Posted on 09/04/2009 1:18:56 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The human-driven buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere appears to have ended a slide, many millenniums in the making, toward cooler summer temperatures in the Arctic, the authors of a new study report.
Scientists familiar with the work, to be published Friday in the journal Science, said it provided fresh evidence that human activity is not only warming the globe, particularly the Arctic, but could also even fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age over the next few dozen millenniums.
The reversal of the slow cooling trend in the Arctic, recorded in samples of layered lakebed mud, glacial ice and tree rings from Alaska to Siberia, has been swift and pronounced, the team writes.
Earlier studies have also shown that the Arctic, more than the planet as a whole, has seen unusual warming in recent decades. But the new analysis provides decade-by-decade detail on temperature trends going back 2,000 years — five times further than previous work at that detailed a scale.
...
In the very long term, the ability to artificially warm the climate, particularly the Arctic, could be seen as a boon as the planet’s shifting orientation to the Sun enters a phase that could initiate the next ice age.
As a result of such periodic shifts, 17 ice ages are thought to have come and gone in two million years. The last ice age ended 11,000 years ago and the next one, according to recent research, could be 20,000 or 30,000 years off discounting any influence by humans. The last ice age buried much of the Northern Hemisphere under a mile or more of ice.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No, polar bears foraging for food on Miami Beach is a good thing.
LOL perhaps. Down where we are (Boca area) we are already overwhelmed by them.
Here’s my point. Let’s just say for argument that indeed there is global warming, and for more grins, let’s say it is man made....so what?
Doesn’t that mean one of the benefits is more arable land so that we could grow more food. So why is Global Warming so bad anyway?
Exactly.
NO STUDY based on “tree ring data” can be trusted as accurately depicting temperature.
That method has been thoroughly called into question. Unless a researcher proves that in their particular instance, at that particular time and location, it is a valid proxy, it must not be trusted.
Another one of their computer models??
I also have a bit of a problem with tree ring data supporting a “study” of a region most of which doesn’t grow trees.
Morons.
The temperature history of the first millennium C.E. is sparsely documented, especially in the Arctic. We present a synthesis of decadally resolved proxy temperature records from poleward of 60°N covering the past 2000 years, which indicates that a pervasive cooling in progress 2000 years ago continued through the Middle Ages and into the Little Ice Age. A 2000-year transient climate simulation with the Community Climate System Model shows the same temperature sensitivity to changes in insolation as does our proxy reconstruction, supporting the inference that this long-term trend was caused by the steady orbitally driven reduction in summer insolation. The cooling trend was reversed during the 20th century, with four of the five warmest decades of our 2000-year-long reconstruction occurring between 1950 and 2000.
According to the study, after a slow cooling of less than half a degree Fahrenheit per millennium, driven by a cyclical change in the orientation of the North Pole and the Sun, the region warmed 2.2 degrees just since 1900, with the decade from 1998 to 2008 the warmest in 2,000 years.
That could well be true, but it may only be regionally true.
Does this mean that “Igloo Construction Specialist” won’t be included on the list of Green Jobs?
I love the “DUH” headline!
How's the ratings a doin' of late there with your promotional drivel NYT, eh?
Are ya' hopin' for a volcano to erupt to take the GW heat off of your lies and place them back in the hands of God?
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