From the American Thinker
The Coming Ice Age
By David Deming
Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously. On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.
For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth’s climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.
We don’t know what causes ice ages to begin or end. In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change. This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory. But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.
The climate of the ice ages is documented in the ice layers of Greenland and Antarctica. We have cored these layers, extracted them, and studied them in the laboratory. Not only were ice ages colder than today, but the climates were considerably more variable. Compared to the norm of the last million years, our climate is remarkably warm, stable and benign. During the last ice age in Greenland abrupt climatic swings of 30 °F were common. Since the ice age ended, variations of 3 °F are uncommon.
For thousands of years, people have learned from experience that cold temperatures are detrimental for human welfare and warm temperatures are beneficial. From about 1300 to 1800 AD, the climate cooled slightly during a period known as the Little Ice Age. In Greenland, the temperature fell by about 4 °F. Although trivial, compared to an ice age cooling of 50 °F, this was nevertheless sufficient to wipe out the Viking colony there.
In northern Europe, the Little Ice Age kicked off with the Great Famine of 1315. Crops failed due to cold temperatures and incessant rain. Desperate and starving, parents ate their children, and people dug up corpses from graves for food. In jails, inmates instantly set upon new prisoners and ate them alive.
The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death, the greatest disaster ever to hit the human race. One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed. Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate. Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.
The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth’s climate for the last million years. But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes. This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.
Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models. But our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists. By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration’s announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.
Earth’s climate is controlled by the Sun. In comparison, every other factor is trivial. The coldest part of the Little Ice Age during the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the nearly complete absence of sunspots. And the Sun now appears to be entering a new period of quiescence. August of 2008 was the first month since the year 1913 that no sunspots were observed. As I write, the sun remains quiet. We are in a cooling trend. The areal extent of global sea ice is above the twenty-year mean.
We have heard much of the dangers of global warming due to carbon dioxide. But the potential danger of any potential anthropogenic warming is trivial compared to the risk of entering a new ice age. Public policy decisions should be based on a realistic appraisal that takes both climate scenarios into consideration.
(h/t to Ron de Haan)
David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.
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Jack Green wrote: “We’re overdue and any explanation as to how these “ages” can end so abruptly?”
Abruptly in Geologic terms can be in the range of a thousand years or more. Here is one resource that addresses what did (or didn’t ) cause the end of the last ice age.
http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14288.html
“We don’t know what causes ice ages to begin or end. In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change. This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory. But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.”
Well, not quite. This study by Winograd, et al. on 21 samples in a single vein of calcite provides scant evidence to refute the dozens of deepsea sediment cores that consistently and independently show periodicities in chemical and microfossil abundance timeseries (several species) that match the Milankovich cycles. Orbital parameters are the primary forcing for glacial-interglacial oscillation, but other factors certainly contribute.
Modern Man has probably never experienced the change from interglacial to to glacial conditions; certainly not at high latitudes. Homo Erectus went through a couple and migrated all the way to China but probably had a very hairy body.
We aren’t a very cold-adapted species. It will be “interesting” when it happens but I wouldn’t want to be around when it does.
Regarding Plimer’s book the follwing web site is interesting: http://awesternheart.blogspot.com/2009/05/heavenearth-on-fire.html
I guess we’ll just have to wait awhile.
Not knowing what precipitates ice ages is an unsatisfactory situation. Solar variation seems a natural candidate. I start from the proposition that we live in unusually good times. That civilization has been established and continues whereas before no sufficiently long period of favorable climate occurred to foster it. You would expect scientists of our age to be pointing out that the sun is remarkable in its stability. That it could not be the cause of significant climate change.
This reminds me of the classic Operations Research problem where returning B17s were examined and their battle damage assessed. The critical parts of the aircraft were those that were never found to have failed. We can’t armor parts of the sun to protect ourselves from climate change. We can store grain and otherwise build up surpluses to give our society some chance to adapt.
It is an interesting time that we live in. If we are fortunate what we learn today may be of great use to some distant generation.
Dave ,
Thanks for the reference – I will try to get a copy . As for Amazon , I tried to get Plimer’s book yesterday , via proxy as I don’t do internet transactions , and was informed that it was unavailable .
Re my last, you might also be interested in the following newspaper review in Oz.
http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=page&id=14&chapter=0&zenid=0319813286cff4077f7a534603db643b
Anthony,
You like doing polls, here’s one I would like to see on your site. A debate on the topic would be interesting, as well.
With mankinds current state of technology, could humanbeings fend off the next big iceage?
rbateman (09:10:21) :
Ron de Haan (08:56:11) :
“Yes, in fact, Putin & Gasprom are banking on it.
The fact that the known universe is expanding and the Sun is ageing may have a cycle that keeps the Earth moving along an ever increasing occurence and depth of Ice Ages.”
Yes, but if you take a look at the ice age map there won’t be any Russia.
They always will be an unreliable supplier.
OT: As of today, the temperature at the North Pole is above the melting point of sea ice (got up to -0.6C over the past day).
Rhys Jaggar (09:16:30) :
Sure, tropical and subtropical areas remain inhabitable during glaciation, but the climate becomes somewhat cooler and much drier. Most of Africa turns into desert or dry steppe during glaciation and so does much of the Caribbean and South America, including large parts of the Amazon basin, so there is really no doubt that a glacial Earth could only support a fraction of the present human population, despite the fact that vast areas of continental shelf is exposed by the low sea-level.
By the way the map at the top is of the second-to-last glaciation about 200,000 years ago. Ice in Russia and Siberia covered much smaller areas during the last glaciation.
ward (08:05:54) : This para has a rather Gorian quality to it. Does not seem credible.
On their way out west, a party of normal relatively modern U.S. citizens got stuck in the snow at what is now Donner Pass. It created quite a stir when they were rescued and discovered to have survived by eating each other…
http://www.donnerpartydiary.com/
The survivors went on to California and some became relatively famous and prosperous. (There is even a school named for one of them, Reed School in San Jose, since they became a prominent family in that area…)
Cold, snow, and lack of food, starvation? It always comes with stories of eating anything that’s dead (and sometimes those that are not dead yet…)
We have several hundred million years of evolution behind us to be an omnivore that SURVIVES. We have a couple of thousand years of civilization and only a few hundred years that really demonized behaviours like murder, rape, and cannibalism. (Look at what the Roman Empire leaders did… and need I mention Idi Amin?) We aren’t that long “out of the bush”, and when stressed, it shows…
BTW, we forget how hard our ancestors had it and how grounded in reality they were. No contraception. Variable crops. Solution: At the end of the harvest season the parents would count up the food stocks. They would figure out just exactly how many people could survive the winter on that food. If that meant they were one kid over the survival line, one kid was led to the forest and left to die (or worse). I’m sure they didn’t like doing it, but they also knew that if they did not do it: 2 or 4 would die of starvation after the food ran out before the next harvest was ripe.
I’m not going to provide links to the documented history of the practice. I find it too disturbing personally. But don’t ever think we are not capable of it. I’m certain that if put in the same circumstances I could decide who was essential to keep alive and who was, literally, lunch. Some languages even have a specific word for the practice of thinning out the offspring at the start of winter… that only happens after a practice has been around for a very long time.
Minor point: The British used to bowl with the skulls of Danes. Think about it… We are much more squeamish than folks of old.
Jack Green (08:14:32) : any explanation as to how these “ages” can end so abruptly?
There are some interesting ideas. One has to do with rock falls from space. These have a distribution that is well known with Really Big Ones being less common that medium and much less common than small. So we had what looks like a large rock fall into the North American ice sheet at the end of the last glacial. It has a tendency to cause an abrupt change when a few thousand megatons of TNT worth of energy gets deposited into the ice sheet in a few seconds…
Another has to do with the methane clathrate on the ocean bottom. It’s only stable under pressure and is prone to explosive decomposition. So as the ice piles up on the continents the oceans drop. At some point the clathrate destabilizes (which lowers the weight of water over it by filling it with bubbles leading to more destabilization). The notion is that a hugh bolus of methane gets released into the air at the point where the ocean drops too low. This methane then causes a warming spike. Basically, it’s an ocean level / clathrate oscillator with 100,000 year periodicities.
Then there is the plant oscillator theory. Ice age buries plants under ice. Cold slows photosynthesis and ocean formation of carbonates. Eventually the natural volcanism leads to added CO2 leading to warming. As glaciers retreat, buried plants release CO2 from decay. Eventually plants start to flourish again. Eventually the planet is warm and the plants have a Great Spike of growth – sucking the CO2 down to the point where they suffer a crash from CO2 deficiency and the snow begins. Basically the theory is a CO2 / ice oscillator based on a plant timer circuit.
These things are all plausible. Which has veracity? I donno… The reality is likey to be a mix of small bits of each along with things we just don’t understand. FWIW, one of the sites I like most on the ice age issue is:
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
That makes a connection to the galactic arms and cosmic rays…
At least someone has a clue. From:
http://www.eworldvu.com/international/2009/2/4/a-cold-war-that-russia-can-win.html
The Russian report summarized its findings as follows: “The evidence from core samples suggests that the 12,000 years of warmth we call the Holocene period is over. Apparently, we’re headed into an ice age of about 100,000 years, give or take. As for CO2 levels, core samples show conclusively they follow the earth’s temperature rise, not lead it.
Austin (08:46:13) :
“In Europe there was already social turbulence prior to 1315. Many institutions were seized by the states at that time – most famously in 1307 and 1312 the Templar’s estates were seized in many nations – they were one of the largest food producers at the time. So, the 1315 famine was certainly triggered by bad weather – but there is a political and social subtext as well – nations were not as robust as they used to be due to internal chaos brought about by poor decision making”.
The cold started much earlier according to this time line:
Medieval glaciation, prior to the LIA:
* late 1100s: Sharp fall in Camp Century ice-core 18O content signals lower temperature in North Atlantic region.
* 1200: Foraminifera in deep Atlantic sediments show culmination of warming trend of preceding few centuries.
* 1200: Beginning of increased sea ice in coastal waters of Iceland.
* 1200s: Glaciers began to advance in Iceland.
* 1215-1350: Glaciers began to advance in several parts of Europe.
* 1215: Oberriederin (irrigation canal) overrun by advance of Aletsch glacier; radiocarbon dates on buried larch; canal head still covered by modern Aletsch glacier.
* 1227: Thick sea ice on the Baltic allowed a German army to march from the mainland of Estonia to the islands of Muhu and Saaremaa and to capture those islands (Tannberg et al. 2000).
* 1261: Greenland accepted sovereignty of the King of Norway; Iceland also voted allegiance to the king in 1262.
* 1275-1300: prolonged drought caused disappearance of cliff-dwelling Anasazi culture in southwestern U.S. (Peterson and Haug 2005).
* 1280: Radiocarbon date on wood (Pinus cembro) of forest buried by advance of Grindelwald glacier; forest does not again grow on site today.
* 1300s: Decline of vineyards in Germany; vineyards completely disappeared in England.
* 1300-1350: Fishing replaced cereal crops as main food resource in Iceland.
* 1315: Crop failure and starvation in northern Estonia (Tannberg et al. 2000).
* mid-1300s: Old sea route from Iceland directly west to Greenland impassable due to southward expansion of sea ice; serious decline began in Greenland settlements.
* 1340-50: Western (northern) settlement in Greenland abandoned and derelict.
* 1350: Beginning of disasterous wind-blown sand drifting along northwestern coast of Denmark. Episodes of wind erosion and sand-dune migration occurred several times during the following centuries (Clemmensen and Andersen 1998).
* 1380-1460: Minimal sea-ice cover around Iceland.
* 1397: Union of Kalmar; Greenland and Iceland became colonies of Danish Kingdom.
* 1400-1700: 3‰ decline in 18O values for Inuit and Norse teeth in western Greenland implies significant climatic cooling–see Fig. 19-16.
Norse skeletal remains from graves at Hvalsey church, Greenland. 18O values from tooth enamel indicate sharply colder temperature during the Little Ice Age (Fricke et al. 1995). Photo by Preben Jensen; reproduced by permission.
* 1408-10: Last reliable account of Norsemen still living in Greenland; all had perished by end of 15th century.
* 1460: Increased sea ice in coastal waters of Iceland.
* 1460-1560: End of Medieval glaciation was followed by a century of relatively mild climate.
* 1510: German merchants visited Greenland and found Inuits living among ruins of Norse settlements.
* 1530-75: Chamonix/Mont Blanc glaciers (France) advanced, but caused no damages.
Beginning of Little Ice Age
For further data: http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/holocene.htm
To be pedantic, the Earth has been in an ice age for 100% of the last million years – and for twice that long – and is still in an ice age right now. Ice ages are defined by the presence or absence of ice at the poles, which is, on a geological timescale, an unusual state for planet Earth. The “normal” climate is several degrees warmer than today and has no polar ice.
The Milankovich cycles should be predictable. So does anyone know where we are now in those cycles and where we will be in the future?
The Famine and Freak weather of the little ice age will be just seen as proof of “Climate Change” by those who believe
It’s over now, a word from Pen Hadow
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/audiowebcast.aspx
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7897392.stm
Well, if we start seeing an ice age coming, we should concentrate our efforts in geoengineering to mitigate it.
Once I had suggested aluminizing the moon 🙂 thinking it could become a second sun in the sky.
Certainly mirrors circling could replace the decrease of TSI if that is the reason of the ice ages.
The only true climate prophecy is that an ice age will come, sooner or later. Brainpower and resources should be concentrating on how to survive.
Has anybody seen the diagrams of the multi-storey buildings for growing crops?I don’t know how practical the idea is,but it seems possible.I don’t think people would starve in rich countries,but 3rd world countries would be in for a bad time,especially if the rich countries are busy providing for their people,leaving no time for 3rd world countries.
On Winograd…
In line with some prior posts…As far as I know, the correlation between Pleistocene glaciations and permutations of the Milankovitch Cycles is very strong. However, Winograd does bring up some valid challenges…
http://water.usgs.gov/nrp/devils.html
Milankovich theory doesn’t explain the 100k year dominant vs 43k year dominant cycles over the last few million years.
Svensmark 2007 @ur momisugly http://www.scribd.com/doc/338170/svensmark-2007cosmoclimatology does some interesting work relating our solar system’s travel through the galactic spiral arms as a modulator of cosmic rays to the big picture of ice age periods. Work in progress though.
Austin (08:46:13) : In Europe there was already social turbulence prior to 1315. […] nations were not as robust as they used to be due to internal chaos brought about by poor decision making.
And you think maybe a slight decay during onset might not have led to some of these instabilities? A “sudden and abrupt” geologic change can easily spread over 100 years. I would fully expect that the years just ahead of the Really Aw Shoot times would be somewhat unstable…
BTW, one could make comments about the present decisions coming from our government being “not as robust” and “poor decision making”. In fact, I’d even assert that the Very Good Times lead to sloppy decision making since it doesn’t matter as much and you can indulge your fantasies a bit. Then Reality Bites… As they say in the stock trading biz “When the tide goes out you get to see who’s overexposed…” (meaning over leveraged to financial risk – i.e. Lehman and Bear Stearns…)
Rhys Jaggar (09:16:30) : When people say human life is not consistent with an ice age, don’t they mean ‘human life in high latitudes’?
Well, since humans were around 20,000 years ago up to their eyeballs in an ice age, I question that assertion… but:
I can’t believe that you couldn’t live in Tanzania during an ice age. Mightn’t be as hot, but it’d sure be well above freezing. Ditto India. Ditto Australia. Ditto Brazil.
Very much so. My neighbors have bought land in S. America near the equator and I’ve been invited to join them… Not only will crops be fine there, but there are some places that will improve.
Spain might be quite a temperate climate in an Ice Age. How about Egypt? Or Mexico?
Well, the Sahara Pump theory holds that the Sahara oscillates between desert and lush jungle… And in the early Roman history there was much more grain grown in N. Africa. I’d expect the major problems to be related to coping with the change rather than the total growing space.
I would guess that you lose the polar areas, but the deserts move a bit further south. So look 200 to 400 miles north, that’s what you get (IMHO!).
tty (10:46:38) : Sure, tropical and subtropical areas remain inhabitable during glaciation, but the climate becomes somewhat cooler and much drier. Most of Africa turns into desert or dry steppe during glaciation and so does much of the Caribbean and South America, including large parts of the Amazon basin,
That is the historical pattern. But we have some differences now…
so there is really no doubt that a glacial Earth could only support a fraction of the present human population, despite the fact that vast areas of continental shelf is exposed by the low sea-level.
Um, I’m willing to doubt the catastrophe is inevitable.
First off, we eat so much more meat as a planet than at any time in the past, we could all eat much more total food even if we had a 30% cut in total grain production. This is an incredibly important point:
It takes 10 pounds (or kilos) of grain to raise 1 pound (or kilo) of BEEF. Most of us eat a half pound or so of meat per day (in the modern west, at least). So that’s 5 POUNDS of grain per day. Enough to feed a person for 5 days. That means we could take an 80% cut in the grains grown for beef production and have no reduction in total food we eat if we just eat the cows and then eat the corn and soybeans they would have eaten.
The great dying will hit cows and pigs; not people in the western world. (Folks already on subsistence grain diets are another issue…)
Further, if the onset is at all “slow” in human terms (“rapid beyond belief” in geologic terms) we can easily change or agronomy systems to adapt. In a 5 to 10 year period we could convert from corn and soybeans to millet and sorghum (both drought tolerant – and millet can go directly into any corn bread recipe, I have it frequently.) Barley grows where it’s too cold for wheat. You get the idea. We can also build greenhouses and water transport / desalinization if we have 10 to 20 year time spans. It’s all about the rate…
So while I strongly believe in being prepared, I also strongly believe that we can easily survive another ice age cold epoch without a population catastrophe (whether our political systems will let our technology fix things is another question…)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Jim B in Canda (10:15:41) :With mankinds current state of technology, could humanbeings fend off the next big iceage?
An interesting question… I think we could.
One of the interesting correlations is that ice ages began when the isthmus of Panama closed. The theory is that we could undo ice ages by blasting the channel back open (thus changing world ocean currents) with atomic explosives / excavation.
While Panama would not like it 8-0 and it does take a lot more looking at to see if it really would function as expected; the needed excavation is not beyond our means…
IFF the greenhouse gas theory has any truth in it, we could pump out “super greenhouse gasses” pretty easy in massive quantities. Doubt it would work, but easy to test in an ice age catastrophe…
Then we could also just put several dozen nuclear reactors in key parts of the ice sheet using the ice for cooling. Strategically placed these could significantly slow the ice. It’s amazing what a few terrawatts can do to melt ice…
I’d be interested in the idea of methane clathrate destabilization (via conventional explosives or stronger stuff 😉 if it could be shown to lead to “greenhouse warming”…
And finally, it is possible to put up thin mirrors in space and modulate the insolation. It would take 50 to 100 years to get this all built and working, but possible. Personally, I think there are simpler things that could be done with the resources, but it’s an option…
But frankly, I think it would be a lot easier to just adapt to ice ages. Melt some ice with nukes, pipe it to the edge of the Sahara and grow grains. Move some folks from N. Canada and north slope Alaska down to Montana and Kansas and let them teach the locals how to live. Open my bar on a beach in Brazil 😉 Adaptation CAN be a good thing!
Also realize that ice ages START fast (in geologic terms) but the ice proceeds to grow more or less linearly (with wobbles) for 100,000 years. So put a marker at the edge of Greenland (the present remaining ice sheet from the last glaciation…) and draw a line to where the ice extent reached in the LAST ice age. (That would be, oh, New York City?). Now measure the distance and divide it by 100,000. That’s the average rate of ice advance per year.
Last time I did this exercise, it was 800 FEET per year. If you walk 801 feet south each year, you outrun the ice age… (call it 250 meters…)
And that is probably the most important point to make.
We all like to think we have a clue about how things change. But we all live in a world far different from geologic realities… You must think Really Large and REALLY REALLY SLOW to grasp the geologic realities.
The fact is we could easily have already entered the next ice age. It could easily have begun during the LIA, or even a bit before. We will find out in a few thousand more years, maybe… “Abrupt onset” is only abrupt in geologic terms. 1000 years, maybe a few hundred. And that is the “onset”. It still takes 100,000 years to reach the bottom.
So when you look at those ice extent pictures, realize that’s after that 100,000 years; not at the “onset”. Lets just say I’m not worried about the ice sheet getting even 100 miles closer during my lifetime even if we are already in an ice age that began in the LIA. It might get 1 mile closer… maybe… but that just doesn’t get me worked up much.
A rock from space is a far far more likely problem and a big volcano is vastly faster onset of the Aw Shoot. They are what we ought to be worried about and preparing for. And a beach bar in Brazil gets me much more excited 😉
Yukon Peat (09:30:00) :
Abruptly in Geologic terms can be in the range of a thousand years or more.
Don’t indulge yourself, think in the siberian mammuts frozen in minutes….found with fresh food in their stomachs.
Read above Ron de Haan (11:16:53) :
It is interesting to compare this graphic of ’65 million years of climate’:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
to Svensmark’s graph on p1.22 of our travel through the Sagittarious-Carina spiral arm.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/338170/svensmark-2007cosmoclimatology
Note the abrupt change ~35 million years ago in both.
See Nicola Scafetta’s EPA presentation: Climate Change and Its Causes: A Discussion about Some Key Issues Video and Slides, especially slide 66 where he predicts global cooling until 2030-40.