Friday Funny (well maybe not so funny) – XKCD takes on the real climate threat

The next period of glaciation will start with just one snow flake, and it could very easily last for 90,000 years. Perhaps historians thousands of years in the future will call the next glaciation period, the Gore Ice Age – if they have a sense of humour, that is.

Probably off by a factor of four.
More like 3000 metres deep of ice sheets.

It was all Bush’s fault.

We’re buried like that now – but it ain’t under ice. You might say we’re inturd. 😉

Wait – this is a bit hard to believe. Where does all of that water come from?

thelastdemocrat says (June 14, 2013 at 6:44 pm): “Wait – this is a bit hard to believe. Where does all of that water come from?”
It’s hiding in the deep ocean! 🙂

I don’t think there is any dispute that we are at the end of the Holocene based on earth’s current obliquity (Milankovitch theory) or geologic past interglacial durations (earth history). It could also be argued that obliquity during the LIA might have been nearly at the point also, but maybe other factors may have prevented its end (cosmic rays not being favorable or other factors?) So, I am wondering if this might be the point of regime change, with the sun going quiet and the ocean cycles going negative. Any brave souls out there that has a tea leaf read on it or, even better, reasons?

Look, this problem of science is pretty simple to figure out.
It’s all about balls.
Let me explain…
Back in the ’70s, our balls were taken away from us in the name of feminism. We were still playing with other balls, though, so we didn’t notice.
Meanwhile, others were growing some. And these were not nice people.
I could go on…

More funny at ClimateCentral.org
But before you go there imagine what is there for a minute.
It is so predictable.

@JM VanWinkle
It appears that we are halfway down to the cooler part of the earth’s tilt at 23.4 degrees. We are sliding to the 22.1 degree part of the cycle and will hit this in about 10,000 years. We were at the warmest part of this cycle about 10,000 years ago when the Holocene Epoch started. So, glaciation could start at any time, really.
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/tilt_graph.html
I began to speculate a short time ago, that the areas we should be most concerned about regarding temperatures are Canada, and the northern regions of Eurasia because these are the areas that were fully “ice-sheeted” during the last glaciation period. When places in these regions start to develop snow all year around, that is the beginning. Perma-snow overlaying permafrost. It is not a pretty picture no matter how white the snow may be.

Ric Werme 4:40 pm
The Gore Ice Age!!!!!!! I almost fell out of my chair!!!!
Eugene WR Gallun

My 10yr old son asked me about global warming and whether we would be safe from sea level rise. I told him we could easily outrun the ocean, but that in 50,000 years our inland house here in Halifax Canada would probably be under two miles of ice. He was incredulous.
Crap… isn’t it my job to make the young’uns feel safe 🙂

the thelastdemocrat says:
June 14, 2013 at 6:44 pm
20,000 years ago the North Sea bottom was mostly above water and the English Channel was dry land. Today’s Fishing trawlers are constantly snagging nets on the remains of Stone Age settlements.

Jim says:
June 14, 2013 at 8:40 pm
@JM VanWinkle
———————–
A link i find better to see all the variables in the Milankovitch Theory;
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Milankovitch/milankovitch_3.php
For reasons unknown (as far as i am aware) the glaciation cycle settled into a 41,000 year period some 2 million plus years ago and then about a 800,000 years ago the period changed to about a 100,000 years…i cannot find the article i read a while ago and my present search has found only articles contaminated by CO2.
I ripped open a tea bag and a hot drink is steeping,..

Thanks for the reply Jim and Kajakuk. Those graphs and all the other graphs I have seen have time axis of thousands of years per division. Further, the theory discussions seem to focus on what starts an interglacial, not what ends one. I guess the blame for that is resting on the large variability in the glacial period duration as compared to the interglacial period. However, it would seem that since we are at the end of the Holocene that we would have what causes the interglacial end timing under a microscope as it is a massively serious issue.
I wonder if Jim’s criteria of summer snow survival will be our only clue. Perhaps cold weather crop failure from frost will also be an indicator. However, if the ice core records could be mapped to obliquity with precision or other potential triggers then perhaps we could see if there are other significant factors.
Somehow the whole climate investigation has been hijacked to focus on our current climate optimum as if it were bad. I look at all the greenery and our bountiful food and wonder how can geologic history be ignored when our cornucopia is at real risk. Thank goodness for our higher CO2.

One thing for sure. It’ll be cleansing. It. WILL. Be. No weasel words to cloud the issue. That big, cold scraper will come, and it WILL basically clean it off to bedrock, leaving an astounding terminal moraine full of all that technology wrought. Thos that survive will be packed into the tropics. Pretty sobering. What will the hubrisoids of 2313 AD say THEN?

Should be great for land prices in my area. We have end morains from the last glaciation here. All the people from Hamburg will have to flee southwards.
Woul be a great topic for a realistic Hollywood disaster movie. Remember when Toronto lost all but one high voltage line, I think in the winter of 1976?

Judging by what my Canadian friends have told me, the ice may be gone but it’s still fracking cold.

The Toronto graph seems to be wrongly marked with height. Should the ice thickness not be 2000 rather than 200 metres or it is too high in relation to the other columns.

@John Peter: Squint closer, it reads 2100 m — the ‘1’ is kinda slurred in there.

And when that ice melted it created the Great Lakes the largest freshwater system on the planet…something that wouldn’t be there without the depression from the weight of the ice and the 80-90% “fossil” water that was needed to fill it.
Also just 2000 years ago Ottawa was at the bottom of an inland sea created by the melt water.

The graphics shows funny way that threat here at this planet isn’t the rising sea level, but the rising ice cover. Much higher than the catastrophic AGW CGI stunts – as the flooding of the big cities in the Inconvenient Truth show. The threat for Earth indeed is not the Hansen’s “Venus-like GHE runaway” but the glaciation runaway.
An runaway glaciation and ice age is not an imagination, it is a real possibility, although fortunately definitely not now, but not sooner than in several thousand years due to the current axial precession phase – Earth’s perihelion phasing with winter solstice, therefore leaving oceans, mainly at the southern hemisphere, in average some 5-7 W/m^2 more insolated than how it will be in ~12000 years when the Earth’s perihelion will phase with summer solstice.
If somebody likes I can write a popular explanatory article about what and why triggers the runaway glaciation, why it possibly cannot be offsetted by the CO2 forcing and why the elevated atmospheric vater vapour content (usually being considered a warming positive feedback to the CO2 forcing by the CAGW proponents) becomes a strong positive cooling feedback in such case and expedites the whole ice age triggering process.

Jim says:
June 14, 2013 at 6:21 pm
In the last glaciation period, Canada was totally covered with an ice sheet ranging from 1 mile to 2 miles thick. Canada is 3.8 million square miles in area. I wonder how the polar bears survived…

Southeastern Alaska?

We conclude that brown bears, and perhaps other large mammals, have continuously inhabited the archipelago for at least 40,000 yr and that habitable refugia were therefore available throughout the last glaciation.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/qres.1996.0058

Blame Canada!

I have watched “Waterworld” several times, the hero is dishy, and the whole point of the plot was that there WAS dry land, and the hero and heroines were searching for it via a map. Those who have watched it know where the map was! It was a bit of fun not to be taken seriuosly. So there!
Anthea

so let me get this straight. . .climate skeptics believe that we are past the peak of the Milankovich cycle and will be headed into a new ice age sometime (anytime now?).
and
That the hockey stick curve is false because the measured temperatures are actually just slightly below the maximum from the medieval climate anomaly–and that, unless the temperatures begin to rise above those values then they aren’t concerned.
Don’t these two things conflict, just a little bit???
never mind that a recent analysis of paleo temperature data from seafloor cores, ice cores, lake sediments and other trends from all over the globe confirm that we are now warmer than we have been on this planet for the last 11,000 years.
This means that we would probably have to go back to the Eemian peak 125,000 years ago to get temperatures that are similar to those we are experiencing today.
and yet the milankovich cycles reached their maximum over 10,000 years ago and the sun’s effects have been net cooling since then. . .

@jai Mitchell. But the Met Office has just thrown the warmest in11,000 years over board.
http://www.myclimateandme.com/2013/03/12/new-analysis-suggests-the-earth-is-warming-at-a-rate-unprecedented-for-11300-years/
Q: Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?
A: Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. Other factors also contribute to smoothing the proxy temperature signals contained in many of the records we used, such as organisms burrowing through deep-sea mud, and chronological uncertainties in the proxy records that tend to smooth the signals when compositing them into a globally averaged reconstruction. We showed that no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2000-year periods and longer. Our Monte-Carlo analysis accounts for these sources of uncertainty to yield a robust (albeit smoothed) global record. Any small “upticks” or “downticks” in temperature that last less than several hundred years in our compilation of paleoclimate data are probably not robust, as stated in the paper.
In the light of this statement from the authors, we no longer consider our headline to be appropriate.

JM VanWinkle says:
June 14, 2013 at 6:59 pm
Maybe time for another big sleep? 🙂

Tom in Florida says:
June 15, 2013 at 5:58 am
“However, as the good Dr S reminds us, eccentricity will be too low for the next 50,000 years for us to fall back into a glacial period.”
I have heard that thinking before, but it is inconsistent with the geologic record that interglacials end with the next point in obliquity passing 23.5 degrees (or thereabouts), very inconsistent. It is why the interglacials are only about 10k years, never significantly longer. You can see the record yourself, it is quite clear. I like theories to be consistent with the geologic record. Still, if Dr. S is talking about what will cause the next interglacial after the Holocene ends, that is another matter as the point of interglacial beginnings is variable, based on the record. As for me, that is further into the future than is personally interesting to me. Others maybe more optimistic.
I hope that makes sense.

jai mitchell: so let me get this straight. . .climate skeptics believe that we are past the peak of the Milankovich cycle and will be headed into a new ice age sometime (anytime now?).

We undoubtedly ARE approaching the end of the current interglacial and by all indications are overdue for the next ice age. That means the climate is close to the tipping point. The consequences of an ice age commencing really would be catastrophic as the xkcd panels illustrate. We came very close to tipping into a full ice age during the LIA triggered by the Maunder minimum. It was a lucky escape. Note how quickly the world cooled and how long it took temperatures to recover. Many skeptics like myself are more concerned that the greenhouse effect from added CO2 might not be large enough to help us escape from ice age during the currently commencing solar minimum. An ice age really is catastrophic in a way that a warmer world is not. Just look at the XKCD panels.
A warmer world means longer growing seasons – less frost – faster growing crops due to CO2 fertilisation – higher average rainfall – and less extreme weather overall due to lower temperature contrasts. There is absolutely no evidence in the geologic record of any kind of tipping point in the climate on the warm side. That some GCMs predict this is merely more evidence of the failure of GCMs. In fact the evidence is that the climate is quite stable on the warm side. I’d therefore be very happy to see the world move away from the edge of the ice age precipice by warming a bit.

and [skeptics believe]
That the hockey stick curve is false because the measured temperatures are actually just slightly below the maximum from the medieval climate anomaly–and that, unless the temperatures begin to rise above those values then they aren’t concerned.
Don’t these two things conflict, just a little bit???

For a start, the hockey stick is simply wrong. The mathematics it used is completely broken. It is a scientific error so why are we even talking about it.
What you call the “medieval climate anomaly” the rest of us are happy to call the medieval warm period. By all historical accounts the climate at that time was benign and human civilisation flourished and spread. Your use of the word “anomaly” to describe this period is judgemental and suggests that the climate at that time was atypical, unnatural or abnormal. How can you possibly justify that judgement? The weather in the MWP – far from being anomalous – was fairly typical of most of the holocene. The anomalous climatic episodes are the cold periods like the LIA which have been gradually becoming more frequent and more severe. Eventually one of these will tip us over the edge into true ice age. Most of us will then die of starvation and our cities will be obliterated by miles high walls of grinding ice. That is true catastrophe.
Alarmists have to work very hard indeed to make a warmer world sound alarming. Some of their stories are frankly ridiculous. Weeds will grow faster (all plants will grow faster!). Crops may have a slightly lower protein content (because they will be vigorous, healthy, and bursting at the seams with sugars – eat meat if lack of protein worries you). Mosquitoes may spread further (conditions will be benign for all life – so spend a bit more on mosquito control – problem sorted). That they have to work this hard to find the dark lining in the silver cloud illustrates that a warmer world is not a problem. A colder world on the other hand is a very scary possibility.

PiperPaul says:
June 14, 2013 at 7:38 pm
Back in the ’70s, our balls were taken away from us in the name of feminism.
=========
The only “humor” shown on TV these days is to portray white males as stupid. If you tried this with females it would be sexist and if you did it with any other race it would be racist.
For some reason however, prejudice against white males is permitted by society and TV broadcast standards. I call it a double standard. If it is wrong to “make fun” of women, blacks, orientals and hispanics, then it is surely wrong to “make fun” of males, whites and any other groups. Otherwise, if it OK to “make fun” of white males, then surely it is equally correct to “make fun” of any group.
Email, write and phone in your complaints to the TV station, regulators and legislators whenever you see this sort of sexist and racist portrayal of any groups, including white males. You will be surprised to find that many people that consider themselves “progressive” cannot see that stereotype portrayals of white males is both sexist and racist.
Do your bit to bring up the subject at the next cocktail party you attend. You may be surprised how many people do not even see the problem. Educate them. It is the first step in growing a pair.

“However, as the good Dr S reminds us, eccentricity will be too low for the next 50,000 years for us to fall back into a glacial period.”
===============
Similar arguments were made 80 years ago to discredit Milankovitch. Until the ocean cores were sampled in the 70’s.
The problem for Sr S and climate science in general is that we do not have sufficient understanding of the problem or the mathematics to make reliable predictions. Thus for example, the 100,000 year problem in climate science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem
Spectral analysis shows that the most powerful climate response is at 100,000-year period, but the orbital forcing at this period is small.
This would appear to contradict Dr S’s assurances that small orbital forcing prevents ice ages. While that might be true in linear systems, in non-linear and chaotic systems no such limitation exists.

Tom in Florida,
Thanks for that explanation on eccentricity. Also despite CO2 hijacking climate science, some work is seeping through the Warmist Barrier. I was scouting for information and found this in my archive:
“(Boston) –Through dated geological records scientists have known for decades that variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun – subtle changes in the distance between the two – control ice ages. But, for the first 2 million years of the Northern Hemisphere Ice Age there has always been a mismatch between the timing of ice sheet changes and the Earth’s orbital parameters.
A new model of ice volume change developed by Boston University researchers Maureen Raymo and Lorraine Lisiecki proposes a reason for this discrepancy…
“Because summer insolation is controlled by precession, and summer heating controls ice sheet mass balance, it is difficult to understand why the ice volume record is dominated by the obliquity frequency,” said Dr. Raymo. “It’s not a complete mismatch, but the precession frequency we think should be strong in geological records is not.”
The new model proposes that during this time, ice volume changes occurred in both the Northern Hemisphere and Antarctica, each controlled by different amounts of local summer insolation paced by precession.
“The reason the frequency is not observable in records is because ice volume change occurred at both poles, but out of phase with each other. When ice was growing in the Northern Hemisphere, it was melting in the Southern,” said Raymo.
The team believes scientists have been operating under the assumption that Antarctica has been exceptionally stable for 3 million years and very difficult to change climatically. “We don’t tend to think of ice volume in that region as varying significantly, even on geologic time scales,” said Raymo. “However, only a modest change in Antarctic ice mass is required to “cancel” a much larger Northern ice volume signal.”
There also was a newer article from Lorraine Lisiecki on eccentricity and the 100,000 year cycle.
Best regards

Tom,
The importance of eccentricity varies from theory to theory, but most discount it. Here is what Dr. Lorraine E. Lisiecki’s dissertation says:
The 100-kyr Cycle
Virtually all models of the 100-kyr glacial cycle in the late Pleistocene rely on the argument that long time constants in the climate system favor a 100-kyr glacial cycle by decreasing the climate’s sensitivity to the more rapid variations of precession and obliquity. Theories differ in the source of the long time constant, but popular suggestions are large ice sheets and their underlying bedrock [Weertman, 1964] or the global carbon cycle [Shackleton, 2000]. A direct response to eccentricity is unlikely because it has very little net effect on annual insolation and because the 400-kyr power of eccentricity produces little response in late Pleistocene climate.
Most models differ in the extent to which eccentricity and nonlinear responses to obliquity and precession drive 100-kyr glacial cycles. One group of theories holds that 100-kyr oscillations are self-sustained, requiring no external forcing [e.g., Maasch and Saltzman, 1990; Tziperman and Gildor, 2003]. Even if variability is self-sustained, orbital forcing may still play an important role in pacing 100-kyr glacial cycles [Huybers and Wunsch, 2005]. Another group of theories posits that nonlinear responses to obliquity and/or precession result in conditions conducive to deglaciation with a period of approximately 100 kyr [e.g., Raymo, 1997; Paillard, 1998; Ruddiman, 2003]. Finally, it is possible to produce 100-kyr power in climate models simply by introducing different rates of ice sheet growth and decay [Imbrie and Imbrie, 1980]. One very different model proposes that 100-kyr cycles in orbital inclination may force late Pleistocene glacial cycles [Muller and MacDonald, 1997], but very little support exists for forcing mechanisms associated with inclination [Winckler et al., 2004].

Tom, here is a poster of a temperature poxy ice, δD (Antarctic temperature) in grey that you can download as a pdf. When I look at it, the 400k BP interglacial is about 10k years also. See what you think.
http://lorraine-lisiecki.com/lisiecki_poster_agu08.pdf

On a clear sunny day the sun’s intensity occurs at midday but the maximum temperature happens around 3 hours later. Other conditions result in a widely different time of day for the maximum temperature; sometimes during the middle of the night.
Why would the Milankovitch cycles each not have a time lag? These time lags would not be the same and could, in combination with climate response, change. A summation could generate (overall) periods that are at present about 90 ka, that oscillate wildly between an overall cycle: adding constructively and destructively where one or the other prevails. But hahaha there could even be an as yet undiscovered astronomical input that could rationalize the quantal change in period of the last couple of millions of years.

Forgot to link;
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FgaPchYinO8/UMD2PwSKlWI/AAAAAAAAADs/K3_d49i_GME/s1600/400000yearslarge.gif

The problem seems to be that when paying attention only to orbital parameters, something else directly related gets left out. At present time our northern and southern hemispheres track rather closely in temperatures yet the solar TSI varies with the year and perihelion is near the NH winter solstace, providing the SH with significantly more power than the NH. The difference is that most land is in the NH and most ocean water is in the SH. It also means that more water is available in the SH for evaporative cooling and cloud formation and it means that the surface albedo in the SH is much less, oceans being more like 0.04 and most land being 0.12 to 0.16. Of course heat flow will try to minimize temperature differences as well but it would seem we have a fairly decent balance over a significant variation of actual solar energy absorbed in the two hemispheres.
I suggest it is not a foregone conclusion that our next glaciation can’t happen for 10k to 50k years because the nature of Earth’s surface, continents, Isthmus of Panama blockage, oceans must also factor into the conditions for glaciation as well as the potential for trigger events like asteroids, giant fires, volcanic erruptions, and statistically low liklihood weather patterns and cycles.

“I’ve been trying to jazz it up recently by telling tales of Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants. However when you introduce new stuff you learn new stuff. There may not have been snow up in those passes, back then, but still it was pretty cold for elephants. Apparently some got pneumonia and died.”
They all did, from what I remember. One lasted until the following spring, but was too sick to go on the campaign. It died shortly thereafter.

Chicago looks better then than now.

Very interesting, I love xkcd. Thanks for sharing