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Carbon Emissions 'Will Defer Ice Age'
Sven-Erik writes "Due to subtle variations in the Earth's orbit, researchers have calculated that the next Ice Age is due within 1,500 years. However, a new study suggests greenhouse gas emissions mean it will not happen that soon (abstract). 'Dr Skinner's group ... calculates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin. The current level is around 390ppm. Other research groups have shown that even if emissions were shut off instantly, concentrations would remain elevated for at least 1,000 years, with enough heat stored in the oceans potentially to cause significant melting of polar ice and sea level rise.'"
Is this science? Or is it it political posturing ? If an experiment can't reproduce the results, can we really have confidence in the predictions?
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.
Fallen Angels
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Its good, as it turns to be? Or do we want an ice age?
Neither melting ice caps nor a new ice age sound particularly appealing.
Consider the rate of human advancement before and after the last ice age and you'll see why having another one may not be in our best interest.
It makes sense to me that by melting all ice, carbon emissions would prevent the occurrence of an ice 'age'.
The heat is ALREADY in the oceans. WTF?
global warming may save the human race?
This is good news, since many of us live in areas which would be covered with glaciers.
Wonder how many hypocrites who previously excoriate all climatologists who caution about global warming as corrupt and biased instantly trumpeting that these brilliant, honest, decent climatologists have to be right because the end result is one that they want.
And people said global warming deniers didn't care about future generations. They were trying to help them all along!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
k thanks
two words: time scale.
Hmmmm, seems to me the ice cores from the last ice age revealed a CO2 concentration 20 times todays readings. Don't know if I trust this prediction. On the other hand, sea levels have not risen, the 50 Million supposed climate refugees from areas that were to have been flooded by now are no where to be found. Indeed, those island areas have actually grown. The Arctic ice has not melted to what it was in 1940-1945 when the RCMP sailed the Ste Roche from Vancouver to Halifax and back through the NW Passage, the AntArctic Ice sheets have grown, the Himalyan Glaciers are chiefly rebounding and there has been no statistical warming in the last decade. Maybe the Ice Age cometh quicker than we expect.
Good book, IMHO.
For those interested, "Fallen Angels" is available at Jim Baen's Free Library to read online, or download. (linked below)
"Fallen Angels"
*Discaimer*
I'm just an enthusiastic fanboy, not affiliated with Baen Books in any way other than being a happy customer.*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Anything we do, "could potentially" do something, or nothing, or upset part of Mother Nature that proves unexpectedly fragile. Unless Mankind goes away, we will continue to influence the environment forever. I suggest doing Nothing as the only possible prudent course of action.
Let's roll the dice so we don't have to be inconvenienced by sorting our garbage and driving cars with smaller engines.
My UID is prime. Hah!
I buy that CO2 could prevent or delay the onset of an ice age. What I don't by is the suggestion that an ice age is due to start 1500 years from now. Looking more carefully, I see that the value of CO2 level required to prevent an ice age 1500 years from now is below the pre-industrial level. In other words they've predicted an ice age that would, under no conceivable circumstance, occur and then said, look, it won't occur because of CO2. Yes, but then again our lakes aren't frozen in the summer now because of CO2. Maybe we should send out a press release.
Support SETI@home
Remember the Greening Earth Society?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Greening_Earth_Society
In the late 1990s I remember they were out there with an interesting take that not only was the greenhouse effect real, but that we should promote it because it would "make Greenland green again" and otherwise unlock many areas of tundra and for conventional agriculture and human expansion.
Apparently it is imperative that we keep CO2 levels above 240ppm unless we want to destroy life as we know it. We have an obligation to save the planet and it's inhabitants from dying a slow, cold death!
One thing's for certain: whether coastal cities are under 20 feet of water or up to their asses in ice 2000 years from now, there will still be politicians pointing at each other over whose fault it is.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
According to this http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667889/
AWESOME!
"House fires keep you warm in the wintertime!"
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The planet is soo poluted, in 1500 years I doubt anything will still be alive!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Better explanation of why CO2 levels don't have an impact on glaciation cycles, http://motls.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/will-co2-save-us-from-next-ice-age.html
Now, what did we do to cause that? Maybe if we all just sit down and be still, the Earth's orbit will stop variating?
If the Earth's orbit is variating, it's because we did something bad, and we had better change our ways . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The reverse argument is equally ridiculous:
Nothing we do can combined cause global scale changes on the planet, which is nice, because then I can keep doing whatever I want.
The worst part is that very little is required to make very large impacts on carbon emissions. If everyone in the US bought a car that had half the horsepower that the car they currently own has, they could make a huge impact on their emissions.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Wouldn't glaciation pretty much end life as we know it on the planet? You can't grow anything on an ice sheet.
Given the choice of planet wide starvation and freezing VS moving to high ground and breeding heat tolerant crops,
Given the choice between the extinction of some less mobile less heat tolerant species VS the extinction of all species,
I pretty much know what I'd be in favor of and it dosen't involve freezing to death
This simply gives more excuses for maintaining the pollution driven economy we have now. The same reason that so many people argue that there is no human induced global warming will now say "Not only are we not doing anything wrong, but we are helping."
Unfortunately, our society is based on greed. The people in power have a lot of money invested, and make a whole lot of money from polluting and destroying the environment. They pay lots of money to keep people ignorant, and make anything that makes them profit legal. Sad really, but the truth.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Everyone else is fairly well aware of the scientific method and peer review.
However, we have known for a few years that the Earth's orbit has been rounding out, which is when it gets colder. This was among many points covered on slashdot along with solar output and geological methane release that demonstrated that the Earth's climatic shift has been primarily due to CO2 levels. If CO2 levels had not gone significantly beyond their 1700 levels, we would be experiencing the starting signs of cooling over the next 200 years.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
"Step 0: Be born a retard like jellomizer."
Well. He seems to have gotten at least a little better. He's posting to slashdot. I acknowledge that's not much of an achievemet, but still, given where you say he started at...
But if you weren't retarded to start with, then what happened to you along the way?
People tend not to be so worried about what happens in 1500 years or so.
But, they'll get into bitter dustups over what will happen in 50.
So now they're spinning global warming into being a good thing? People are already polluting so much carelessly, giving them a reason to think it's good (by pushing off the next ice age) isn't the greatest thing...I mean there are idiots out there as of now who 'don't like the cold' so think that global warming won't be a bad thing.
Firstly "global warming" doesn't only warm, it cools (I learned this from a class on Environmental Issues). Apparently this is because the change in the global temperature causes different air streams on the earth to change, thus resulting in severe cooling in certain areas. Secondly, as someone said above, we have pretty much already screwed ourselves and considering the fact that getting smaller cars, hybrids, or switching our fuel type is just too muich of an effort for our grossly lazy population, there probably won't be much left to freeze if and when the next ice age does happen.
People need to wake the f**k up. Hundreds upon hundreds of temperature record highs were broken this year. Global warming isn't "going to" happen, it's ALREADY HERE. So quit being lazy and throwing out recyclables...quit being wasteful and driving a huge truck when there's only one person and no cargo in it...because you're ruining it for the rest of us such that there will probably be no one around to care when that ice age actually comes.
What utter rubbish.
Since we know about CO2 being a greenhouse gas since the 19th century, industrialization was just planned to prevent the ice age.
Je me souviens.
But Manmade Global Warming is Bullshit. An agenda put forward by the crooks that want to profit from the Carbon Tax Scam. The Global Government and Depopulation Power Freaks. The Dysfunctional People that hate themselves and want to die. The Watermelons. Enviro Green on the outside, Communist Red on the inside.
Figure if they sneak it in there as a assumed premise for some article, I am not going to notice? NO! That propaganda technique is as old as the hills. Peddling a discredited agenda with a weak propaganda tool. Double Fail. Where's the Gang Gonged Tag?
Up With LFTRs (Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors)
We all knew climate change would be bad for polar bears. If I was a polar bear I'd be pissed to hear about this.. If you're a polar bear, that ice age; it's the _best_.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
I finally read "All the Trouble in the World" which was bublished in 1995.
The author traveled to various UN supported countries investigating the efforts to end overpopulation, famine, poverty, etc.
He describes convoys travelling under armed guard through the most furtile areas on the earth to deliver: food.
There are real problems with the UN, not least of which are the ammounts of $$ that magically dissappear and the lavish soires.
No brain, no pain.
Just look at the Mauna Loa figures. CO2 has been rising steeply for the last 50 years.
Now look at the satellite earth temperature feeds. The Earth warmed up fast in the 1990s, then the warming flattened out around 2000 and it's been flat (slightly falling) ever after. That's over a decade of NO increase in temperature, with a continuing increase in CO2. And there is NO obvious major cooling reason.
From that you can deduce that any warming from CO2 (and it's actually calculated to be minimal - the models get their temperature increase by assuming that a tipping point is reached, and lots of water vapour is inducted into the atmosphere, and we now know this does not happen) is insignificant, and completely reversed by other natural changes in climate.
Now, who was it who thought that we could stop ice ages with a minor gas concentration change...?
that depends - if everyone in the US bought a *new* car, how much of the emissions saving will have been lost due to the need to manufacture and transport their new car, dispose of the old one, etc? and if everyone downgraded to an existing second-hand car with half the horsepower of their existing (presumably redistributing their current car to someone else whose current car is twice its horsepower), effectively just shuffling a whole lot of cars around and skimming off the outlighers at the top end, would there be any significant effect at all?
personally im still worried about all the global cooling nonsense from the 90's. I'm in a state of absolute horror that all our politicians and activists abandoned the ozone layer so quickly, to support this new global warming fad.
No, I'm here. What did you want to know? Getting off the Earth? That's easy:
* Orbital velocity is root (R(e) * g), where R(e) is the radius of the Earth (6378000 meters), and g is the surface gravity (9.80665 m/s^2). That works out to 7908 m/s
* Kinetic Energy is 0.5 * m * v^2. Thus kinetic energy to reach orbit is 31.27 MJ/kg.
* One kiloWatt-hour (kWh) is the common unit of electric energy. 1000 W * 3600 seconds = 3.6 MJ.
* Therefore it takes 31.27 / 3.6 = 8.7 kWh/kg to get something into orbit.
* Multiply by your local electric rate. Where I an now, that works out to $1/kg, about what potatoes cost at the local market.
So getting off the Earth is cheap, if you use energy efficiently. You haven't been, though. You have been using about the least efficient method available: chemical rockets. The best rocket fuels only have a bit under half the energy needed to get to orbit (15 MJ/kg), and the engines are around 2/3 efficient, which leaves you at around 10 MJ/kg. So the fuel can't even get itself to orbit, much less anything else, like cargo. You end up using a lot of fuel to lift a smaller amount of fuel part way, then use that to push an even smaller amount a bit further, and finally that last bit pushes a very small cargo to orbit. For those who understand math, that is an exponential ratio of fuel to cargo, where the exponent is the ratio of mission velocity / rocket exhaust velocity. For chemical rockets, that works out to 2-3, depending on which fuel. So you use e (2.718...) raised to 2-3 power as much fuel as cargo that gets to orbit.
The answer is quite obvious: use something else. Something that has better efficiency, so you are not slaughtered by the exponential. There are a number of choices. Which one you use depends on a number of "mission requirements": What are you launching, how often, how much up front development money you can spend, how much risk do you want to take, etc.
OK, that takes care of getting out of *this* gravity well. What next?
(1) Don't go right down another one. The Moon and Mars can wait till you build up some infrastructure. Use near Earth asteroids first, followed by other asteroids, including the ones orbiting Mars, as a source of building materials. You can use efficient electric thrusters as long as you are not diving down a gravity well.
(2) Don't send humans first. Humans have all kinds of picky needs about temperature, pressure, food, radiation, etc. Robots, remote controlled, and automated equipment (which I will call just "robots" for brevity) are not as sensitive. Send robots first, have them build stuff up. Once you have enough stuff in place and can support the humans, then they can come.
Likely a few decades for the consensus, but it appears that what Svante Arrhenis wrote about in the mysts of the the beginning of the 20th century is becoming true after such a long gestation.
Cheers All
~from a twenty year nap? Slashdot, you fishin for the nw0? Someone is spraying radioactive rat poison overhead and someone is beaming in rf, elf in waves, lensing doom upon us, superheating the ionosphere, floods here, earthquakes there, making any greenhouse gas effects on global warming MOOT. Sven, Sven...
I'm looking forward to driving my V8 Cadillac to work this morning, sneering at all the hybrid drivers with that look of "Congratulations, you're destroying the planet with you car, asshole" look that they love to throw around.
They can thank me for keeping their asses above water later.
You can swim in water. You can't swim in ice.
--
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
Perhaps, 'intelligent design' is not so far of after all. A giant experiment is what this is.
I had no idea we were already living in a Rush album.
Try 512 AD.
-DwS
Oops!
yea you are right. n o t
How about we stop global warming today and think about the possibility of an ice age 1500 years into the future, say a few centuries from now? I would imagine the level of scientific knowledge in 2500 AD will be a bit higher than what we have today. If we manage not to drive ourselves to extinction through nuclear war or runaway global warming that is.
why this was modded 'funny'?
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
Just to be clear, I believe it will be at least 200 years before we could force 50 feet of sea level rise. Before that happens we'd likely do something about global warming. So I don't expect that to happen, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone who is alive today (assuming no immortality treatment).