Global Warming or Ice Age Coming?
We hear about global warming and in fact, the temperatures seem to be slowly inching up. Whether this is a man made effect or depends on solar activity or other environmental factors outside of our control is an open question. What is new to me is that, even in a scenario of global warming, there could be local flips towards a cold climate.
A mechanism that could bring about such a flip for much of northern Europe is the Gulf Stream, a warm water ocean current, which brings a moderate climate to the western shores of our continent, especially to the areas of France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the British Isles.
A report by Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor of The Independent, says: The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become "very much" saltier in the tropics and subtropics and "very much" fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years.
This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.
The change is described as the "fingerprint" of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold ones fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water.
Apparently, similar "flips" have occurred before and caused cool periods in Europe. Due to the non linear nature of such a change, the cooling could come as fast as a decade or two. Watch out.
Global Warming Will Plunge Britain Into New Ice Age 'Within Decades'
Article from: The Independent UK
Global warming will plunge Britain into new ice age 'within decades'
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
25 January 2004
Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change "of remarkable amplitude" in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.
Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden "flips" of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development - described as "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments", by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research - threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild.
If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador - which is on the same latitude - bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.
A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden - launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists - warned last week that pollution threatened to "trigger changes with catastrophic consequences" like these.
Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as "likely". But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.
The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling."
Robert Gagosian, the director of Woods Hole, considered one of the world's leading oceanographic institutes, said: "We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes.
"Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates." The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become "very much" saltier in the tropics and subtropics and "very much" fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years.
This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.
The change is described as the "fingerprint" of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold ones fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water.
Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.
The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as "the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light". Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.
When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.
Some scientists say that this is the "worst-case scenario" and that the cooling may be less dramatic, with the world's climate "flickering" between colder and warmer states for several decades. But they add that, in practice, this would be almost as catastrophic for agriculture and civilisation.
- - -See also related:
Global Warming Will Cause - The Coming Ice AgeClimate Model Predicts Even Hotter Summers
Glaciers and Sea Ice Endangered by Rising Temperatures
How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age...
'GLOBAL WARMING': AN OFFICIAL PSEUDOSCIENCE
by Paulo N. Correa, M.Sc., Ph.D. & Alexandra N. Correa, HBA
There is perhaps no clearer example of the arbitrary vagaries of mainstream peer-review and its promotion of non-scientific fads, driven by political and economic interests, than the recent promotion of the pseudoscientific myth of 'global warming', systematically accompanied by the recurrent fits of public hysteria it engenders amongst scientists, politicians, environmentalists (another type of politico), mainstream science journals and mass-media. Fads of this type - the fear-mongering alarmist type - have become the mainstay of official mass-media and the object of sensationalistic 'science-journalism'. There's been a whole series of such fads associated with pseudo-scientific meteorology and climatology, that are cyclically promoted by syndicated news media and official or mainstream science publications.FACTS AND FICTION ABOUT SEA LEVEL CHANGE
MAY LOW-LYING ISLANDS AND COASTAL AREAS BE FREED FROM THE CONDEMNATION TO BECOME FLOODED IN THE NEAR-FUTURE
Memorandum by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, Head of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden President, (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, Leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project
Video: The Great Global Warming SwindleTwo More Global Warming False Alarms
The global warming debate has developed a pattern: In part A, a scientist makes a scary claim and gets headlines for himself, and his funding source, across the known world. In part B, a few months later new evidence blows the scary claim away—but with no press coverage of its demise.Two more global warming scares have just been quietly blown away: the claim that global warming is causing more and bigger hurricanes; and the claim that warming threatens to shut down the great Atlantic Ocean conveyor currents.
Inconvenient Facts About Climate Change (Global Warming)
"All the planets in our solar system are presently showing signs of increased temperature." If the planet is getting steadily warmer due to Industrial Age greenhouse gases, why did it get cooler when industries began belching out carbon dioxide at full tilt at the start of World War II? The amount of debris spewed into the atmosphere by volcanic activities alone could swamp the effect of greenhouse gases.
The Whole Solar System is Undergoing Global Warming
"This is a fact that not many people know about, and quite a few people, would like that there was no evidence to back this fact, because some people would like the world to believe that human activity is the cause for global warming on Earth. I am not advocating that releasing harmful gases, and chemicals in the oceans and atmosphere are good, but after a few years of research, I have come to understand that global warming is happening in the Solar System, not just on Earth."
Forty-five nations answered France's call for a new environmental body to slow inevitable global warming and protect the planet, perhaps with policing powers to punish violators
The words of warning about global warming from the top panel of international scientists Friday Feb. 2, 2007 were purposely blunt: "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the cause is "very likely" man-made, and "would continue for centuries." Officially releasing a 21-page report in Paris on the how, what and why the planet is warming -- though not telling the world what to do about it -- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave a bleak observation of what is happening now and an even more dire prediction for the future.
Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide. This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun's brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism. He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds.
The politics of global warming
The whole world is preparing for warming, but I mentioned that we have been cooling since 1998 and the climate scientists that I respected -- particularly the Russians and Chinese -- are predicting that we're going to be much, much cooler by 2030. So we've got completely the wrong adaptive strategy.
President of Czech Republic Calls Man-Made Global Warming a 'Myth' - Questions Gore's Sanity
Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.The causes of global warming and climate change!
There are two competing theories for the current global warming trend.
The first theory, which is the generally accepted one, is that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels and from land use are responsible for the temperature increase.The second theory is that the suns magnetic field and the solar wind modulates the amount of high energy cosmic radiation that the earth receives. This in turns affects the low altitude cloud cover and how much water vapor there is in the atmosphere and thus regulates the climate.
Climate change: The Deniers
Canada's National Post has a series of articles on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science. Several articles by sometimes eminent scientists that challenge the contention that global warming is a bad thing, or that global warming is due to our emission of carbon dioxide.
Global Warming: Prepare for Cooling, not Warming
By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris
The world is cooling. Global temperatures have declined since 1998 and a growing number of climate experts expect this trend to continue until at least 2030. This, happening while carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to rise, is in complete contradiction to the theory of human-induced (anthropogenic) global warming.
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Saturday February 7 2004
updated on Sunday December 26 2010URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2004/02/07/global_warming_or_ice_age_coming.htm
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