Posted on 02/09/2005 3:41:49 PM PST by rwh
Human activities may have averted the next ice age. This conclusion from recent research is sure to make global warming alarmists cringe. Ongoing human activities during the past 8,000 years likely have served to prevent us from falling into an ice age, says William Ruddiman, former chairman of the University of Virginia environmental sciences department and his research team in Quaternary Research Reviews.. “Without any anthropogenic warming,” they write, “earth’s climate would no longer be in a full-interglacial state [warm period] but be well on its way toward the colder temperatures typical of glaciations.”
Ruddiman’s team carefully studied carbon dioxide and methane trapped in ice cores extracted from Antarctica. They pieced together a detailed history of those two greenhouse gases’ atmospheric concentrations. When analyzing natural cycles of the concentration of these gases over the past 400,000 years, the researchers noticed anomalous behavior in recent millennia. “Over the past 8,000 years, the CO2 concentration gradually rose to a level of 280ppm-285ppm during an interval when trends observed during the three previous interglaciations suggest that it should have fallen to 240ppm-245ppm.” They found similar behavior in the concentration of methane (Figure 1). Ruddiman attributes this anomalous rise in greenhouse gases to massive deforestation of Eurasia, irrigation for rice farming in Southeast Asia, and increases from biomass burning, livestock production, and other sources.
Based upon the anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases over the past 8,000 years, as well as climate cycles during the past 400,000 years, Ruddiman and his colleagues suggest the global average temperature otherwise would be about 2ºC lower than now and “roughly one-third of the way toward full-glacial temperatures.”
This result, as much as they won’t like it, will place global warmers in an awkward position. Their bedrock belief is that earth’s climate was merrily chugging along the way nature intended before to the Industrial Revolution. Then all sorts of pernicious human activity kicked in and began interfering with the climate’s “natural” behavior. They believe this has led us to the brink of environmental catastrophe due to global warming.
In January 2005, a group calling itself the International Climate Change Taskforce claimed that if temperatures were to rise more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, we would be flirting with disaster. “Beyond the 2ºC level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly,” the ICCT warns. Their report stresses “climate change represents one of the most serious and far-reaching challenges facing humankind in the 21st century.” (see www.co2andclimate.org/wca/2004/wca_30c.html for additional coverage of the ICCT report).
Ruddiman’s underlying message is that such a world view is opposite what really has happened. Anthropogenic climate change has spared us descent into what would be the most serious and far-reaching challenge facing humankind in the twenty-first century — dealing with a rapidly deteriorating climate plunging us into an ice age.
No matter what scary scenarios global warming enthusiasts contrive, they pale in comparison with the conditions an ice age would serve up. Look to our climate past. 21,000 years ago, a mile’s thick ice sheet covered all of North America north of a curve stretching from somewhere near Seattle to Indianapolis and New York City (see Figure 2). Earth has spent about ninety percent of the past 1.8 million years under ice age conditions. Only about ten percent of the time have there been warm conditions. Add that one to your Gratitude List! We’re fortunate and very lucky to live when we do, but luck may have little to do with it. The last 10,000 years well might have been warm because humanity flourishes. Such optimistic perspective place global warming alarmists in a dilemma. They either must admit that “natural” climate is undesirable from a human and life-as-we-know-it perspective or that human influence on the climate is a good thing in preserving all kinds of species’ right to life. Of course it would be a dilemma if they simply ignore or dismiss Ruddiman’s results. The problem that path poses is that his results derive from use of a complex climate model that incorporates not only atmospheric and oceanic components, but also vegetation, soils, snow, and sea ice models. It is very similar to the computer models used to project the future course of climate and which are tweaked to generate scary climate scenarios for the 21st century. The people who rely on models to make their case cannot blithely dismiss a similar model simply because it generates different results.
What to do, what to do? The alarmists will prefer that everyone simply ignore Ruddiman’s results and pretend such research never happened. Scores of the world’s finest newspapers and news outlets already abet this strategy. They satisfy themselves with headlines like “Global Warming Called Time Bomb,” “Extinction Tied to Global Warming: Greenhouse Effect Cited in Mass Decline 250 Million Years Ago,” and “Global Warming Twice as Bad as Feared.” Have you seen a headline trumpeting the benefits of human activity of late? We thought last summer’s quick-to-DVD-release blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow” might get people thinking about what a disaster an ice age would be. Apparently that’s so only if it’s caused by “global warming” instead of averted by it.
Lol, keep it up Greenies!
As far as I'm concerned, it's still too damn cold in Indianapolis. Heck, I got cold in the summertime in Las Vegas!
The only real provable direct effect of the man made increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is that it that it makes plants healthier and more plentiful. As an indirect consequence the shrinking wilderness can support more animals, and some species are being saved from extinction.
Thus the global warmers have positioned themselves against making the planet greener, and for killing off endangered species, but not necessarily in favor of an earlier ice age.
What anthropogenic warming?
Drudge reports NASA say Global warming true. NASA looking for more funding.
Global warming is fake, a political weapon used against us and now against us by NASA for more funding.
Imagine that BUMP!!
Sure they can. That's why its quackery and not science.
Science means real life experiments. Computer models on the other hand, can produce any out come that the programmer desires, and to win the grant money available you have to conclude that global warming is real.
Agreed, its a classic case of the Emperor having no Clothes. The changes we can measure fall within the normal cyclic values on every scale for which we can dredge up data. By every measure, the changes are more easily explained by natural factors: solar output being high on the list of culprits.
A warming of two or three degrees (to the unlikely extent it is Real rather than Imagined would bring far more of the earths surface into high agricultural production than it will make inhospitable to agriculture. If the Canadian Praries and the Russian Stepps are given a one month longer growing season food production will soar. More people can be fed....
Oh, wait, that's exactly what the global warmers are against... People.
ping
The earth supports life DUE to global warming via greenhouse gasses.
I'd say it's all good.
Stranded motorist cleverly avoids freezing to death by dousing himself in gasoline and lighting a match.
Do you mean that the industrial revolution is like lighting oneself on fire?
Is this a faith-base belief or a hypothesis?
The sheer arrogance of today's scientific community continues to astound me. To attempt to predict long-term cyclical behavior based on a few hundred years worth of recorded data is madness.
Help save our planet - rev your SUVs and light those BBQs. A planet is a terrible thing to waste.
BTW who defines the optimal temperature of the planet?
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