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).
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