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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Milankovitch is pretty well validated IMHO, but it takes both eccentricity and obliquity to be in phase to get the stable, lower temperature interglacial that we have enjoyed for so long. This last one has been very beneficial for mankind I’d say. The current interglacial and the one that occurred ~420kyrs are very similar (both in phase).
~225000 yrs ago Eccentricity and Obliquity were well out of phase and the result was some pretty unstable climate (essentially the eccentricity cycle was split in two with dual interglacials as a result). Really screws with FFTs. Not great times for mankind I would think.
If you average the GISP2 data and the Vostok data, and consider it to be representative of global temps, it looks like we have been entering the next ice age for the last 3500yrs roughly, with about the same rate of change (ignore the ~1200yr cycle/noise we are currently experiencing which are similar and probably share the same periodicity as the MWP, Roman WP, etc).
Looking at the longer term, millions of years, definitely a cycle there (~150million yrs), I would assume galactic due to the time scales, I’d be a little surprised that continental drift would be so cyclic.
I will admit that I am a student of climate change, (Younger-Dryas, Bond events, Dansgaard-Oeschger events, etc.), and as a bad sci-fi fan, I even like the movie the day after tomorrow. I don’t believe for a second that a movie style absolute zero wave came through and froze stuff in place. The unfortunate mammoth more likely fell down a ravine, through a hole in the ice, or was entombed in an avalanche as suggested above.
On the other side of it though, I don’t buy into the 100,000 year gradual change thing either. The blue marble is a violent place, and significant climate change can occur in well under a century. The thought of present day society experiencing an event similar to Younger-Dryas scares me a lot more that AGW.
It is really a shame that academia and others are filling our population’s heads with AGW fear mongering and garbage. My climate change studies are immensely more interesting, pondering how a mile-thick glacier melted so fast that it left a pile of outwash that is now a steep ski hill, or checking out sedimentary rocks where a glacier bowled over an ancient forest..
If you want fear about climate, go study the Volstok cores, and do a YOU ARE HERE —>.
We should consider ourselves lucky to have lived in the Modern Maximum with such a nice climate. While it might not seem like it sometimes, these ARE the good old days.
“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. ”
Well not exactly. The Black Death was a European phenomenon. One third of people died there. The rest of humanity was blissfully unaware of the problem.
It’s all wrong, Gore stated that we are like frogs in heating water just waiting to be boiled alive. Ice?, what are you people thinking? The Hansen models are showing the planet is on the tipping point of extream heat! CO2 must go, we need to limited population, stop economic growth and lie down and slow our breathing. Get real, we are all going to die from heat exhaustion!!!! Stop CO2 now!
LOL
Cap and Tax, Cap and Tax, Cap and Tax!
Free health care for all!
Free Electric Cars!
Windmills!
Solar Panels for all!
Robinhood policies, spread the wealth! Rob the Rich and give to the poor!
Rhys:
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.
Ice and extreme desert covered much of the earth during the last glacial period:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_glacial_max.html
It may be above freezing, but hardly will it support life.
Francis wrote: Milankovitch, a Serbian school teacher, proved (using logarithms!) that the small orbital changes could explain the ice ages.
Does anyone know how he calculated it? If he did it using logarithms, I figure I could do it a lot easier on my computer.
By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age.
Stuffing nonsense. We risk inducing poverty and it’s all its associated horrors. There is no danger of mankind removing all the carbon dioxide from our atmosphere.
Well, waiting in the wings there’s always Velikovsky, who proposed that the Earth was knocked sideways by a young Venus (newly-sprung from Jupiter), on her way to her present orbit, events he maintained were enshrined in ancient myths and recorded in geological catastrophes (see Worlds in Collision, Earth in Upheaval). The placid mammoths chewing their cuds were suddenly plunged into the deep freeze that Siberia became. Not very plausible, given the accepted geological record, but an interesting speculation, nonetheless.
/Mr Lynn
Pamela Gray (20:11:54) : I just wanted to tell you that, OK, the TSI it is almost invariable BUT there are a few things in between that make for changes (clouds, ozone, etc) which are AGAIN caused by our OLD SUN’s behaviour.
There are small things which are meaningful, like the blink of an eye, for example.
Several people have pointed out that we are still technically in an Ice Age (ice at the poles), in an interglacial.
Slightly more unsettling possibility – that we are in an *interstadial*.
Interstadial = shorter, warmer phase of a glaciation (not warm or long enough to qualify as a full interglacial).
Average length of an interstadial : approx 10,000 years.
Time since ice sheets last retreated (c.8300 BC to present): approx 10,000 years.
:-O
idlex (18:05:14) :
“This might be relevant/interesting:
Global land environments since the last interglacial”
idlex, thanks for the link.
Very interesting!
Worst than that:
Barbara (08:13:50) :
An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that “Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.”
http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Milankovitch-cycles#The_future
OT: “Watts Effect” urgently needed!!. Is it a spot or just a lost pixel?
Roger Sowell (21:19:48) :
“All this talk of ice ages, and the adaptations required to survive reminds me that a critical issue is the lower sea level as the glaciers form. There is an interesting graph of sea level vs time on Goddard Institute for Space Studies
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/
That link has a graph that shows sea level was 120 meters lower than today. That is roughly 400 feet for those (like me) who struggle with SI meters and such. (Warning: the giss author V. Gornitz has consumed the AGW kool-aid, but the graph is pretty).
The impact on our world trade caused by sea levels that drop that far will be immense. Existing ports will be high and dry. New seaports will be required at the water’s edge, along with roads and railroads extended out to the water’s edge.
The Straits of Malacca will be water-free, as presently they are only about 40 to 50 feet deep. Commercial shipping traffic will be re-routed accordingly.
Those precious tidepools along California’s coast will be dry, too. I for one cannot wait to see the complete hissy fits the greenies throw over that one. (note for non-USA readers, a hissy fit is a major-league temper tantrum by humans who appear to be grown-ups). We will finally be able to drill for oil west of Santa Barbara, as it will be dry land. DRY LAND folks, no more Santa Barbara beaches to worry about.
San Francisco Bay will be a dry valley, which will cause some problems for shipping.
New York City will no longer have a harbor, and Long Island will likely not be an island. Chesapeake Bay may become a valley (not sure how deep the bay actually is). Miami will become an inland city, or perhaps will just build more beachfront homes further and further east as the ocean retreats. New Orleans will no longer have to worry about hurricane surges.
These are things one never reads about, instead, the AGWers have monopolized the governmental concern with how to contend with a few feet of sea level rise. How’s about assessing the needs for a 400-foot sea level drop? And who is to say there will be only 400 foot drop this time? We could be in for a humdinger of an ice age, with 500 foot or more drop in sea level”.
The reduced sea level could compensate for the land loss due to glaciation.
Because the drop in sea levels will be a slow process we will have sufficient time to adapt.
It takes about 30 years to transform a former sea bed into land suited for agriculture
(based on experience in the Netherlands when the former Southern Sea was turned into a sweet water reservoir and than was turned into land.
The former sea floor (sea clay) has turned into rich agricultural land producing high yield harvests).
Infra structural projects can be performed relatively fast as it took us an ample 150 years to build the current infra structure with the biggest advances during the last 60 years. We would see the introduction of the so called “White” or “Cool” jobs at a scale never seen in human history to adapt our societies to the coming glaciation as we would see the biggest migration in human history as people move from the North to the South.
Anyhow, the social economic effects of such an event certainly would dwarf that of the current “Green Jobs” program of Obama.
It makes a person very humble to see that the real “change” is initiated by nature and not by man.
OT
Just for who is interested, an incredible picture of Chaitén Volcano is published at
http://www.seablogger.com/?p=14273
I am watching the developing events of this volcano since it’s unexpected eruption the second of may 2008 via the Chaitén Airport web cam looking North and the assessment reports published at several web sites.
I think this volcano is going to cause a major eruption in the near future, shooting a lot of material into the troposphere with a lot of potential “cooling” in the process, despite it’s geographic location on the Southern part of Chili.
Dome building takes place at an incredible speed, lava has risen to the rim of the dome which is very unstable.
Quakes up to magnitude 4.2 are registered between 0.5 and 12 km directly under the volcano. Smaller quakes that mark the outer boundaries of the caldera show it’s huge. The separate vents now have grown together to form a wide vent reducing the pressure build up and limiting the plume to altitudes around 2 to 2.5 km.
This can change abruptly in case of a major dome collapse.
The town of Chaitén, still habited by a small group of about sixty people, persistent to “save their hometown”, will be wiped from the face of the earth.
This volcano represents the equivalent of a nuclear reactor in a cart box.
Francis (22:15:18) :
“A warning, about not heeding a warning; seems out of place here, somehow.
When I sat in a geology classroom, Continental Drift was only a theory. There were many good arguments for it. But it hadn’t been proven yet.
Milankovitch, a Serbian school teacher, proved (using logarithms!) that the small orbital changes could explain the ice ages.
Francis,
Last I heard, we will have another 16,000 years in our interglacial. And that’s easily extended, with just a little global warming.”
You must have been in the local pub with the heating up and doors and windows closed when you heard so, because I haven’t noticed any global warming lately.
From London’s Financial Times today:
“One of the most alarming consequences of rapid global warming would be a collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet. Until now scientists have generally assumed that it would raise the global sea level by five to six metres, but a more detailed analysis, published in the journal Science, shows this is an overestimate.
The study, led by Jonathan Bamber, of Bristol University, found that a complete collapse would raise the sea level by an average of 3.3 metres – though the rise would not be distributed evenly around the world. The biggest impact would be along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of north America, where levels would rise 25 per cent more than the global average.
The regional variations result from the uneven redistribution of ice from Antarctica into the oceans. With less mass around the South Pole, Earth’s gravitational field would become slightly weaker in the southern and stronger in the northern hemispheres, causing water to pile up in the north. The redistribution of mass would also affect the planet’s rotation, accentuating the sea level rise in the western hemisphere.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5e6810a2-4098-11de-8f18-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
“hareynolds (20:57:11) :
Carlos (08:49:19) said:
One could also argue: Shouldn’t we try to put the missing CO2 back where it belongs whenever/however possible?”
I think that Carlos meant put it back in the atmosphere!
DaveE
Adolfo, do you know how much ozone would have to disappear (and then reappear) in order to make a drop in the bucket difference in the global temperature trends? And do you know how much more cosmic rays would have to change in order to affect cloud formation to the degree that it affects global temperature? On the other hand, do you know how much SST’s have to change in order to change weather patterns? This seems such a no brainer to me. I still don’t understand why you focus on the Sun when all around you are variables that perfectly explain weather pattern trends.
Re my 14:22:27 comment, how can this re-evaluation of the sea level rise be accurate? Isn’t the science settled? (settled: verb, past-tense of “settle;” meaning no longer in doubt). Yet, here we have a new study (doesn’t sound settled to me; why conduct a new study, if the science is settled)?
Also, this article states that “until now, scientists have generally assumed that…” and sea level would rise “five to six meters;” none of which satisfies the concept of “settled science.” [bolding mine] So, is settled science based on assumptions? And estimates with a range of 20 percent (six is 20 percent more than five)? If the engineers used such “settled” results for engineering calculations, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Ah well. Perhaps with all that extra Antarctic ice these days, one could expect the sea level rise to be less…. oh wait…wouldn’t MORE ice equate to MORE sea level rise? Never mind…I am sure that this is also part of the science that is settled.
Last point, I wonder if Mr. Bamber has consulted lately with the sea level rise charts
, and considers the fact that the sea off the west coast of North America is in fact falling, not rising. One must then wonder exactly how the Antarctic ice melt will all rush over to Baja California, and up the coast to Monterrey, and hang out there. I would appreciate a lucid explanation for this phenomenon.
Who is interested in a Plimer Presentation about “Climate Change” can have a look here: http://www.tsaugust.org/Weekly_News.htm#Curb_
Roger Sowell (18:08:37) :
“Re my 14:22:27 comment, how can this re-evaluation of the sea level rise be accurate? Isn’t the science settled? (settled: verb, past-tense of “settle;” meaning no longer in doubt). Yet, here we have a new study (doesn’t sound settled to me; why conduct a new study, if the science is settled)?”
Roger,
Why don’t you send your comments to FT and Mr. Bamber and a claim for fraudulant science to the University of Bristol.
I am sure that Monckton will give you a helping hand.
As the author of this piece, I’m gratified at the attention it has received. The comments here have raised a couple of concerns. (1) Was I exaggerating about people “eating their children,” during the Great Famine of 1315? No, my sources were from articles published in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature that were based on contemporary chronicles. (2) Has Milankovitch Theory been “falsified”? Maybe. In Popper’s “Logic of Scientific Discovery,” he concedes that absolute falsification is an impossibility. But I’m writing here a polemic, albeit one based on facts and the scientific literature. In a polemic, one has to make certain compromises. For example, you just don’t have the space to list nuances and provide counter-arguments.
I’m glad I produced a piece that people found interesting. I don’t believe we yet have a good or thorough understanding of the Earth’s climate system.
Continental shelf edges might represent the 90% probable shoreline.
Ron de Haan (13:30:25) re: CURRENT COOLING ?
Local weather is pretty simple here: heating season and air conditioning season, separated by nice weather. I only pay attention to outside temperatures mid-month, when last month’s global average becomes available.
From the Summary of the April, 2008; Fawcett & Jones paper: Waiting for Global Cooling. (This is Aussie–I like the accent.)
There is very little justification for asserting that global warming has gone away over the past ten years, not least because the linear trend in globally-averaged annual mean temperatures (the standard yardstick) over the period 1998-2007 remains upward. While 1998 was the world’s warmest year in the surface-based instrumental record up to that point in time, 2005 was equally warm and in some data sets surpassed 1998. A substantial contribution to the record warmth of 1998 came from the very strong El Nino of 1997/1998 and, when the annual data are adjusted for this short-term effect (to take out El Nino’s warming influence) the warming trend is even more obvious.
Because of the year- to-year variations in globally-averaged mean temperatures, about ten years are required for an underlying trend to emerge from the “noise” of those year-to-year fluctuations. Hence, the fact that 2006 and 2007 were cooler than 2005, is nowhere near enough data to clearly establish a cooling trend.
And of course this most recent La Nina continued, thru 2008, until it ended last month.
I would hope for some standard weather for a while…so we can keep score without the down and up adjustments.