DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Henny on August 14, 2007, 04:22:03 PM
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By Idean Salehyan
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3922&print=1
Corrupt, tyrannical governments?not changes in the Earth?s climate?will be to blame for the coming resource wars.
Few serious individuals still contest that global climate change is among the most important challenges of our time. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is a very real phenomenon, that human activity has contributed to it, and that some degree of climate change is inevitable.
We are no longer arguing over the reality of climate change, but rather, its potential consequences. According to one emerging ?conventional wisdom,? climate change will lead to international and civil wars, a rise in the number of failed states, terrorism, crime, and a stampede of migration toward developed countries.
It sounds apocalyptic, but the people pushing this case are hardly a lunatic fringe. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for instance, has pointed to climate change as the root cause of the conflict in Darfur. A group of high-ranking retired U.S. military officers recently published a report that calls climate change ?a threat multiplier for instability.? An earlier report commissioned by the Pentagon argues that conflicts over scarce resources will quickly become the dominant form of political violence. Even the Central Intelligence Agency is reportedly working on a National Intelligence Estimate that will focus on the link between climate change and U.S. national security.
These claims generally boil down to an argument about resource scarcity. Desertification, sea-level rise, more-frequent severe weather events, an increased geographical range of tropical disease, and shortages of freshwater will lead to violence over scarce necessities. Friction between haves and have-nots will increase, and governments will be hard-pressed to provide even the most basic services. In some scenarios, mass migration will ensue, whether due to desertification, natural disasters, and rising sea levels, or as a consequence of resource wars. Environmental refugees will in turn spark political violence in receiving areas, and countries in the ?global North? will erect ever higher barriers to keep culturally unwelcome?and hungry?foreigners out.
The number of failed states, meanwhile, will increase as governments collapse in the face of resource wars and weakened state capabilities, and transnational terrorists and criminal networks will move in. International wars over depleted water and energy supplies will also intensify. The basic need for survival will supplant nationalism, religion, or ideology as the fundamental root of conflict.
Dire scenarios like these may sound convincing, but they are misleading. Even worse, they are irresponsible, for they shift liability for wars and human rights abuses away from oppressive, corrupt governments. Additionally, focusing on climate change as a security threat that requires a military response diverts attention away from prudent adaptation mechanisms and new technologies that can prevent the worst catastrophes.
First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend.
Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.
Second, arguing that climate change is a root cause of conflict lets tyrannical governments off the hook. If the environment drives conflict, then governments bear little responsibility for bad outcomes. That?s why Ban Ki-moon?s case about Darfur was music to Khartoum?s ears. The Sudanese government would love to blame the West for creating the climate change problem in the first place. True, desertification is a serious concern, but it?s preposterous to suggest that poor rainfall?rather than deliberate actions taken by the Sudanese government and the various combatant factions?ultimately caused the genocidal violence in Sudan. Yet by Moon?s perverse logic, consumers in Chicago and Paris are at least as culpable for Darfur as the regime in Khartoum.
To be sure, resource scarcity and environmental degradation can lead to social frictions. Responsible, accountable governments, however, can prevent local squabbles from spiraling into broader violence, while mitigating the risk of some severe environmental calamities. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has observed, no democracy has ever experienced a famine. Politicians who fear the wrath of voters usually do their utmost to prevent foreseeable disasters and food shortages. Accountable leaders are also better at providing public goods such as clean air and water to their citizens.
Third, dire predictions about the coming environmental wars imply that climate change requires military solutions?a readiness to forcibly secure one?s own resources, prevent conflict spillovers, and perhaps gain control of additional resources. But focusing on a military response diverts attention from simpler, and far cheaper, adaptation mechanisms. Technological improvements in agriculture, which have yet to make their way to many poor farmers, have dramatically increased food output in the United States without significantly raising the amount of land under cultivation. Sharing simple technologies with developing countries, such as improved irrigation techniques and better seeds and fertilizers, along with finding alternative energy supplies and new freshwater sources, is likely to be far more effective and cost saving in the long run than arms and fortifications. States affected by climate change can move people out of flood plains and desert areas, promote better urban planning, and adopt more efficient resource-management systems.
Yes, climate change is a serious problem that must be addressed, and unchecked environmental degradation may lead to intensified competition over scarce resources in certain regions. The good news is that the future is not written in stone. How governments respond to the challenge is at least as important as climate change itself, if not more so. Well-managed, transparent political systems that are accountable to their publics can take appropriate measures to prevent armed conflict. If the grimmest scenarios come to pass and environmental change contributes to war, human rights abuse, and even genocide, it will be reckless political leaders who deserve much of the blame.
Idean Salehyan is assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas and coauthor of ?Climate Change and Conflict: The Migration Link,? published by the International Peace Academy in New York.
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Warm-mongers and cheeseburger imperialists
MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.
Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century ? 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 ? plummeted even lower down the Hot 100.
In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.
And yet we survived.
So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh."
The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.
Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings ? albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.
One is tempted to explain the error with old the computer expert's cry: That's not a bug, it's a feature. To maintain public hysteria, it's necessary for the warm-mongers to be able to demonstrate that something is happening now. Or as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it at the end of 1998:
"It's December, and you're still mowing the lawn. You can't put up the Christmas lights because you're afraid the sweat pouring off your face will short out the connections. Your honeysuckle vines are blooming. Mosquitoes are hovering at your back door.
"Hot enough for you?"
It's not the same if you replace "Hot enough for you?" with "Yes, it's time to relive sepia-hued memories from grandpa's Dust Bowl childhood."
Yet the fakery wouldn't be so effective if there weren't so many takers for it. Why is that?
In my book, still available at all good bookstores (you can find it propping up the wonky rear leg of the display table for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"), I try to answer this question by way of some celebrated remarks by the acclaimed British novelist Margaret Drabble, speaking just after the liberation of Iraq. Ms Drabble said:
"I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win."
That's an interesting list of grievances. If you lived in Poland in the 1930s, you weren't worried about the Soviets' taste in soft drinks or sentimental Third Reich pop culture. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Chad or some such. But because it's the world's first nonimperial superpower the world has had to concoct a thesis that America is a threat not merely to this or that nation state but to the entire planet, and not because of conventional great-power designs but because ? even scarier ? of its "consumption," its very way of life. Those Cokes and cheeseburgers detested by discriminating London novelists are devastating the planet in ways that straightforward genocidal conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of. The construct of this fantasy is very revealing about how unthreatening America is.
And, when the cheeseburger imperialists are roused to real if somewhat fitful warmongering, that's no reason for the self-loathing to stop. The New Republic recently published a "Baghdad Diary" by one "Scott Thomas," who turned out to be Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp. It featured three anecdotes of American soldiering: the deliberate killing of domestic dogs by the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle; a child's skull worn by a U.S. serviceman as a fashion accessory; and the public abuse of a woman to her face, a half-melted face disfigured by an IED. In that last anecdote, the abusive soldier was the author himself, citing it as evidence of how the Iraq war has degraded and dehumanized everyone.
According to the Weekly Standard, army investigators say Pvt. Beauchamp has now signed a statement recanting his lurid anecdotes. And even the New Republic's editors concede the IED-victim mockery took place in Kuwait, before Pvt. Beauchamp ever got to Iraq.
They don't seem to realize this destroys the entire premise of the piece, which is meant to be about the dehumanization of soldiers in combat. Pvt. Beauchamp came pre-dehumanized. Indeed, he was writing Iraq atrocity fantasies on his blog back in Germany. It might be truer to say he was "dehumanized" by American media coverage. In this, he joins an ever lengthening list of peddlers of fake atrocities, such as Jesse MacBeth, an Army Ranger who claimed to have slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a mosque. He turned out to be neither an Army Ranger nor a mass murderer.
There are many honorable reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but believing that our troops are sick monsters is not one of them. The sickness is the willingness of so many citizens of the most benign hegemon in history to believe they must be.
As Pogo said, way back in the 1971 Earth Day edition of a then-famous comic strip, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Even when we don't do anything: In the post-imperial age, powerful nations no longer have to invade and kill. Simply by driving a Chevy Suburban, we can make the oceans rise and wipe the distant Maldive Islands off the face of the Earth. This is a kind of malignant narcissism so ingrained it's now taught in our grade schools. Which may be why, even when the New Republic's diarist goes to Iraq and meets the real enemy, he still assumes it's us.
Article (http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/american-iraq-data-1804986-year-america)
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'Cool farms' mask the extent of global warming
13:33 14 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12482-cool-farms-mask-the-extent-of-global-warming.html
You've heard of urban heat islands. Now researchers have confirmed the existence of their opposite: cool farm patches.
Whereas urban development generates pockets of hot air, irrigated fields tend to cool things down, they say - and there is evidence that the effects have been felt in California for over a century.
In areas of intensive irrigation, such as the Central Valley in California, US, these "cool farms" have counteracted global warming, say C?line Bonfils and David Lobell of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. But they warn that a reduction in irrigation could spell the end of the relief that these regions have enjoyed.
Bonfils and Lobell compared irrigation and temperature data for California between 1915 and 2000, during which time the area of irrigated land in the Central Valley doubled. They found that maximum daytime temperatures in the area were between 0.9 ?C and 1.6 ?C cooler during this period than areas that were only modestly irrigated.
Extrapolating back to when irrigation began in 1887, they calculate that intensively irrigated parts of the Central Valley are 1.8 ?C to 3.2 ?C cooler than they would otherwise have been.
Chilly spillover
That cooling occurs because much of the solar energy that hits irrigated ground during the day goes to evaporate the extra water in the soil and in plants instead of heating the air, explains Lara Kueppers of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Kueppers had predicted the cool farms effect from climate modelling studies (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2006GL028679). The models suggest that the cool air spreads to areas outside the irrigated fields, although the extent of this "spillover" is still unclear.
Bonfils and Lobell say the cool farms effect could explain why minimum and maximum winter temperatures steadily rose in California between 1915 and 2000, whereas maximum summer temperatures did not.
The warmer winter temperatures can only be explained by the greenhouse effect, and the authors speculate that the cool farms effect may have masked the impact of global warming on summer temperatures. Irrigation is mostly carried out during the summer.
Dwindling supplies
The cool times may not last, however. The amount of irrigation in California has stabilised since 1980, Bonfils and Lobell point out, because expanding urban areas have laid increasing claims on dwindling water supplies. In the US overall, irrigation decreased for the first time - by 2% - between 1998 and 2003.
A rollback of the cooling effect of irrigation in the face of continued global warming could mean that California will be hit by substantial warming, say the researchers. The same is likely to be true of other regions of the world. India, Pakistan and China have become huge irrigators over the past 50 years, but the growth of irrigated areas is slowing down.
This may mean that irrigated regions, which now provide about 40% of global food production, will feel more than their share of warming in the future. In turn, this will inevitably have an impact on food security.
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But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures.
The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934.
Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century ? 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 ? plummeted even lower down the Hot 100.
In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced.
Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s
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Liberal Sham "Global Warming" On Hold?
UNITED STATES Climate Summary April 2007
The average temperature in April 2007 was 51.7 F. This was -0.3 F cooler than
the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 47th coolest April in 113 years.
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Liberal Sham "Global Warming" On Hold?
UNITED STATES Climate Summary April 2007
The average temperature in April 2007 was 51.7 F. This was -0.3 F cooler than
the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 47th coolest April in 113 years.
This is direct from NOAA:
APRIL TEMPERATURE NEAR AVERAGE FOR U.S. EARLY APRIL COLD OUTBREAK, STRONG NOR'EASTER, DROUGHT NOTABLE GLOBAL APRIL SURFACE TEMPERATURE THIRD WARMEST ON RECORD
For the contiguous U.S., last month's average temperature was 51.7?F(10.9?C), which was only 0.3?F (0.2?C) below the 20th century mean (based on preliminary data). The April temperature one year ago was the 2nd warmest on record, and the warmest April occurred in 1981, when the average temperature was 56.1?F (13.4?C). The coldest April occurred in 1920.
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Global Highlights
The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April was the third warmest on record (1.19?F/0.66?C above the 20th century mean). For the January-April year-to-date period, the global surface temperature ranked warmest on record.
Separately, the global April land-surface temperature was the warmest on record. Monthly mean temperatures more than 5?F (3?C) above average covered large parts of Asia and Western Europe. The April ocean-surface temperature tied for seventh warmest in the 128-year period of record as neutral ENSO (El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation) conditions persisted in the equatorial Pacific (awaiting update to indices).
During the past century, global surface temperatures have increased at a rate near 0.11?F (0.06?C) per decade, but the rate of increase has been three times larger since 1976, or 0.32?F (0.18?C) per decade, with some of the largest temperature increases occurring in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/apr/apr07.html
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*snicker* Shall we keep posting contradictory conclusions on the global warming debate?? Shall I trot out all the experts and climatologists that have concluded that the global warming hysteria is pretty much that? That even if Global warming is occuring, that the "reasons" for such are completely questionable?? Cyclical?? Any comments on the "refresh" NASA had to provide on their temperatures and the acute lack of any media attention to it?? I can't help but recall that near blizzard Gore ran into when about to speak on global warming, a little while back. and boy, did you catch those latest massive category 5 Atlantaic Hurricanes pelting the the East coast and Gulf, everyone said was coming following Katrina? 8)
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but does this mean we can dump sewage in the street or not?
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Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny
June 30, 2007
BY JAMES M. TAYLOR
In his new book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore pleads, "We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth." Gore repeatedly asks that science and reason displace cynical political posturing as the central focus of public discourse.
If Gore really means what he writes, he has an opportunity to make a difference by leading by example on the issue of global warming.
A cooperative and productive discussion of global warming must be open and honest regarding the science. Global warming threats ought to be studied and mitigated, and they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.
Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.
For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."
Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."
Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.
Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.
Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."
Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.
Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.
Each of these cases provides an opportunity for Gore to lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science. Will he rise to the occasion? Only time will tell.
Article (http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/450392,CST-EDT-REF30b.article)
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http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/hansen-t1.jpg
The graphics don't lie. Yes, the temp goes up and down but the overall trend is UP. Just like gas prices, it goes up and falls, it goes up and falls a little, it goes up and falls a little, but the price/temp is still much higher than before and the ice masses at the poles have decreased ALOT.
You losers can sit around trying to poo everything but in the end, you're just morons running around saying the house isn't on fire while your hair is smoking and firemen are screaming for you to jump into the circle.
Ignoring proof is not a sound argument.
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I don't know if the earth is warming or not.
I do know that the solutions put forth thus far seem to be not well thought out.
Carbon credits? Please!.
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The graphics don't lie. Yes, the temp goes up and down but the overall trend is UP.
The LIE though, even if we are to conclude a small trend upwards currently, is the supposed "scientific concensus" that it is man made. I don't recall a whole horde of gas guzzling SUV's and a much smaller population back in the 30's, when we had record temps even greater than that of the current decade. What up with that?
Ignoring proof is not a sound argument.
Ignoring scientific proof to the contrary and pushing a lie (Scientific concenses that Global warming is man made) is not a good tactic either
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I don't kniow if the earth is warming or not. I do know that the solutions put forth thus far seem to be not well thought out. Carbon credits? Please!.
GADS, that one does take the cake, of all hypocritical cakes to date :P
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Personally, I have been trying to find out how to get solar panels installed on my house and haven't been able to find a straight answer on cost.
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as recently as 1994 the scare mongers were worrying about an ice age
(http://www.quartzmtn.com/files/images/time-logo.gif)
The Ice Age Cometh?
Monday, Jan. 31, 1994
By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
Just as last week's tremors were destroying highways, buildings and lives in Southern California, an even deadlier natural disaster was advancing slowly but inexorably south from Canada into the U.S. By midweek a huge mass of frigid arctic air had practically paralyzed much of the Midwest and East. Temperatures in dozens of cities dropped to all-time lows: -22 degreesF in Pittsburgh; -25 degrees in Akron, Ohio, and Clarksburg, West Virginia; -27 degrees in Indianapolis, Indiana. Chicago schools closed because of cold weather for the first time in history, Federal Government offices shut down in Washington, and East Coast cities narrowly escaped widespread power outages as overburdened electric utilities struggled to keep homes heated. Hundreds of motorists in New Jersey had to be rescued by snowmobile from an impassably icy highway, and thousands of the homeless crammed into New York City's shelters to avoid freezing. By week's end the unprecedented cold wave had killed more than 130 people.
There is a growing understanding as well that ice ages are not uniformly icy, nor interglacial periods unchangingly warm. About 40,000 years ago, for example, right in the middle of the last Ice Age, the world warmed briefly, forcing glaciers to retreat. And while the current interglacial period has been stably temperate, the previous one, according to at least one study, was evidently interrupted by frigid spells lasting hundreds of years. If that period was more typical than the present one, humanity's invention of agriculture, and thus civilization, may have been possible only because of a highly unusual period of stable temperature -- a fluke.
Just 150 years ago, the notion that much of the Northern Hemisphere had once been covered by thick sheets of ice was both new and highly controversial. Within a few decades, though, most scientists were convinced and began looking for explanations. Several suggested that astronomical cycles were involved, and by the 1930s the Yugoslav astronomer Milutin Milankovitch had constructed a coherent theory. The ice ages, he argued, were triggered by changes in the shape of the earth's slightly oval orbit around the sun and in the planet's axis of rotation. Studies of the chemical composition of ocean-floor sediments, which depend on climate conditions when the material was laid down, more or less supported Milankovitch's predicted schedule of global glaciation.
According to Milankovitch cycles, an ice age could start sometime within the next 1,000 or 2,000 years. But geophysicists have realized for years that while the cycles are real, and influence climate, they alone cannot explain ice ages. For one thing, Milankovitch's timing of glaciation may be broadly correct, but major glacial episodes happen when his cycles call for minor ones, and vice versa.
Besides, a simple astronomical model would predict smooth and gradual climate transitions -- the opposite of what really happens. The last Ice Age was in full retreat about 13,000 years ago when temperatures suddenly reversed and began heading lower again. They stayed low for 1,000 years, an episode known as the Younger Dryas period. The periodic "spikes" of warmer weather that have interrupted ice ages and the cold weather that often came on suddenly in the last interglacial period are also impossible to explain with astronomy. And so is the astonishingly rapid changeover from warm to cold.
A number of theories have been floated to explain these irregular, rapid variations. The leading one, advanced by Lamont-Doherty's Wallace Broecker and George Denton of the University of Maine, involves a kind of cyclic ocean current that has been likened to a conveyer belt. Broecker and Denton note that a stream of unusually salty (and thus especially dense) water flows underneath the Gulf Stream as it moves from the tropics to the North Atlantic. When this salty stream reaches the far north, it is forced to the surface as water above it is blown aside by the winds; it then discharges its tropical heat into the arctic air, cools off and sinks to the bottom, where it returns to the tropics to be heated again
What ever happened to global warming? Scientists have issued apocalyptic warnings for years, claiming that gases from cars, power plants and factories are creating a greenhouse effect that will boost the temperature dangerously over the next 75 years or so. But if last week is any indication of winters to come, it might be more to the point to start worrying about the next Ice Age instead. After all, human-induced warming is still largely theoretical, while ice ages are an established part of the planet's history. The last one ended about 10,000 years ago; the next one -- for there will be a next one -- could start tens of thousands of years from now. Or tens of years. Or it may have already started.
There is no way of knowing yet: an entire winter of record-shattering cold, let alone a single week, might be a meaningless blip in the overall scheme of long-term climate trends. In fact, last week's cold wave was caused by a phenomenon that is by no means rare. The jet stream, a stratospheric wind that governs the movement of air over North America, dipped temporarily south of its usual course. As it did so, the stream pulled along a vast high-pressure system from Siberia and the Arctic Ocean.
If that starts happening more and more often, though, it might mean that something bigger is going on. Climatologists once thought the world eased into ice ages, with average temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere falling 15 degrees over hundreds or thousands of years. During long, frigid winters and short, cool summers, snow piled up much faster than it could melt, and mile-thick sheets of ice gradually covered much of the planet's land surface. After 100,000 years or so, scientists believed, the glaciers made a dignified retreat, stayed put for about 10,000 years and then began to grow again.
But over the past several years, researchers have dug deep into Atlantic sea-floor sediments and Greenland glaciers to study the chemistry of ancient mud and ice, and they are increasingly convinced that climate change is anything but smooth. The transition from warm to frigid can come in a decade or two -- a geological snap of the fingers. Says Gerard Bond, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory: "The data have been coming out of Greenland for maybe two or three decades. But the first results were really so surprising that people weren't ready to believe them."
It is this current, argue Broecker and Denton, that keeps the Arctic relatively warm and glacier free. When it stops running, an ice age -- or a cold spike -- begins. What causes a turnoff? An influx of fresh water might do it, by diluting the saltiness and density of the current, preventing it from sinking and heading back to the tropics. There is evidence that at just the time the Younger Dryas began, a huge North American lake (which no longer exists) began dumping Amazonian quantities of fresh water into the North Atlantic. The discharge stopped about 1,000 years later, as did the Younger Dryas. Broecker and Denton's model, says Penn State's Richard Alley, an expert on Greenland ice cores, "is probably the trigger for these abrupt changes."
Nobody knows what other factors might help trigger climate shifts, and how sensitive they are. "It scares us," says Alley. "We know that there are times when climate is very delicately poised. We know that for the past 8,000 or 10,000 years, it hasn't flipped over. But we don't really understand it well enough to say whether it's really stable or whether we are on thin ice."
In short, while there is no reason to think the next full-fledged Ice Age is upon us, a shorter episode of frigid conditions could happen at any time. The last interglacial period was warmer than this one and also, arguably, more unstable. It is conceivable that the greenhouse effect could heat up the planet for a while but then trigger changes that could plunge the earth into a sudden chill. And for an idea of what a mini-Ice Age might be like, just imagine last week's cold wave lasting all winter, every winter -- for the next thousand years.
With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York
http://205.188.238.109/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980050-3,00.html (http://205.188.238.109/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980050-3,00.html)
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Personally, I have been trying to find out how to get solar panels installed on my house and haven't been able to find a straight answer on cost.
http://www.memphisdailynews.com/Editorial/StoryNew.aspx?id=98466
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watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi1LU45Nip0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi1LU45Nip0)
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http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html
NASA EXPLAINS "DUST BOWL" DROUGHT
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Personally, I have been trying to find out how to get solar panels installed on my house and haven't been able to find a straight answer on cost.
The Cost is subject to change , the practicality of such a thing is getting better all the time.
http://www.projecta.com.au/documents/item/9
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The graphics don't lie. Yes, the temp goes up and down but the overall trend is UP. Just like gas prices, it goes up and falls, it goes up and falls a little, it goes up and falls a little, but the price/temp is still much higher than before and the ice masses at the poles have decreased ALOT.
And yet, the Earth is still cooler now than at other points in it's history.
For many millions of years, there were NO ice caps.
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Arctic August: NYC Sets Record For Coldest Day
High Of 59 Degrees Ties Chilliest August High Set In 1911
Aug 21, 2007 5:15 pm US/Eastern
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_233143509.html (http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_233143509.html)