Posted on 04/28/2007 6:54:46 AM PDT by MNJohnnie
With all the hoopla surrounding the new environmental scare movie The Day After Tomorrow, and a media feeding frenzy trying to figure out if the events as portrayed in the film could really happen, we decided it might be helpful to republish the following article. It ran about two years ago as a cover story, in September 2002, and it became one of our best-selling issues on the newsstand. It is an unemotional, reporting tour de force by Brad Lemley that conveys the concerns of a number of scientists at the Woods Hole Institution in Massachussetts that indeed we may very well be facing a new ice age in the Eastern United States and Europe based on global warming. However, those scientists characterize that ice age as a “mini” event that might last 300 to 400 years. And they characterize that mini ice age as an event similar to one humanity has already suffered through that ended about 1850. Could it happen soon? Yes. Will it be as devastating as events portrayed in the movie? Highly unlikely, but not impossible.
–The editors
William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's famous painting “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. “Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,” says Curry, tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot.
(Excerpt) Read more at discovermagazine.com ...
A mini ice age based on global warming?
Oh boy...how many time we need to go over this....
1. Melting polar ice is fresh water....so is lighter than seawater....
2. Fresh water floats on top of the sea water...
3. This turns off the warm gulf stream in Norther Hemisphere...
Net result a mini ice age ...particularly in Europe....
Ever wondered why Canada and Ireland have such different winter climates....?
Not any more.
2. Fresh water floats on top of the sea water
Nice try at a save but factually ridiculous. The 2nd statement is not factual but a environmental wacko made up factoid. Fresh water does not float on top of seawater.
IF fresh water floated on top of salt water the seas would be mostly fresh water on the surface since rain ALSO is fresh water. Rain, you will note, has been falling for millenniums into the ocean. However, to the tier devastation of your thesis, the Oceans are still salt water.
Now go away or I will taunt you a 2nd time!
My mind is boggled by the profound ignorance displayed by a magazine that has "Science" in its name, even if the article was written three years ago.
"not impossible"?
Hello??
A full blown ice age in a matter of weeks if not days?
The "science" depicted in that movie is right up there with Godzilla, or Spiderman!
As of 2002, deep-ocean surveys have revealed that since at least 1850 Planet Earth has experienced worldwide subsurface volcanism at continental margins. For plate tectonic or other reasons, this pattern is geophysically pronounced, as unassailable as was discovery of “continental drift” via the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1964.
As global “magmatic” activity accelerates, warm waters rise to ocean surfaces, liberating quantities of volcanic CO2. Aggravated by this naturally emitted “greenhouse gas”, coastal evaporation lifts warm-air currents which precipitate as floods in summer, blizzard snows in winter. Because evaporation is akin to “air-conditioning”, rising warm air paradoxically cools lower continental layers— not only because they underlie upper-level warmth, but because rising warmer currents draw in frigid Northern airs to compensate.
Beyond this 150+ year geophysical phenomenon (ocean volcanism driving an atmospheric evaporative/cooling process) lies an 800-year intra-solar cycle keyed to Earth’s periodic intersection of a primordial ring of dust lying between Mars and Venus.
Last met in AD 1313, this brought on a 550-year Little Ice Age that ended only in the 1880s. Since then, Earth has experienced alternating warming/cooling episodes at ever-diminishing intervals: 50 years to 1939; 40 years to 1979; now 30 years to 2009. From 2010 - 2029, twenty years, we project a renewed cooling phase similar to that through 1979. Thereafter, as frequencies increase and amplitudes grow ever more extreme, the “global thermostat” may shake itself to pieces, simultaneously turning warm/cold without an equilibrium.
Whether or not the “thermostat” crashes through AD 2113, that year will see the cyclical —rather than linear— peak in a short-term warming trend dating from the 400-year trough in 1713. Over 10-million years, Ice Age interglacials have lasted on average 11,000 years... from the Younger Dryas, ours has persisted 12,500 years, meaning that Ice Time is 1,500 years past-due. In fact, pronounced chill should have engulfed land-masses outside the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn about AD 400, coincident with the Fall of Rome.
“Carbon footprints” via CO2 emissions are a canard. This gas constitutes barely 1/10,000 of the atmosphere, entirely due to worldwide volcanism: Since 1990, Mount Saint Helens and Pinatubo alone blasted more CO2 aloft in twenty minutes than all industrial civilization in 200 years.
Academic and regulatory-body climatologists’ so-called Models are corrupt. Selective data, invalid samples, spurious correlations and extrapolations (as Gore’s notoriously fraudulent “hockey stick” graph, definitively exposed in 2003)— all give the lie to ideological extremists posing “climate change” for partisan political purposes. Every single one of their assertions, from melting icecaps to anomalous European temperatures, in context and perspective represents a conscious, meretricious falsehood.
Earth is indeed warming, but cyclically not linearly, at a rate of some .70 degrees per century. Rising temperatures will peak in 2113 if not well before, and odds are high that 120,000 years of cold will follow. Glaciers do not “move South”: Ninety-foot snowfalls land on your head, to accumulate thereafter because they cannot melt. Atop Mount Washington, close to a mile high, ice sheets 15,000 years ago stood two miles higher and stretched well North of Hudson’s Bay. All Long Island is a terminal morraine.
And when glaciers fall on humanity again, what will high-tech cultures do in 2050 or thereabouts? Why, engage a mass teleportation exodus off-planet, excluding for urgent security reasons any and all Sons of Allah plotting to extort adherence to their barbarous cult on pain of their well-practiced suicidal self-destruction. In other words, Ice re-orients not only geophysical but human socio-cultural milieus as well.
Great post.
Bring it on! I hope it really happens, maybe then we will see all the illegals GO BACK to their own country.
I live in a cold climate and I rarely see mexicans when its -40, it must be a genetic thing.
And let us remember that all of the climate historical data show recurring mini and grand ice ages.
And we are now at the end of a relative warm period, expecting it to cool down and enter another ice age.
But that is part and parcel of the spoiled brat nature of the Hysteric Left. Having all their lives refused to believe in anything beyond their own emotional whimsy, they simple are emotionally, and mentally, incapable of grasping the fact that they are NOT the center of the Universe.
"The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude."
A duo of an American and a European scientist proved last year that this theory about the Gulf Stream being the engine of warmer North Atlantic balmy weather in winter on the western edge of the north Atlantic was, all along, an assumption that no one had verified with any data.
They gathered the data and verified the theory was wrong. The Gulf Stream affect is too small to affect any major trend, or produce a trend, it can only moderate an existing trend. The major reason the western side of the Atlantic, at high north latitudes, has such balmy winter weather so often is the same reason the western side of the Pacific at high northern latitudes (northern California Oregon and Washington) have the same kind of weather in winter.
That cause comes from how, in similar fashion, the mid-continent mountain ranges (like the Rockies in the US and Canada and the Urals in Europe) affect the jet stream which, in the northern latitudes is the major distribution belt for the climate as it moves the largest masses of air from west to east.
The mid-continent disruption of the Urals, alters the jet stream in Europe to deliver a warmer primary air-flow received at the northern Pacific at the western edge of the U.S., while in the same way, the Rocky Mountains produce similar weather affects for the northern Atlantic at the western edge of Europe. The temperatures and volumes were tracked and compared over time and demonstrated to be the primary engine of "climate delivery" in those areas, and only marginally affected by the air-exchange factors from the Gulf Stream. (by the way, in the northern Atlantic, the largest volume of the Gulf Stream does not flow at or near the surface, but at very low depths at which it is has less ocean to air exchange, anyway).
The oceanic Gulf Stream affect is too small to affect any major trend, or produce a trend, it can only moderate an existing trend in the northern Atlantic. The jet stream in the northern hemisphere and the mid-continent disruption of it is the primary cause of delivering the primary mass of either "warmer" or "cooler" air to the western edges of the two main continents in the northern hemisphere.
Great post! Simply amazing how many smart people are Freepers. No matter the topic you will always find someone who has a master’s level knowlege of the topic.
Academic and regulatory-body climatologists’ so-called Models are corrupt. Selective data, invalid samples, spurious correlations and extrapolations (as Gore’s notoriously fraudulent “hockey stick” graph, definitively exposed in 2003)— all give the lie to ideological extremists posing “climate change” for partisan political purposes. Every single one of their assertions, from melting icecaps to anomalous European temperatures, in context and perspective represents a conscious, meretricious falsehood.
The greatest selectivity is that while, yes, when there has been increases and decreases in the "global average temperature", it is true that their have been increases and decreases in global levels of CO2. But when the two are graphed together, on the same graph, over very long time spans - thousands of years - it is clear that the CO2 is a trailing indicator not a leading indicator. In nature, in the earth climate history, the temperature rises precede the CO2 rises and the CO2 declines follow the temperature declines - not lead them, not cause them. The graphs prove that the ICCP idiots are not scientists because they fail the essential test of science - that correlation (both factors rise) is not causation (what supplied or took away the heat).
Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
New!!: Dr. John Ray's
GREENIE WATCH
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Great Article!
The current temperature peak is right on schedule, though current temperatures seems to be about 2.5 degrees BELOW previous AVERAGE peak temperatures. So a few more years of “global warming caused by America’s SUV’s” ... Then 300,000 years of 1/2 mile thick Ice overlaying Manhattan, England, France, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, parts of Germany ....
In re 300,000 years of glaciation et.al.:
No-one is expert on the future, but 300,000 years would represent a climatological anomaly on order of 2.50. Since at least the early Miocene (13-million years back), plate tectonics have separated Earth’s eastern from western hemispheres by North and South American continents. By accident of fate, land covers our South Pole while an Arctic Ocean prevails atop the North.
In combination, this configuration historically derives a well-defined cyclical pattern of recurrent glaciations (”ice ages”), which will only end when the two western continents separate sufficiently to re-integrate global atmospheric/oceanic currents— probably in about 25-million years. Let’s hope that North and South America drift together into temperate regions.
Aside from longterm geophysical aspects, the 800-year intra-solar cycle governs: At clockwork intervals, now from AD 1313 - 2113, Earth moves at shallow angles through an annular ring of dust (”snowball” residue of an ancient comet-train?) in the plane of the ecliptic between Mars and Venus. Little Ice Age minimums occured in 1713, precisely on 400-year schedule, when wolves froze to death in German forests and wine iced over at banquets in Versailles. From 1890, rebounding weather patterns (”climate” is too strong a term) are incrementally raising temperatures in stair-step fashion towards the 2113 peak. Meantime, interference from global oceanic warming due to escalating “magmatic” episodes (latest is discovery of enormous volcanic “traps” emerging over Indian Ocean floors) may accelerate the process.
“Models” are inherently “editorial”, subjective in that modelers choose which factors to include, and what weights to give them. “Facts” are relevent only in context and perspective, which in turn depend solely on valid historical data (in geophysical climatology, at any rate). Where modelers lack integrity, skewing scenarios for political or other ends, their conclusions are not right or wrong— just bumpf.
We cite fundamental processes of meteorolgy (”as warm air rises, cold layers flow underneath”), geophysics (”ocean warming drives an atmospheric evaporative/cooling process”), longterm plate-tectonic dispositions (for 10-million years, North and South America have sundered eastern from western hemispheres). Given the consistency of glaciations since the early Miocene, the fact that Earth is 1,500 years past-due to freeze, coincident with looming temperature peaks due intra-solar factors, our cooling projection stands credibly opposed to “modelers’” arbitrary alternative hypotheses.
To recap: We hypothesize that from 2010 - 2029 or so, Earth will experience a cooling phase akin to that of 1940 - 1979. We also propose that this 21st Century stands on the threshold of an overdue glacial onset commencing no later than 2113. Forget Argument by Stipulation (”the guru has spoken”): We welcome contingent, objective, rational evidence to the contrary, and would be overjoyed to see ourselves proved wrong.
Doesn’t the current (sudden) drop in geomagnetic intensity (and the dramatic “run” of the north geomagnetic pole from its previous “stable” position near the south Hudson Bay towards Siberia, combined with a dramatic sudden increase in sunspot intensity affect the recent temperature rise much more than continental drift?
That is: both continental drift and the earth’s rotation imbalance (precession) control long-term change: movement over hundred-thousand or tens-of-thousands years IS dominated by those factors - while geomagnetic changes (or sunspot activity) change temperatures over a decade-long interval?
Gad, Sir, you’re way beyond my competence! All we can say is, that if in fact a major longterm climatological shift is nigh upon us, factors such as these will probably multiply in preparation. Indicative, but not definitive, for the notorious complexity of such factors becomes chaotic: Deterministic, not random, but nonetheless entirely unpredictable. (Lorenz, Mandeldrot, Prigogine are standard references.)
“Global Warming” as a hypothesis recalls Wegener’s “continental drift” from 1912. Any child can see that Africa and South America are a close fit, but geophysicists for decades assumed that continental landmasses mirrored deep-ocean bottoms. When bathyspheric probes revealed two radically opposed regimes, “plate tectonics” via Mid-Atlantic Ridge upwellings to subduction zones provided a mechanism validating Wegener on the spot.
Today’s missing element is, again, discovery of deep-ocean “magmatic” activity since at least 1850, affecting every major salt-sea area on Earth. Here is the absent longterm geophysical factor, unpredictable in detail but correlating global temperatures as strongly as Wegener did Africa with South America. No serious researcher can ignore such evidence.
“Greenhouse gas” emissions, sunspot cycles, virtually any conventional “warming” factor so far named, is difficult to track historically; can have only marginal geophysical effect; and lends itself to credulous misrepresentation in all non-chaotic “models”. Stand back, hoist a goblet with Louis XIV, and hope that as in AD 413 and 1313 humanity will experience another 800-year respite from Ice Time. Just don’t count on it.
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