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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Ron de Haan (11:16:53) : You forgot Pied Piper’s Hamelin, where rats running away from cold in 1284, invaded Hameling. (as invaded towns back then)
ALMOST NOBODY HAS REALIZED THAT THIS EVENT HAS REPEATED LAST YEAR
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1448535.php
From Pen Hadow: “Without pre-empting any scientific results, my general impression is that the sea ice seems to be thinner than expected. And the fact that it has been predominantly first-year ice means that it’s more likely to totally melt this year.”
Any comments?
Noelene (11:51:54) : 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.
It is entirely practical. Greenhouse systems are very common today. Odds are that your lettuce and specialty greens in your salad came from a hydroponic greenhouse. (Its easier to deliver clean bug free salad greens of superior quality… for everything but “head lettuce” more or less.) Tomatoes for home use are widely grown in greenhouses. That’s why you get tomatoes 365 days a year in perfect condition… Zukes and cukes too. Even without an ice age, the stability of production and the quality of the product is pushing vegetables in that direction.
NASA made an interesting mini-greenhouse for space use – even developed special “very short” versions of things like wheat so it could be grown in several “layers” per meter of height.
As an odd “existence proof”: Grow Houses are now the rage in California Marijuana culture. Hydroponic or potted soil. 100% artificial lighting. The whole structure is entirely insulated from light and heat (to prevent DEA spotting it by the heat signature) if possible. Yet they grow massive crops. All it takes is electricity and a little dirt. (And even the dirt is optional if you go with hydroponics…) Some of these are hugh. Thousands of square feet. They use standard commercial greenhouse lights and materials (which gives you an idea how “ordinary” greenhouse culture is these days…)
30% of world fish consumption already comes from aquaculture. These can be built in any shape and height (though some are cheaper than others).
Most of the pigs products you eat came from “pig farms” that are actually more like pig cities. Large ‘grow out’ operations with pig “barns” that are environmentally controlled and computer driven. Same thing for chickens. The only reason they are single story instead of multi story is because land is cheap out there and buildings cost a bit more to build “up”. It is not a technical limit at all.
see my “no shortage of stuff” link in the above posting and scroll down to the section on food and greenhouses.
As per the energy needed to run all those grow lights:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
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.
And thus has it always been …
IMHO, that’s the only real problem. How to help our brothers and sisters trapped in bad systems in poor places. They have all the resources they need, it’s just a mater of giving them the understanding and the liberty to use them… tossing money to their corrupt governments is not helpful.
Ray (12:51:08) :
Just take your bathsuit and go up there!
I would like to know if Vukcevik or another mathematician has made any analysis with Vostok data curves. It would be really interesting.
Leon Brozyna (08:36:17) :
Well, whatever we do, don’t send Mr. Gore on any extended speaking tours in Canada or Northern Europe — it’ll take us 100,000 years to recover.
Too late I am afraid! He was in Tromsø (Northern Norway) a couple of weeks ago. Pictured below with the Norwegian foreign minister.
http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/klimatrusselen/artikkel.php?artid=542714
As always, our newspapers constantly repeat that “the ice melting in the Arctic is faster than anticipated”
See Easterbrook’s 2001 30 year Global cooling projection
Adolfo Giurfa (12:54:31) :
Actually, we planned to go check out the sand dunes in Oregon this summer, but now that you mention it, I think we will change our plans and go see the dunes in the Artic… I heard it will be balmy up there this summer, from the Catlin group.
“Milankovich theory doesn’t explain the 100k year dominant vs 43k year dominant cycles over the last few million years.”
Most of the power in spectral analyses of time series that are long enough is found at 100kyr. Remember to consider harmonics and interactions of the 41kyr and 23kyr cycles as well as the effects of all the ice up on the continents having to melt to reduce the albedo when coming out of an ice age and conversely having to be evaporated out of the oceans and precipitated on land when going into an ice age. That’s a lot of “inertia” to overcome and would tend to regularize the beating of the cycles.
So, while not necessarily “explaining” the dominant periodicity, Milankovich theory certainly supports it.
Leon Brozyna (08:36:17) :
“Well, whatever we do, don’t send Mr. Gore on any extended speaking tours in Canada or Northern Europe — it’ll take us 100,000 years to recover.”
I like my version better: “… it’ll take us 100,000 years to ‘dig him out’.” LOL
Newsflash: The Catlin team finds “more evidence of global thaw”: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE54C6GS20090513
Actually one of the things that eventually saved Europe from cycles of starvation was the introduction of the potato from the New World. Prior to that wheat was the main staple. It was subject to bad weather, fires and being trampled during wars. The potato being a root plant could survive all of that. While most Europe, like Germany embraced the potato, the French distained it. Louis XVI ate a potato to try to encourage the populace to start eating them. It failed. The next drought cycle, it was off with their heads.
I’m surprised you let him get away with blaming meteorologists rather than climatologists for this one. Don’t they get blamed for enough 😀
Fun article.
Milnkovitch was right:-
Onset of Ice Ages:-
Ice Ages are cyclical in the Earth’s recent (last 30m years) past.
Original cause:-
Continental Drift of Antartica over the south pole 40m years ago. Ice pack at first formed over mountainous regions. This caused a negative temperature feedback due to the increased albedo, eventually the entire continent was covered with ice. This permanently reduced the surface temperature of the earth.
Cyclical Ice Ages – Why?
Once the surface temperature is lowered, the variability of the Earth’s orbit around the sun which causes a variation in the balance of solar radiation NH/SH summer/winter leads to summers cold enough to allow snow to remain unmelted and to accumulate.
Prior to the Antarctic moving over the South Pole, this would not happen as the earth’s surface would have been too warm.
The 3 parameters and periodicity is as follows:-
Orbital eccentricity varies between 0 (a perfect circle, sum always 93m miles away) and 0.1 ( min 88m miles max 98m miles) , period 100,000 years.
Axial tilt varies between 22.5 and 24.5 degrees , period 41,000 years.
Precession of the equinox , period 26,000 years. This parameter determines which month the summer solstice occurs, and impacts on the first 2 variables.
To start an Ice Age, the above parameters cause a lowering of solar radiation in the NH in summer. Snow does not melt from the previous winter and a negetive temperature feedback driven by increased albedo sets in. The Ice marches south. Typically all of Canada, the Northern part of USA all of Scandinavia and most of Northern Europe have permanent Ice sheets. Obviously, Greenland and Antartica remain Ice covered.
To end an Ice, the opposite to the above. i.e. increased solar radiation at the in NH summer.
As Ice ages typically last 10 times longer then the inter-glacials, it seems clear that Ice Ages are easier to start then to end.
If the conditons are right, a run of cold winters caused by something like a Maunder minimum solar event could be enough to tip the climate into an Ice Age. This might be less than 100 years from interglacial to Ice Age, though of course this is hard to prove.
Current orbital parameters would sustain an Ice Age, all that is needed is a Maunder minimum to push the climate over.
Something else to ponder, at the moment the Sun has entered a long period of quiet. This is not a Maunder minimum, yet.
At least we know it will be the *warmest* ice age ever 😉
Does anyone know what global climate was like during the last ice age? Presumably the tropical regions also cooled. But by how much?
“Does anyone know what global climate was like during the last ice age? Presumably the tropical regions also cooled. But by how much?”
Derek Kelly in an opinion piece from Asia Times Online, wrote a bit about that. It stuck with me. Excerpt:
“The Earth has also been immensely colder, the CO2 much less plentiful, and the sea levels much lower than today. Fifteen thousand years ago, the sea level was at least 90 meters lower than it is today. The land looked bare because it was too cold for beech and oak trees to grow. There were a few fir trees here and there. No grass grew, however, just shrubs, bushes and moss grass. In the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia there was still tundra. The animals were different from today too. Back then there were woolly mammoth, woolly rhinos, cave bears (the former three now extinct), bison, wolves, horses, and herds of reindeer like modern-day reindeer.”
Full article here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GB25Aa02.html
“ohn Edmondson (14:00:45) :
Milnkovitch was right:-
Onset of Ice Ages:-
Ice Ages are cyclical in the Earth’s recent (last 30m years) past.
Original cause:-
Continental Drift of Antartica over the south pole 40m years ago. Ice pack at first formed over mountainous regions. This caused a negative temperature feedback due to the increased albedo, eventually the entire continent was covered with ice. This permanently reduced the surface temperature of the earth…..”
Remember when quoting the Milnkovitch cycles and the cause of the ice age is that the total amount of energy reaching earth does not change, just its distribution. The drop in summer heating in the northern hemisphere even at the large dip 115,000 years ago was not enough to keep the snow from melting except in the far north of Canada. It would have lowered the snow line in the mountains but no year round snow on the plains. Models have been run that support the cycles causing ice-age but these are the same types of models a lot of us all decry when applied to global warming. I have not looked at the models so I will not say they are wrong, but I am skeptical after looking at the orbital cycles in some detail.
http://gallery.me.com/wally#100002/60%20degree%20summer%20winter&bgcolor=black Shows the solar flux at 60° North for summer and winter and an average value over the last 20,000 years or so with the points at -115,000 years added for reference. Current summer values are more or less constant for the next several thousand years, Winter values are slowly declining and the average value is slowly declining at 60°N.
From the PRE-PLEISTOCENE GLACIATION plot, I’d say we are still in a cold period and it might NATURALLY get warmer in the far future http://www.acer-acre.org/ClimateChangeCD/sec4/421a.htm . But most likely, on a short time scale, it will also get colder before it gets warmer.
Chris Kaiser (12:15:31) :
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.
While I do like what I have seen of the work, I admit that I think the coorolation betwen in arm’s and out is backward. I think we would be more likely to have fewer GCR’s while in an arm as we would have not only our heliosphere but other solar systems to protect us from GCR’s (most of the higher energy ones coming from closer to the center of the galaxy). Then when we move out of the arm into more open space there is less between us and the galactic bulge and we would recieve more GCR’s. Now as for why this interglacial has been longer, if we take it my way, would be that this trip trough an arm has been longer than many others because we moved out of the Persius arm into the Orion Spur. When we move out of that we will be in open space again and here come the glaciers. If the science is sound that is.
Adolfo Giurfa (12:24:19) : Don’t indulge yourself, think in the siberian mammuts frozen in minutes….found with fresh food in their stomachs.
The long term trend is very very slow. There can still be short term excursions that don’t persist. The ice cap might surge forward 10 miles in one year, yet it will only average 800 feet a year…
That said, I have no idea what kind of process can freeze a mammoth solid in short enough time to stop digestion. It would be hard to do with commercial freezers. Something very unusual would be required, certainly not normal geologic time scale processes. Unfortunately, rocks from space make explosive heat… and a “nuclear winter” from volcanos or space rocks does not have ‘minutes’ scale onset. ’tis a mystery.
Chris Kaiser (12:32:24) :
It is interesting to compare this graphic of ‘65 million years of climate’:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
As I read that graphic it says we are 24 C warmer 50 million years ago? But that sounds extreme… Or is that some kind of dTemp /dt that misleads as to the actual T? I don’t think I’m getting it straight…
I found the “Antarctic Glaciation / Thawing / Reglaciation” to be a fun thought!
Kind of makes it seem silly to worry about a “tipping point” from ice melt when we’ve already had it gone, then frozen, then a melt, and a refreeze…
Better save a copy of the graphic quick before the AGW Langoliers “fix” it…
“For thousands of years, people have learned from experience that cold temperatures are detrimental for human welfare and warm temperatures are beneficial”
Strange, then, that countries on the equator are on average much poorer than countries at temperate latitudes.
“Earth’s climate is controlled by the Sun. In comparison, every other factor is trivial.”
The fact that an Earth without an atmosphere would be uninhabitable is not trivial.
“Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age”
Utter, utter, utter nonsense. This is an insane claim, which would require massive feedbacks in the climate system that only act in one direction. It is pure nonsense.
I remember reading an article in wikipedia about a scientist who blamed the black death as a reason for the little ice age ie black death meant fewer people which meant less carbon dioxide…
This excellent article is by the same Dr. David Deming:
That statement, which advocates lying about established facts in order to promote an agenda, is typical of what passes for science on the CO2=AGW side. No one who makes a statement that “we” have to get rid of the MWP is being honest. Now, it’s all about the money, and who gets it.
That quote reminds me of what Dr. Stephen Schneider stated to Discover magazine:
Was Schneider censured for advocating lying to advance the AGW=CO2 hypothesis? No; the pro-AGW side appears to lack any ethics, from top to bottom. IMHO, of course.
Interesting temperature chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
Though I think the last few dozen years data are a bit overstated to the warm side, it does show the LIA and the preceding climate optimum. As you go back in time, the time scale compresses, but you do get an interesting idea what the normal temperature ranges can be… including 8C higher than now
😉
The glacial periods in the ice ages show up nicely…