means all the extra heat is going to get pushed elsewhere (the suggestion seems to be warmer weather for Central and South America and Africa).
Jedidiah.
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I hate them both. Do a little research. Did you know we exited the "Little Ice Age" in 1850? Do you know anything about this book? Did you know West Antarctic ice is increasing at the rate of 26.8 gigatons per year? Did you know 420,000 years ago the Earth was warmer than it is today?
FYI, just because someone disagrees with a liberal doesn't mean they're Rush Limbaugh fans.
This guy is way out there
I am curious if there is a technological solution to the problem. Granted, mucking around in big natural system is always more then a little risky, but if there is a serious problem, I couldn't think of a better place for it then the North Atlantic. Surrounding the North Atlantic are the richest and most technologically advanced nations in the world. If anyone can scrape up some money for some grand technological solution, I imagine the US and EU are the two entities to do it.
Certainly it would be nice to simply halt climate change by altering the amount of green house gases being released, but there is no guarantee that we can change fast enough to have any noticeable effect. There also isn't any guarantee that we haven't already slipped over some equilibrium point and are accelerating to a new one regardless of green house gas levels.
Personally, I am curious why we don't look for more grand scale technological solutions to environmental problems. We have certainly proven that we can very effectively destroy the ozone with just a little CFCs. We know how to increase global warming. Why in the hell hasn't anyone found a chemical that promotes ozone expansion or reduces global warming?
Personally, I am curious why we don't look for more grand scale technological solutions to environmental problems. We have certainly proven that we can very effectively destroy the ozone with just a little CFCs. We know how to increase global warming. Why in the hell hasn't anyone found a chemical that promotes ozone expansion or reduces global warming?
Well there is plenty of work being done, you just have to know what to look for. Here's some Wikipedia information on various schemes at artificial carbon sequestration - basically just getting the carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it up somewhere.
As to mitigation with regard to a stalling north Atlantic conveyor - the cause, according to the models that predict such a thing, is lowered salinity of water in the north Atlantic, which means lowered density which means it doesn't sink when it should, and hence the system stalls. The obvious ways to "correct" that are to increase the salinity by removing fresh water, or by adding salt, or some combination thereof. Doing such a thing would be a huge and expensive exercise, but depending on how badly tthings stall and how bad the weather gets, it may well be worthwhile. I expect that there are people working the numbers for various schemes along those lines.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The one thing about global warming that people must understand is that it will throw all the climate regions into chaos, and change them, which will change the local fauna and flora.
Change? Yes, but will it be better or worse? Will the effect be a bad one or a good one overall for the fauna and flora. This is what we really don't know or understand.
The article went on to describe the states plans to back exploration of a "Northwest Passage" across the Arctic, in cooperation with a Finnish company. Apparently other countries are also working on plans to exploit the route.
Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel "Fifty Degrees Below" looks at the consequences of the North Atlantic Convery shutting down. It's not a great novel, surely not one of his best, but it's worth a read. Far too people die from exposure when D.C. gets a sustained period of -50F.
i've seen that website before and i decided to run a few calculations on it. now while you might think that that is a miniscule mean temperature change in the atmosphere, when one multiplies that 0.001227436 C by the ~725(depends on exact density, doesn't vary much) joules needed to raise the temperature of mixed air by one degree centigrade and the 5.1*10^18 kilograms of air in the lower atmosphere one gets the net energy "loss"(this being entropic and useless energy that we don't want, and can do almost nothing with) of 4538444610000000000 joules
that's 4538444610 gigajoules
for comparison that's about the same as a gigaton nuclear bomb(heat and blast)
It's all pointless at this point anyway. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen. Anything any set of countries tries at this point is going to be pathetically too little, too late.
Consider that the third world and much of asia is desperate to ramp up industrial production to help their economies grow. The way they look at it, they can either worry about global warming or the bigger fish they have to fry, i.e. poverty and catching up to the rest of the world. Are they going to spend huge amounts of money trying to clean up their industries? No. They're going to pollute the fuck out of everything while they manufacture all the disposable crap they'll be selling to the rest of us. Crap we ASKED them to produce, of course.
Consider that the first world has already shifted most of its heavy industry to the third world. The only thing most of US can do to reduce global warming is stop driving cars and use clean energy generation methods. Is this going to happen? No. Not while our self-absorbed leaders are so fascinated with the oil economy they're willing to overthrow other countries to increase their supply.
Conclusion: The situation is completely and hopelessly fucked. Everyone is acting in their pathetic selfish self-interest, and nobody is willing to give anything up to change anything. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen.
It'll be an interesting few decades while things settle down. I'm betting on the following:
1. Mini ice age lasting two hundred years or so, sort of like the last one, in all nations bordering the North Atlantic. Actually I don't mind this, I hate hot weather and I've always loved snow. Here in New York, things should be pretty nice, if a bit chilly. And blizzards are fun as long as you don't have to travel. It's an excuse to stay home and play Halo II on XBox Live.
2. Very hot weather and major storms throughout equatorial regions. Florida and the other gulf states, for example, are going to get the shit beaten out of them every year. I expect most people to get fed up and move inland to get away from the hurricanes, and away from the plains states to get away from "Tornado Alley". Lots of migration will produce new ghost towns along the coasts, not due to disasters per se, but to people getting fed up with having their houses knocked down biannually. Actually I'm endlessly surprised this hasn't already started.
3. Ocean levels might rise a bit, but this might be offset by increased ocean ice due to the mini ice age, so the whole "waterworld" thing is going to be a non-starter. Of course we knew that.
4. Everyone is going to completely freak out and run around with their hair on fire for years and years. We on Slashdot will argue about it endlessly, never arriving at any conclusion, but it'll be interesting and take our minds off the fact that none of us have been laid recently.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Personally, I am curious why we don't look for more grand scale technological solutions to environmental problems.
How about this:
Russian Scientist Suggests Burning Sulfur in Stratosphere to Fight Global Warming
Just to give you a quantitative perspective, the amount of sulfur he is proposing to burn is abou half of this little stockpile:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/kmcclary/sulfur/
It's easier to solve a problem if you know what caused the problem.
True enough. Problem is that humanity is a long way off from being mature and intelligent enough to determine exactly what sort of climate change to expect, much less the root cause of that change. Does human activity cause climate change? Absolutely. How much and in what way? We have no friggin clue and we wont in any of out lifetimes. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. Humanity's lack of maturity prevents us from putting aside politics and self-interest. We try but in the end out efforts are nearly futile. Our best effort to date many might say is the Kyoto accord and it is doomed to fail. And no, it isn't the fault of the Americans--even if the US signed on it would never work. Why? Because Kyoto is just another political/economic shell game. Developing nations are pretty much exempt from making an effort at reducing CO2 emissions (including 800-pound-gorilla China). I don't care what reasons are behind such exemptions--if we want to affect global change the whole globe must participate. Second of all, there is "selfishness" involved. It is easy enough for the likes of Germany and France to look down their noses at the US and trumpet their wonderful CO2 reductions: France just throws up more nuclear generation and Germany gets to count all those communist-era east-German soot-belching factories in their starting numbers. Then there are nations like Canada, where the infrastructure is already quite modern and efficient for the most part and the cold climate and sparse population make it more difficult to meet targets legitimately--most of those reductions will be met by playing the shell game and trading pollution credits. In the end it means no meaningful impact on climate change.
2. To paraphrase a favourite sci-fi author: "The universe is mind-bogglingly complex". Scientists know almost nothing about the direction of climate change. They have pretty little computer models that make predictions and they can make vague (and often conflicting) pronouncements about the earth heating up or more hurricanes or ice ages and whatnot. In the meantime the good people at Environment Canada cannot even predict the weather two days in advance with any reliability at all. How can we get the "immature public" to buy into a more climate-friendly lifestyle with that kind of track record? The weatherman tells them it'll snow in two days with the accuracy of a coin toss. Big, smart scientists with expensive supercomputers tell us the world is heating up...no wait we are going into an ice age (which was the prevailing theory in the 1970s)...no wait we are heating up (1980s to now)...no wait...the world will heat up a bit, but some places will be really dry and others really wet...no wait...we ARE going to have a sudden ice age...because of global warming melting ice and cooling the oceans....what the hell? Our smartest people cant quite wrap their brains around it much less the general public (I like most others are pretty much mentally retarded on the subject though most like to think theyknow something about it).
I'm sure someone will argue the merits of Kyoto (maybe there are some--I just don't see how it'll change the world meaningfully). Others will argue that science is proving itself now (gee, look at all the hurricanes we had this year--never mind the fact it was only one or two more than the previous record set many decades previously, before we had the technology to spot those that didn't make landfall near civilisation). Thing is, the pronouncements we make and the justifications for Kyotot-like manoeuvring are so vague it is like proving Nostradamus was right.
In the meantime, bandages and maybe a makeshift torniquet is all we have to keep us from bleeding to death in terms of climate change. I figure we should put more emphasis on more concrete, proven environmental factors--like living sustainably (use less energy--get rid of the big old SUVs. Get your lazy ass out of the captain's
yep, it's not the first time the ice age is coming and it wont be the last (unless we blow this place up). but this thing will be a bit bigger than snow on some mountains. this will be like ... a damn frozen europe .... this means no french wines anymore and a lot of frozen norwegians (yeah, norway's climate is totally built up on the gulf streams, if those stop, the place will be really cold). the "funniest" aspect of this is that we need more power to heat this place up to live here and therefor we'll create even more pollution when the iceage comes ... high five to all suv owners, you just made my day ...
...
.. oh holy {censored}, i AM in europe, last minute to make a run for south ?
humans are not responsible for the iceage, but we are responsible for the fact that it's coming a lot sooner than it should
i hope the fact that europe freezes shows the world that we should cut back a bit on the pollution thingy. that should teach them all !
erm
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
for comparison that's about the same as a gigaton nuclear bomb(heat and blast)
/ maybert.htm
Which is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I quote from this website.
http://coop.co.pinellas.fl.us/TimeTweb/2001/may01
"While a hurricane lives, the transaction of energy within the storm's circulation is immense. The condensation heat energy released by a hurricane in one day can be the equivalent of energy released by fusion of four hundred, 20-megaton hydrogen bombs. One day's release energy, converted to electricity, could supply America's electrical needs for about six months. "
That's eight gigatons of energy released a day by a single hurricane. Now how many did we have this year alone? That's a lotta fucking energy by mother nature alone.
Life is not for the lazy.
Quite humorous that you should say that, It's the second listed in PopSci's "How Earth-Scale Engineering can Save the Planet." http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/3afd8ca 927d05010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html Note: list starts on page two. There are a number of facinating ideas here as well.
Demented But Determined.
"Some people say that the real "global warming" problem has to do with increased energy output from the sun. Good luck stoping that one."
Some people say the universe is three thousand years old. Some people say people from Pleadies visit the eath in their beamships. Some people say ancient warriors speak through them.
Some people say a lot of weird things. I don't listen to them. I listen to people who have spent their entire lives studying and methodically researching something using strict scientific methods and extensive peer review. Those people are more likely to be right.
evil is as evil does
It lead to global acid rain, and a hell of a lot of deaths. We could also skate on reiers in England in the winder, which we have not been able to do since.
It looks to me like the whole matter is a lot more complex than some people think.
Dont forget, the gulf stream, and its return path, don't only take heat from the carribean to the UK, removing it from hurricanes in New Orleans, but also return cold water at the bottom of the Atlantic, and ech of these effects is in its own positive feedback loop, so the combined effect is magnified many-fold.
While "the day after tomorrow" showed it happening much faster than it is likely to, the effects may well be as profound. Fortunately, I have some nice warm winder clothes for sale, see e-bay :-)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
In the meantime, China seems to be the only large country that's actually working on decreasing CO2 output. I don't believe the EU countries are going to make their targets, too much rhetoric and too little action.
In a few years, we'll be forced to switch to other energy sources anyway, because peak oil is more or less here. We'll see what happens then.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
It would seem to me that our attitudes (in the first world) to climate change will have far more impact than any direct measures that we might take to decrease our carbon emissions.
Sure, I might use the train rather than driving to work but next to China building 1 new coal powerstation PER WEEK anything that I actually do seems rather irrelevant.
For those who read the article, notice that we had just come out of a mini-ice age. Most say it lasted from the mid-1300s to about 1850.
Here's the question: what caused it(it being the forementioned oceanic conveyor), and what caused it to stop(in less than a decade)? The problem is, everyone has a theory and very few agree. Some say it was increased volcanic activity caused it, some say increased salinity of the water, some just don't know.
Those in the volcanic camp say the reason it stopped is the greatly reduced amount of volcanic activity. Here's an example of how volcanoes affect GLOBAL climate. In 1815, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted. It was 100 times the magnitude of Mt. St. Helen's in 1980. The amount of ash and sulfur ejected into the atmosphere lowered global temperatures up to 3 degrees C, and caused the "Year without a Summer" in New England(where crops froze during all of the summer months, and there was 6+ inches of snow in June).
This mini-ice age led to numerous important historical events. The French, which in the 1700s, subsisted on cereal grains(wheat, barley, etc). However, in the years prior to 1789, the harvests were meager, due to the colder temperatures. Having no food, and not wanting to learn how to grow potatoes like Germany and Spain did, they decided to riot and steal whatever stores of grains they could find. This lead to the French Revolution. Still in French history, 1812 Napolean has marched his troops into Moscow. However, supply lines being incredibly weak, the cold, harsh Russian winter beats Napolean. Of the 600,000 troops he takes into Russia, less than 4,000 make it out, and less than 1,500 make it back to France. To Irish history, the Irish, unlike the French, learned to grow potatoes. To the Irish, the potato became their staple food, however, they only grew one low maintenance variety called "Lumpers". When the blight came, it was easy for it to propagate, as there only one variety to kill off. Had their been multiple species, the famine wouldn't have been so widespread. So, millions of Irish died due to starvation, and disease.
So, while some of you sit there saying, bring on the snow...remember, all of our civilizations have existed based on expectations. We expect farmers to be able to raise grains, vegetables, meat, cheese-producing animals, etc to feed the rest of us. However, how would we survive if global climates change and once fertile fields dry up(think U.S. Dust Bowls of the 1930s)? We could have world wide food shortages. Imagine if the rice producing areas of China dried up? Then the Chinese would go looking for land/food. The lion would be out of the cage.
The ride gets bumpier from here on out, until about 2011 or 2012, which is the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar. As I understand it, their calendar cycles back to zero on December 21, 2012. (The universe has an "overflow bug" too!
Well, actually it's the Mayan calendar that has the bug. The designers of the Mayan calendar probably figured that their product would no longer be in use by the time it became a problem. At least they had the good sense to put their bug far enough into the future that they wouldn't be alive to take the blame when the problem surfaced.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
The climatological community, you know, those guys whose field is climate (and consequently climate change) have no doubts as to global warming. Yes, they are not yet certain as to what extent non-human forces play into this, but the evidence is there that there has been a large increase in green house gasses in the last two centuries which corresponds to the recent warming trend. Furthermore, as we gain more knowledge of recent climate history, the more it looks like recent events are not simply some sort of natural fluctuations.
But even if, as the anti-global warming crowd essentially suggest, the vast majority of climate experts are a pack of morons or evil political operatives trying to destroy the economy, the fact is that global warming is happening and that with it will come some very important consequences.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The effect is marginal. A tenth of a degree centigrade or so last I read. At the current time, it has peaked and the sun is now reducing its output, with a similar drop in heat over the next 30 years or so. The temperature graphs just show an accelerating warming over the last 10 years, so apparently the sun is getting overwhelmed by domestic factors. Remember that we do live in orbit around one of the most stable class of stars in the universe. If the sun had too much influence on climate, life would not been able to become very advanced.
RAmen!
My favorite sites to point out to people whenever this debate arises is a site like this. Yes, if you look at extremely short timelines, like 20,000 years, it appears that OMFG we are experiencing the warmest temperatures EVAR! *gasp**full melodrama* However, when you put things into their proper perspective you see that for the last 25 Million years or so, we have been coming out of an unusually long period of glaciation. In fact, if you change the logrithmic timescale in the last link to linear, it is easy to see that paleoclimatologists best estimates are that, through the history of the earth, it has only spent approximately one quarter of the time as cold as we are now. The temp we are at now seems to be one of the semi-stable resting points for global temperature. The Earth has spent slightly less than that at what seems to be mid-stable point approximatly 4-6 C above the current average, and has spent over 50% of the entire history at a very stable point 8-10 C above our current average. Most of the time spent below that highest level can be directly attributed to extraordinary circumstances such as meteor impacts, or extreme vulcanism.
So, while we are undoubtably warming, it also undoubtably is something that would happen Homo Sapiens or not. The only question is whether we are speeding the process to any noticable degree or not.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
I would not argue that we are the only source of climate change, but that by not dealing with emissions we are effectively pushing the accelerator while driving down a mountainside. If we interpret the paleoclimatology graph you cite as evidence of some sort of cyclical nature to long-term climate variation - bearing in mind that this is there is no known dynamical reason why the earth's long-term climate must behave cyclically, then we are already headed into higher temperatures anyway and are woefully underprepared for that as it is, so vastly accelerating the process by rapidly injecting a large carbon load into the atmosphere seems extremely unwise. Think about ~.1-.4C change over 2 decades vs 5C in 1M years on the paleoclimate graph. That could be noise, but it could also well be the start of a very fast trend.
The climate does change on its own (we need to prepare for that anyway), but we also really gotta stop these practices that muck around with the system so extensively. I'd sure rather prepare in an alarmist mentality and be chagrined to find out that I was blowing things out of proportion than vice-versa. Kyoto may or may not have been the right way about reducing emissions, but the fat lotta nothing that's being done now is surely worse, not only because of the potentially grave consequences, but because the people who own the next round of energy source will make planetloads of money. Not to mention that many of the emissions-rich sources we use for carbon are nearing depletion. When you hear oil geologists and execs speak seriously and on the record about Peak Oil, you know things are serious. Which is why this notion that we should wait to make any economic sacrifices until we know for sure that we are the prime cause of climate change strikes me as incredibly risky. For example, most of our agricultural supply relies on the large temperate regions made possible by cold global temperatures, as do our fisheries. I'm all for a scientific debate, but let's do something in the meantime.
I firmly believe that the rise we are currently seeing is indeed the start of an accelerating trend. One that human activity has very little impact on, or if any, has been slowing the rise thus far by emitting clouds of smoke thus keeping temperatures artificially low. Now that we are cleaning up our soot emissions the CO2, and natural process that drive the climate, are regaining their direction. As you noted, we are woefully unprepared for such an event. I would say that we desperately need to start preparing, clearing the low lying areas, etc., but I'm realist enough to know that there is no feasable way to get the huge fraction of the human race that lives on coast lines to change their residence prior to a devastating catastrophy.
As to your comments about peak oil, read the literature more closely and in depth. Yes, oil execs and employees have started falling all over themselves to validate peak oil theories, but apparently, only because they suddenly realized that the peak oil nuts were their best friends. If the oil monopoly (removing Hussein took out the major producer who was not part of the Saudi, Kuwait, Exxon, Shell, Chevron cartel. Russia was broken up to let the cartel take over production there, next in line is Chavez in Venzuela) can convince the world that we have reached peak oil production then they have an indisputable excuse for maintaining higher prices and vastly higher profits. The peak oil advocates love to point out that oil production is down worldwide in recent years. but isn't it interesting that in fact it is down by almost the same percentage at every cartel field world wide. These fields are not connected and shouldn't be suddenly linked in their very close decreases in output capacity. Especially since peak oil states that we can not increase production, not that it will decrease and everyone, including the peak oil fanatics, is very quick to reassure their investors that they have plenty of in ground reserves for X number of years. I propose that this is evidence of global collaboration to set and maintain a specific level of output, regardless of the capacity that could be acheived if it were maximized. In fact, if you research the geophysical scientific papers on new sources and increasing recovery from old sources or souces that were previously inaccessible, you find that not only is there more oil available and accesible today than there ever has been before, but there is far more oil than than we have ever used combined. I would post links to these, but strangely all of the pages I had bookmarked over the last 10 years have disappeared or been replaced by peak oil pages. However, you can find some clue in the investment brochures and independent scientific reports. Now undoubtably these new sources and recovery techniques will cost more, so we have seen the last of cheap oil, monopoly or not.
I became interested in the science and economics of this because of my family's oil wells in west Oklahoma. In the late 60's and early 70's, during U.S. peak production, our 16 wells were producing approx. $200,000 in royalties per month. By the late 80's they were producing about $13,000 per quarter. Basically the oil company explained that, at that time, it cost $32 per barrel to produce from Oklahoma wells, and $6 per barrel to import from the middle east. So all of the wells were placed in maintenance mode, which is basically just enough pumped to lubricate the mechanicals, and at that rate the holding tanks were only emptied once per quarter, instead of weekly or twice weekly. When my mom sold th
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar