Post by JerseyBluEyz on Jul 13, 2004 21:37:38 GMT -5
This article has been around for over a month, but I wanted to post it here anyway since I'm a firm believer in the Global Warming hoax. I do not believe that WE are the sole cause of global warming. The warming and cooling trend is simply part of a cylce that has come and gone many times on this planet. This is well worth the read if you haven't come across it yet.
www.discover.com/web-exclusives/a-new-ice-age-day-after-tomorrow/
A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow?
Worried about global warming? Talk to a few scientists at Woods Hole. Oceanographers there are seeing big trouble with the Gulf Stream, which warms both North America and Europe
By Brad Lemley
May 22, 2004 | Environment
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. “I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.”
But it may again. Soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalized by the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece “Hunters in the Snow,”make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland.
Photographs courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Photo Caption: Chemical analysis of fossilized foraminifera, shell-building one-celled creatures, helps climate researchers determine oceanic temperatures during a mini-ice age hundreds of years ago. G. sacculifera (top left) and G. ruber (bottom right) are planktonic organisms that spend their lives floating near the surface but fall like sand grains to the bottom of the ocean when they die. U. peregrina (top right) and C. wuellerstorfi (bottom left) are benthonic organisms that live and die on or in sediments on the seafloor.
Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists—including many here at Curry’s base of operations, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts—believes conditions are ripe for another prolonged cooldown, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago, the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
“It could happen in 10 years,” says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. “Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.” And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously. In a letter to The New York Times last April, he wrote, “Recall the coldest winters in the Northeast, like those of 1936 and 1978, and then imagine recurring winters that are even colder, and you’ll have an idea of what this would be like.”
A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
The reason for such huge effects is simple. A quick climate change wreaks far more disruption than a slow one. People, animals, plants, and the economies that depend on them are like rivers, says the report: “For example, high water in a river will pose few problems until the water runs over the bank, after which levees can be breached and massive flooding can occur. Many biological processes undergo shifts at particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation.”
Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn't work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. “To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,” says the report.
Still, climate science is devilishly complex, and the onslaught of a little ice age is not certain, at least at this stage of research. Scientists the world over are weighing the potential for rapid North Atlantic cooling, but perhaps nowhere in the United States is more energy, equipment, and brainpower directed at the problem than here at Woods Hole. The oceanographers on staff subsist largely on government grants and are beholden to no corporation, making the facility “uniquely independent,” says David Gallo, director of special projects. Consequently, it should be as likely as any research facility or university to get at the truth.
The task is huge. Down on the docks where the institution keeps its three research ships, gulls swoop around a collection of massive metal frameworks; these are core samplers that, dropped over a ship's side, can extract long columns of layered sediments from the undersea muck. In a workshop nearby, technicians tinker with arrays of multiple independent water samplers, which at four feet long and eight inches thick look rather like giant scuba tanks. Out on the water, researchers drop these instruments into the North Atlantic, hoping to get a sharper picture of the potential for a little ice age. A sense of urgency propels the efforts. “We need to make this a national priority,” says Joyce. “It’s a tough nut to crack, but with enough data, I think we can make a more specific and confident prediction about what comes next.” Policymakers armed with a specific forecast could make adjustments to prepare for the inevitable.
But first things first. Isn’t the earth actually warming?
Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob thingyson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—“arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record.”
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. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. “It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,” says Joyce.
www.discover.com/web-exclusives/a-new-ice-age-day-after-tomorrow/
A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow?
Worried about global warming? Talk to a few scientists at Woods Hole. Oceanographers there are seeing big trouble with the Gulf Stream, which warms both North America and Europe
By Brad Lemley
May 22, 2004 | Environment
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. “I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.”
But it may again. Soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalized by the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece “Hunters in the Snow,”make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland.
Photographs courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Photo Caption: Chemical analysis of fossilized foraminifera, shell-building one-celled creatures, helps climate researchers determine oceanic temperatures during a mini-ice age hundreds of years ago. G. sacculifera (top left) and G. ruber (bottom right) are planktonic organisms that spend their lives floating near the surface but fall like sand grains to the bottom of the ocean when they die. U. peregrina (top right) and C. wuellerstorfi (bottom left) are benthonic organisms that live and die on or in sediments on the seafloor.
Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists—including many here at Curry’s base of operations, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts—believes conditions are ripe for another prolonged cooldown, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago, the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
“It could happen in 10 years,” says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. “Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.” And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously. In a letter to The New York Times last April, he wrote, “Recall the coldest winters in the Northeast, like those of 1936 and 1978, and then imagine recurring winters that are even colder, and you’ll have an idea of what this would be like.”
A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
The reason for such huge effects is simple. A quick climate change wreaks far more disruption than a slow one. People, animals, plants, and the economies that depend on them are like rivers, says the report: “For example, high water in a river will pose few problems until the water runs over the bank, after which levees can be breached and massive flooding can occur. Many biological processes undergo shifts at particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation.”
Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn't work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. “To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,” says the report.
Still, climate science is devilishly complex, and the onslaught of a little ice age is not certain, at least at this stage of research. Scientists the world over are weighing the potential for rapid North Atlantic cooling, but perhaps nowhere in the United States is more energy, equipment, and brainpower directed at the problem than here at Woods Hole. The oceanographers on staff subsist largely on government grants and are beholden to no corporation, making the facility “uniquely independent,” says David Gallo, director of special projects. Consequently, it should be as likely as any research facility or university to get at the truth.
The task is huge. Down on the docks where the institution keeps its three research ships, gulls swoop around a collection of massive metal frameworks; these are core samplers that, dropped over a ship's side, can extract long columns of layered sediments from the undersea muck. In a workshop nearby, technicians tinker with arrays of multiple independent water samplers, which at four feet long and eight inches thick look rather like giant scuba tanks. Out on the water, researchers drop these instruments into the North Atlantic, hoping to get a sharper picture of the potential for a little ice age. A sense of urgency propels the efforts. “We need to make this a national priority,” says Joyce. “It’s a tough nut to crack, but with enough data, I think we can make a more specific and confident prediction about what comes next.” Policymakers armed with a specific forecast could make adjustments to prepare for the inevitable.
But first things first. Isn’t the earth actually warming?
Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob thingyson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—“arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record.”
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. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. “It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,” says Joyce.