14-Year Scottish Study - Sudden Climate Chill May Be Likelier Than Thought

[hatrack]

TEMPERATURES in Scotland are set to plummet as a result of global warming, according to surprising new findings by Edinburgh scientists. An Edinburgh University study has discovered that Ice Age conditions could return to the northern hemisphere sooner than was previously thought. The research, based on analysis of changing climate patterns at the end of the last Ice Age, disputes the widely-held view that global warming will be uniform across the world.

According to the university scientists, we have just emerged from 11,400 years of climatic stability. This has resulted in a warm Europe and cold Southern Ocean, because the Gulf Stream takes warm water north across the Equator. But Scotland and northern Europe could become colder when ice in the Arctic cools in the north Atlantic ocean. This could also be triggered by changing winds and ocean currents around a warming Antarctica.

Edinburgh University spent 14 years analysing samples to build an accurate picture of glacier changes during the past 25,000 years. They found that in the past, during times of major climate change, glaciers in the southern hemisphere have expanded while those in the north shrank. The researchers say that a complex climatic "seesaw" effect - last triggered when the post-Ice Age Earth heated thousands of years ago - could be set off again in our present warming world.

Although the idea of such a bipolar seesaw effect has been mooted before, this study is the first to present firm evidence to support the theory. The scientists believe their study is significant because it suggests that major shifts in global climate are influenced not just by atmospheric conditions, but also by fluctuations in ocean currents."

EDIT

http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=688082005

[lapfog_1]

1. Let's all agree to quit calling it "global warming"

it's Global Climate Change. Some parts may become much colder and others MUCH warmer... and the "average" increase in temp is such
a misleading stat... start looking at local changes and DEVIATIONS
from historical averages.

[Systematic Chaos]

2. Agreed

What I want to know is just WHAT HAPPENED to cause those mammoths to flash freeze with identifiable plants still frozen in their mouths? I'm on this "The Day After Tomorrow" kick right now and what they suggested in the movie was a form of "reverse hurricane" where air almost as frigid as -200F was sucked from the troposphere to ground level so quickly that it could barely warm up once it hit the surface.

What other options could there possibly be to explain a phenomenon like with those mammoths? :shrug:

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Ice-age storms

Just a few late-night ramblings during a heat wave ...

First, the total evidence about "the mammoths" (mainly the Berezovka Mammoth found in 1899) is actually contradictory and does not lend itself to easy analysis. We do know that climate changes in that area hit quickly, but when and how the mammoth died is still a mystery, one that has puzzled scientists for over a century. Alternative explanations can not be ruled out, and as dramatic as the "flash-freezing" story is, the truth may be stranger than even that. Incidentally, there was a herd of mammoths that survived on Price of Wales Island 2000-4000 years after the rest of the mammoths died out. Arctic zone paleontology is really poorly developed -- after all, the area is extremely inhospitable to field work.

Downdraft storms do happen, but the air in the upper atmosphere is nowhere near as cold as -200F, although it is significantly colder now than it was even a decade ago. My personal theory on the "Chemtrails" is that the colder conditions are allowing condensation trails to instantly freezen into ice crystals (snow), so they are more prominent. "Global Warming" as a cause of upper-atmospheric cooling has been discussed by climatologists. For several years, it biased terrestrial temperature studies using IR and remote thermography.

Sudden, violent downdrafts have produced temperature drops of as much as 100F in Arctic and subarctic reagions. They are, of course, quite rare, but IIRC, they have been studied by meteorologists at the Adak and Thule military bases. They've also had some experience with small cyclonic storms, sometimes called "tornadocanes", that form out of thunderstorm lines, and one DUer had personal (and frightening) experience sailing through one of these storms.

Alaskan and Siberian native people have legends of rare storms that we might describe as ice tornadoes. I recall an article from the 1970s about one legend where they were called "Dancers", sent by some deity to punish the wicked. I find the stories credible -- the description matches that of a tornado that might form in the Arctic. During an era of rapid climate change, a warmed-up Artic and a cooling-down northern temperate zone could produce temperature extremes leading to violent storms.

The Earth has alsways seen its share of weird weather, but as world-wide temperature changes, we'll be seeing much, much more of it. I myself follow the "climate flip-flop" model and think it will happen long before atmospheric CO2 hits 600 ppm -- in recent geological history, it appears to kick in at 400 ppm or so, which is just about where we are now.

The originator of the idea, Wallace Broecker, is finally getting his due. His granddaughter is an active DUer, too.

I don't think the climate flip will happen like in The Day After Tomorrow, but it will be quick enough to be, uh, unpleasant. Of course, the choice is ours whether it will be a world-wide disaster, or a challenge we rise to meet.

Just in case, I'm keeping a pair of long johns out of winter storage. :)

--p!

[phantom power]

4. The real scenario may be more cruel than in "Day After"

In Day After, a couple billion people perish rather quickly, frozen to death. In the real thing, it's more likely to happen over a few years. Those same couple billion people are more likely to starve to death, as the northern hemisphere becomes too cold to grow food.

One thing the movie did get right. Those of us in north america, europe and asia are going to be at the mercy of the equatorial countries. But how do you accomodate a migration of the entire northern hemisphere? It would be starving refugees, on a scale never seen in human history.

Or, maybe I'm just being gloomy.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. This is true

But the scenario for the actual cruelties will be even less complicated. In fact, it is possibly happening right now. Several severe droughts are under way -- on the Iberian peninsula, in south Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in the American West. There is also a high probability that the Eastern European "breadbasket" -- the great prairies of Ukraine and southern Russia -- will also experience a drought. Temperatures in mid-continental Europe are breaking records again, and China is also reporting severe weather. And you can be sure that the water vapor found in mid-continental Europe and Asia is migrating northward just as surely as the Australian/New Zealander water is heading toward Antarctica.

The problem for us, we who live in the USA, is that we are victims of our own success. We have more than enough surplus agricultural capacity, and enough air conditioning to take the killing edge off just about any heat wave.

That may not be the case much longer, but it is now. The year that we don't have quite enough food and energy costs too much to run the A.C. is the year we learn to adapt. But that year is still probably a decade in the future.

No, the first warning signal will probably be too subtle to make a difference. Five, ten million dead of hunger and thirst in some country populated by "Arabs" or Chinese -- which will be dimmed in the popular consciousness by the next celebrity sex frenzy. Even 100,000 dead people across Albania and Sicily, Austria and the prairies of France won't be such a big deal in the USA.

For us, I suspect it will be the first "Category 6" hurricane, with sustained 230 MPH winds and a storm surge of 40 feet, when it crashes into central Florida, Charleston, or the suburbanized and oil-trafficking Gulf coast near Houston or Galveston or New Orleans, killing an "Asian" number of Americans and causing financial losses high enough to make the ruling class wince in (mild) pain. Coming on the heels of a hot, deadly Summer would not increase the pain afflicting the well-heeled very much, but it would have a profound influence on the American psyche. We will discover environmental stewardship and appropriate technology -- but decades too late.

--p!

[phantom power]

8. Yes, we probably are victims of success.

Our technology has worked well enough to foster the illusion that we can cope with any adversity. Worse yet, it will continue to work right up until it fails catastrophically.

Same goes for our economy. They'll keep it in it's current bloated, un-dead state right up until something pushes it over the edge, and it all implodes.

I think it's especially exciting, that both things are basically primed to blow up in our face at about the same time. So, we'll be trying to cope with massive environmental collapse, with a world economy crippled by a depression. Or, maybe instead we will be trying to cope with a depression, and get sucker-punched by climate disasters. Sort of like the Dust Bowl during the great depression, but on steroids.

"Sir, I assure you she can sink! She's made of metal!"

[XemaSab]

5. This is wrong

The Gulf Stream does not cross the equator, it takes wwarm water from the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean Sea and moves it north along the Atlantic coast, eventually winding up in northern Europe.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Well, partly

The study in question is one of paleoclimatology. It is likley that the Atlantic circulation was ocean-wide during much of the last Ice Age, and probably has present-day relevance.

It is also likely that the press got some of the details of the study wrong.

The point of the study is that ocean currents play much greater roles in weather than we are used to thinking; the evidence for the critical roles of the North Atlantic currents, from Newfoundland to the Bering Sea (there are several such currents), is/are now indisputable. The details, of course, are being worked out, but the old way of looking at climate as a series of isolated pieces is gone forever, if it had ever existed in the first place.

--p!

[XemaSab]

13. In climatology class

we spent a lot of time discussing ocean currents, and the importance of the Gulf Stream globally, and I just wanted to step in and make the correction to avoid any confusion among DU'ers.

[phantom power]

14. You probably noticed this: In "Day After", at the beginning...

The slide showing the current is running backwards. They depicted it running north along the european coast, and back south along the north american coast.

[XemaSab]

16. I have a confession to make:

I never saw Day After Tomorrow.

I probably should see it though... Maybe a rental for next weekend?

[phantom power]

17. I liked the movie. If you've actually taken climate courses,

it will probably make blood spurt out of your ears, but I think that they actually did an OK job of conveying the basic idea of an "atlantic current failure" scenario.

By that I mean, they managed to get all the specifics wrong, but somehow, the gist of it comes through.

As with all Hollywood scifi movies, I was left wondering why they always get so much wrong. They could have gotten a lot of it right, and still had a cool story.

[XemaSab]

18. Hear, hear

it's well known among birders that Hollywood has NO CLUE what birds are where, and when.

Please, people.... you spend HOW much money on LOTR, and at the end you have the eagles that save Frodo and Sam giving red-tailed hawk calls????

And the MILLIONS spent on the first Spiderman but there's somehow a stray California Quail outside Peter Parker's bedroom in Queens, New York?

[midnight armadillo]

20. That is too funny

I've often noticed scientific idiocies in movies, and the occasional geographic one (in the movie What's the Worst That Could Happen? the characters in Boston state they're driving to NYC and then there's a shot of them going North on the Longfellow Bridge into downtown Cambridge, hee hee), but it never occurred to me to look for birds. Then again, I'm no birder.

[XemaSab]

21. In The Graduate

there's a shot of Hoffman on his way to Berkeley driving along the top deck of the Bay Bridge. Uh..... the top deck is for traffic TO San Francisco, and the BOTTOM deck is for traffic to Oakland/Berkeley.

[phantom power]

9. You know, it's really gonna suck if...

we ever finally build a bunch of {solar, wind, nuclear} power plants, start to get a handle on our energy crisis, and then we have to leave it all behind when the northen hemisphere becomes uninhabitable.

We should consider just building all this shite in central America. Global economy? Let's just buy our power from Mexico. Then, it will still be there for us, if we ever have to knock on their door and ask if they'd mind 300 million guests for dinner, and every dinner after that.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. It'll take a fairly long time for that to happen

(I'm still babbling here ...)

Long in human terms, though short in Earth terms.

I'd say that once a year-round prevailing High (re-)establishes itself over Quebec (the Laurentide), Boston will be on a one-to-two century lease, and NYC may have twice that. Eventually, the ice cap could extend down to about Philadelphia, but it could take a thousand years or more. And these estimates presuppose a major Ice Age, which can't be counted on (and a "Little Ice Age" would be bad enough).

If you're from Europe, I beleive the major prevailing ice-age high pressure zone there was roughly over St. Petersburg.

Of course, the northern tier will become a lot like Nunavut, Canada is today (or was, as recently as 1990, before the warm-up got going in earnest). The tragedy will be that the great nations of the North -- Canada, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Mongolia, and Siberia (if you can call it its own nation) -- will be on evacuation alert almost immediately. Europe and the USA could handle the resulting influxes of 30-60 million people, but the northern Asian people will have no place to go.

The Southern Hemisphere will have an easier time of it, but only because so much of it is oceanic, which will keep the worst effects of desertification and freeze from happening. But much of Brasil may find itself dealing with wild weather, cold and hot alike, as the Pampas becomes the battle zone between rain forest and new desert.

The scenario presented in The Day After Tomorrow, of Americans crossing the Mexican border, is more poetry than reality. I liked those scenes, too, but they were only plausible in the context a major ice age settling in over a period of a month or so, as in the movie. Given fifty years to move (North American) people who may not even be under pressure to move, we'd simply dig deeper into its economy and destroy it, or buy "American" enclaves outright.

The tendancy of we "United-Statesians" (Frank Lloyd Wright called us "Usonians") is to dig in and pull together. We are a much better bunch than our leaders, and most of the world knows that. I suspect we'll hunker down and pitch in, but it will take a couple of painful, anguishing and humiliating blows to get the full process started.

Look at how difficult it is already, and the messages of climate change, resource depletion and disease control are well-publicized. World-wide, the trend is for all-powerful leaders who are blind, and well-aware masses who are powerless. It's THAT climate that has to change.

--p!

[phantom power]

11. I'm thinking the cold/snow will hose us, long before the glaciers

The actual glaciers will take time to grow, but the cold itself will arrive quickly. Growing seasons will shrink drastically, or disappear. Winter will last 8 months a year, instead of 4.

I suppose that if we manage to adapt to that, we might manage to somehow import food from the south. Assuming anybody can afford to buy it.

[Dogmudgeon]

12. Yep, that's the scenario

But I still put less stock in the details because Global Warming will continue for several decades beyond the start of the Climate Flip. It will be that warming that "powers" the snow and new glacial accumulation. Blizzards and hurricanes alike will be driven by rising tropical heat for centuries after the actual equilibrium point changes.

The Pigwidgeon Prophecy® envisions a "Stormy Zone" between about 30N and 50N, slightly higher north on the East Coast, and much higher north on the West. In places like Louisville, Kansas City and Philadelphia, Summers could offer 100F+ bakeouts, with Siberian winters starting shortly after Memorial Day. Such a weather whipsaw would work against agriculture; but California should avoid much of it, as it has for over one million years, and possibly the entire current ice age cycle that started 2.3 million years ago. This stormy zone would last at least 500 years in the event this new system is a true, 100-kY long Ice Age; if it's a Little Ice Age, it would be "not a Bug, but a Feature".

Right now, most of eastern North America seems to be experiencing a seasonal weather delay of 3-6 weeks. In other words, where it used to get cold by Thanksgiving, now it takes until the New Year. We've had cold Springs and late (and dry) Summers since approximately 1995. I believe this is an artifact of continued atmospheric warming. It also happened in the late 1950s and early '60 during a lesser warm period.

I suspect that there will be a lot of indoor and "hothouse" agriculture. The migrations in the south will be patchwork, since a lot of the Mississippi watershed is prone to flooding. In an ice-age onset scenario, flooding will also become more common. The days of the even, temperate climate are ending; we may get a few short years of mercy, but reliability won't return until the new Ice Age either ends (in the case of a little one) or stabilizes itself (in the case of a major stadial one).

But don't let my minor quibbles get you down. I first caught wind of this change in the late 1970s, after reading one of Melodybe's grandfather's papers on the subject. You're on the right track, and simply being aware that "a storm is coming in" will be enough to put anyone at the front of the pack. The kind of foresight that warns folks to lay in a week's supply of groceries in the winter, with some extra batteries and knowing where the blankets are kept, is the kind of thing that will save thousands of lives.

I personally hope I am wrong about this, and the Peak Oil crisis, and the novel influenzae and other diseases, and the lesser problems we will have to deal with if I'm "right". I'm not too upset about not getting my Jet Pack on New Year's Day of 2000, and I could easily wait another 30 years if I had to. And, heck, Alpha Centauri holds no romantic facination for me, either. But the idea that Humanity may be taking a copious. planet-wide dump on its own decendants really does bug the hell out of me.

The next century could be a time of remarkable progress, or soul-shaking destruction. And probably both.

--p!
Lord, I was born a Ramblin' Man ... (Richard Feynman, 1952)

[XemaSab]

15. Don't be so optimistic about the west

Here in California, we've been getting a storm a week. It rained last weekend in Redding!!!!! (For those of you not in the know, "summer" in California is when it stops raining, "winter" is when it starts raining. Redding is known for having a hot, arid climate in the summer.)

The ice age climate in California and the rest of the West saw a huge amount of precipitation, resulting in glaciation of the Sierras, and formation of huge lakes in both the Central Valley and the Great Basin. Water in California is a very delicate balance between storing water for farmers to use in the summer and controlling flooding in the winter. (Hydroelectric power and fish are the two other sabots in the loom of the water system.) This year we've had a huge amount of snow and other precipitation, and all the reservoirs are filled to capacity. There's a point beyond which maintaining the integrity of the dam is more critical than preventing flooding.

In summary, if there is a slight shift towards more water in the state (or less, which could happen too), we're totally hosed and we won't know what to do with ourselves.

[Name removed]

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