Guest post by David Middleton, featured image borrowed from Meadow Heights PTA.
Global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions is blamed by scientists for intensifying storms, raising sea levels and prolonging droughts. Now there’s growing evidence of a positive effect: we may have delayed the next ice age by 100,000 years or more.
The conditions necessary for the onset of a new ice age were narrowly missed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin wrote Wednesday in the journal Nature. Since then, rising emissions of heat-trapping CO2 from burning oil, coal and gas have made the spread of the world’s ice sheets even less likely, they said.
“This study further confirms what we’ve suspected for some time, that the carbon dioxide humans have added to the atmosphere will alter the climate of the planet for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and has canceled the next ice age,” said Andrew Watson, a professor of Earth sciences at the University of Exeter in southwest England who wasn’t involved in the research. “Humans now effectively control the climate of the planet.”
[…]
“However, our study also shows that relatively moderate additional anthropogenic CO2-emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are already sufficient to postpone the next ice age for another 50,000 years,” which would mean the next one probably won’t start for 100,000 years, he said.
“The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented.”
[…]
Words fail me. I won’t even bother to point out that we are living in an Ice Age which began back in the Oligocene…
Nor will I bother to point out that the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide doesn’t even break out of the Cenozoic noise level…
By “ice age,” the author probably means “glacial stage”… The climate is barely warmer than the coldest period of the current interglacial stage…
The subject of the Bloomberg article is Ganopolski et al., 2016…
Abstract…
The past rapid growth of Northern Hemisphere continental ice sheets, which terminated warm and stable climate periods, is generally attributed to reduced summer insolation in boreal latitudes1, 2, 3. Yet such summer insolation is near to its minimum at present4, and there are no signs of a new ice age5. This challenges our understanding of the mechanisms driving glacial cycles and our ability to predict the next glacial inception6. Here we propose a critical functional relationship between boreal summer insolation and global carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, which explains the beginning of the past eight glacial cycles and might anticipate future periods of glacial inception. Using an ensemble of simulations generated by an Earth system model of intermediate complexity constrained by palaeoclimatic data, we suggest that glacial inception was narrowly missed before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The missed inception can be accounted for by the combined effect of relatively high late-Holocene CO2 concentrations and the low orbital eccentricity of the Earth7. Additionally, our analysis suggests that even in the absence of human perturbations no substantial build-up of ice sheets would occur within the next several thousand years and that the current interglacial would probably last for another 50,000 years. However, moderate anthropogenic cumulative CO2 emissions of 1,000 to 1,500 gigatonnes of carbon will postpone the next glacial inception by at least 100,000 years8, 9. Our simulations demonstrate that under natural conditions alone the Earth system would be expected to remain in the present delicately balanced interglacial climate state, steering clear of both large-scale glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere and its complete deglaciation, for an unusually long time.
They basically developed a model relating insolation to atmospheric CO2. If I am reading it correctly, they are asserting that insolation drives changes in atmospheric CO2 which then drives the glacial-interglacial stages.
Then they go on to say “that under natural conditions alone the Earth system would be expected to remain in the present delicately balanced interglacial climate state, steering clear of both large-scale glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere and its complete deglaciation, for an unusually long time.”
So, it’s actually “worse than we thought”… Earth is naturally delicately balanced between a Late Pleistocene glacial stage and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. So, no matter what we do, George Carlin was right…
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Unfortunately, we could be in for a great shock in the near future. The mechanism for rapid ice advance is an Arctic super hurricane. Just this week we saw hurricane Alex move into the precise trajectory that could initiate such a rapid ice event. Fortunately, it is Northern winter and the Gulf Stream is unable to supply the needed warm water to fuel such a rapid ice event.
However, if the global temperatures rise this year, and the heat accumulates in the Gulf of Mexico waters, which feeds the Gulf Stream, and another hurricane follows Alex’s trajectory during September or October, then we could witness a major rapid ice event this year!
The recent record precipitation events around the world are mirroring activity that preceded previous rapid ice advances. The flip in Earth’s climate will occur much quicker than present mainstream theory predicts, when it does occur. Whether it will be this year or not will be determined by the amount of heat that appears in the Atlantic. So far, the Atlantic seems to have been cooling over the past decade, which has been good. Hopefully, it will stay that way for a long time.