Sobering graphics to scale: ice sheets 21,000 years ago versus today’s skylines.
“Data adapted from ‘The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum’ by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels ‘The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown’ and ‘The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift’.”
h/t to reader “View from the Solent”
…. and sea levels were 120 meters lower than they are today… So add another meters to those heights.
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?
In Swedish scandes ( alps) you can see many alterations. The Ice on top af Sweden´s highest mountain, Kebnekaise, 2100m, The ice has gotten 2 m thicker last year. ( during last hundred years appr. 18 m thinner)
Last years glaciers advancing.New Nivel patch appearance, where you did not see them since several decades.Tree line damaged and beginning to get lower.( last hundred years gotten higher, 100 m).( At holocen optimum 600 m higher) Scandes alps temperature appr. couple of C lower last years. Everything documented by photos and data.
It could be weather, but it could also mean that we have passed the climate improvement top. At least for now.
It will be incredibly interesting to follow coming years reports.
Judging by what my Canadian friends have told me, the ice may be gone but it’s still fracking cold.
I’m hopeful that in the developed world we can potentially stop the next ice age dead in its tracks, when it does eventually start to happen. I’m thinking controlled nuclear explosions at the polar regions, preventing the ice caps from growing. I know this would be a mammoth task – we’re talking about areas the size of large continents. But of course it could be centuries away yet, by which time who knows what technology will be available to us.
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.
Ryan says:
June 14, 2013 at 8:22 pm
A piece of advice some should have taken
DaveE.
@John Peter: Squint closer, it reads 2100 m — the ‘1’ is kinda slurred in there.
Jim says:
June 14, 2013 at 8:40 pm
“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.”
There are 2 other factors that must also be included, eccentricity and precession. All 3 cycles have different lengths and certain combinations must exist for Earth’s climate to undergo major changes. The proper conditions for an interglacial peaked about 10,000 years ago: declining eccentricity, maximum obliquity and NH summer solstice at perihelion. Moving away from that combination should bring on a new period of glaciation. 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.
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.
Pamela Gray says:
“Add Fresca……… ”
Do they still make Fresca???
It takes dedicated single-mindedness of purpose to overlook the good; few but the highly educated in specialized and narrow (strictly ‘climate’-focused) fields of study can achieve it. Mention of the ‘special’ membership in restricted-admittance climate ‘clubs’ should be also made, but is redundant owing to the requirement of the individuals to be ‘highly educated in (their) specialized and narrow (climate) fields of study’ …
.
We have those too; you meant perhaps ‘end morans’ (or rather ‘morons’?) We have terminal moraines across the Midwest indicating the ‘edge of ice’ penetration too. <grin>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_moraine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moraine
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.
@tumetuestumefaisdubien1
I would love read your explanatory article as to what triggers runaway glaciation. From what I have read, in many cases, when glaciation does occur, it happens very rapidly. It remains a mystery to me as to how it can happen so abruptly.
Southeastern Alaska?
“I’ve never seen Waterworld…” – You sir, are a fortunate man. Being a sci-fi fan, I saw not expecting much but thinking, “how bad can it be?” I never before imagined that the worst
part of the post apocalyptic dystopia was that EVERYONE WAS BORED OUT OF THEIR SKULLS!
And so is anyone who has ever watched that movie. Sheesh, what a waste of 3 hours, or 4, or however interminably long that thing dragged on.
I actually appreciated all of the plot holes and idiotic plot devices. It gave me something to pay attention to while my brain tried to melt.
Blame Canada!
“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?”
Sea levels drop by hundreds of feet and the oceans become measurably saltier
And the Roley Poley Bears migrate south to near where the edge of the ice meets the ocean
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
To those wondering how the polar bears made out during the last ice age:
Nothing easier, they just wandered south. One of the things that the nature
cultists can’t seem to get through their heads–nature and nature’s creatures
ADAPT. They’re good at it.
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. . .
There is some supplementary information to what I just posted at this link: http://www.skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age.htm
@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.
So I should turn on the stove because my house is too hot? Eventually ice forms right? Should be nice and cool this afternoon.