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A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras -- and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 -- years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City. Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions." Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases -- all of which have a direct impact on food supplies. "The world's food-producing system," warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA's Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, "is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago." Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines. Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
"The Cooling World": From Newsweek, April 28, 1975. ©1975 Newsweek Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
From the same experts now predicting global warming...
Well that's just too bad. Guess wheat futures might be an interesting buy in 10 year then.
Yep. I'm just old enough to remember when "global cooling" was the enviro-scare of the day. Just like now, it was attributed to human factors: we were pouring so much crap into the atmosphere, see, it was raising the Earth's albedo and causing it to reflect more sunlight. Clearly government intervention was called for.
Fool me twice, shame on me... but what does it say when somebody gets fooled hundreds of times and comes back for more?
WE"RE DOOOOOOOOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Read "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven. It's a riot.
bump
We're gonna fry!
We're gonna freeze!
So many mutually exclusive crises, so little time left.
Writer JG Ballard has a number "doom and gloom" stories out there, I think written before wacko environmentalism spang up: The Drowned World, The Wind From Nowhere, etc. They'd make good fodder for the doomsday crowd.
I think it was Issac Asimov who wrote that mankind will deal with, solve and survive whatever the future may throw at us.
Ok, now we've got all those out of the way.
It's getting colder. Be worried, be VERY worried.
It's getting warmer. Be worried, be VERY worried.
It's staying the same. Be worried, be VERY worried.
Brought to you by TIME magazine!
Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age
18:00 30 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Fred Pearce
The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.
The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.
The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
What do you think about these dramatic findings?
Discuss this story >> Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, whose group carried out the analysis, says he is not yet sure if the change is temporary or signals a long-term trend. "We don’t want to say the circulation will shut down," he told New Scientist. "But we are nervous about our findings. They have come as quite a surprise."
No one-off
The North Atlantic is dominated by the Gulf Stream – currents that bring warm water north from the tropics. At around 40° north – the latitude of Portugal and New York – the current divides. Some water heads southwards in a surface current known as the subtropical gyre, while the rest continues north, leading to warming winds that raise European temperatures by 5°C to 10°C.
But when Bryden’s team measured north-south heat flow last year, using a set of instruments strung across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, they found that the division of the waters appeared to have changed since previous surveys in 1957, 1981 and 1992. From the amount of water in the subtropical gyre and the flow southwards at depth, they calculate that the quantity of warm water flowing north had fallen by around 30%.
When Bryden added previously unanalysed data – collected in the same region by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – he found a similar pattern. This suggests that his 2004 measurements are not a one-off, and that most of the slow-down happened between 1992 and 1998.
The changes are too big to be explained by chance, co-author Stuart Cunningham told New Scientist from a research ship off the Canary Islands, where he is collecting more data. "We think the findings are robust."
Hot and cold
But Richard Wood, chief oceanographer at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate research in Exeter, says the Southampton team's findings leave a lot unexplained. The changes are so big they should have cut oceanic heating of Europe by about one-fifth – enough to cool the British Isles by 1°C and Scandinavia by 2°C. "We haven’t seen it yet," he points out.
Though unseasonably cold weather last month briefly blanketed parts of the UK in snow, average European temperatures have been rising, Wood says. Measurements of surface temperatures in the North Atlantic indicate a strong warming trend during the 1990s, which seems now to have halted.
Bryden speculates that the warming may have been part of a global temperature increase brought about by man-made greenhouse warming, and that this is now being counteracted by a decrease in the northward flow of warm water.
After warming Europe, this flow comes to a halt in the waters off Greenland, sinks to the ocean floor and returns south. The water arriving from the south is already more saline and so more dense than Arctic seas, and is made more so as ice forms.
Predicted shutdown
But Bryden’s study has revealed that while one area of sinking water, on the Canadian side of Greenland, still seems to be functioning as normal, a second area on the European side has partially shut down and is sending only half as much deep water south as before. The two southward flows can be distinguished because they travel at different depths.
Nobody is clear on what has gone wrong. Suggestions for blame include the melting of sea ice or increased flow from Siberian rivers into the Arctic. Both would load fresh water into the surface ocean, making it less dense and so preventing it from sinking, which in turn would slow the flow of tropical water from the south. And either could be triggered by man-made climate change. Some climate models predict that global warming could lead to such a shutdown later this century.
The last shutdown, which prompted a temperature drop of 5°C to 10°C in western Europe, was probably at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. There may also have been a slowing of Atlantic circulation during the Little Ice Age, which lasted sporadically from 1300 to about 1850 and created temperatures low enough to freeze the River Thames in London.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 438, p 655).
The earth is running out of food and everybody's going to starve...no wait, there's TOO MUCH food and we are all getting obese!
The earth is running out of fuel and we are all going to be riding bicycles...no wait, I am still stuck in bumper to bumper traffic getting to work each day and everybody's still buying SUVs!
All the jobs have gone overseas and there is nobody in America who is still working...no wait, unemployment is still under 5% and I have to wait in long lines at the supermarket because they are understaffed and can't hire people fast enough.
Nobody in America has any discretionary income, it's the worst economy ever and it's all George Bush's fault...no wait, I can't find a parking space at the mall because everybody's shopping and I can't get a table at Outback on a Friday night without waiting two hours.
Nobody in America can get health care because big bad George Bush won't socialize it...no wait, my son had to go to the emergency room and had to wait four hours because there were about 100 welfare recipients and illegal immigrants with headaches that were there because they know they have to be waited on and don't have to pay a dime. Meanwhile, my aunt can't get an operation for five more weeks because all these people are coming down from Canada - where they have socialized health care - because they'd have to wait five years up there.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/04/04/060404150343.0ufe6r2g.html
Experts believe the latest record hurricane season was part of a cycle where periods of relative calm alternate with decades of intense activity. Some scientists also believe global warming plays a crucial role by further increasing the temperature of warm ocean waters that provide fuel to the hurricanes. But the Colorado State University study played down the theory. "No credible observational evidence is available or likely will be available in the next few decades which will directly associate global surface temperature change to changes in global frequency and intensity," it said.
Rights, farms, environment ping.
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updated List of Ping lists vol.III(Get Your Fresh Hot Pings Here!)
Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No
From the latter:
"The state of the science at the time (say, the mid 1970's), based on reading the papers is, in summary: "...we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate..." (which is taken directly from NAS, 1975). In a bit more detail, people were aware of various forcing mechanisms - the ice age cycle; CO2 warming; aerosol cooling - but didn't know which would be dominant in the near future. By the end of the 1970's, though, it had become clear that CO2 warming would probably be dominant; that conclusion has subsequently strengthened."
I bolded the part about the NAS report, because that's the same report that was mentioned in the Newsweek article.
Ping to #1
So the question is; should I have my Crown Royal at room temperature or on the rocks? If the heat or the cold don't kill me, the Crown will make the choice of what to believe easier at least. Another Crown will kill the pain from the quivering fear that something may kill me. But I bet it isn't the weather.