29. November 2009 10:00
Big freeze plunged Europe into ice age in months
In the film, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ the world enters the icy grip of a new glacial period within the space of just a few weeks. Now new research shows that this scenario may not be so far from the truth after all.
William Patterson, from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, and his colleagues have shown that switching off the North Atlantic circulation can force the Northern hemisphere into a mini ‘ice age’ in a matter of months. Previous work has indicated that this process would take tens of years.
Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by a mini ice-age, known by scientists as the Younger Dryas, and nicknamed the ‘Big Freeze’, which lasted around 1300 years. Geological evidence shows that the Big Freeze was brought about by a sudden influx of freshwater, when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. This vast pulse, a greater volume than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined, diluted the North Atlantic conveyor belt and brought it to a halt.
European Science Foundation
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9 comments:
Why is this a "reason to doubt the global warming hype"? Freezing temperatures in Europe are a part of many global warming/climate change scenarios. Indeed, melting polar ice caps are precisely what would cause the freeze they're talking about.
Climate change doesn't just happen in one place; it's a global phenomenon (hence the word "global"). Colder temperatures in some places don't mean the *average*, *global* temperature isn't rising. Higher temperatures in one place-- say, the North Pole-- can *cause* colder temperatures in others.
well, Gabriel, if you think that freezing temperatures are a sign of global warming, there is no point in discussing this with you
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The article you linked to clearly states that the situation they're describing would be caused by melting glaciers in Greenland. The previous freeze they're discussing was caused by melting glaciers in Canada. Both of these are discussed at length in (among other places) Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." And "Day After Tomorrow" (to which the linked article refers) is also all about the (sometimes surprising) results of a rise in *average* global temperature.
You certainly have the right to be a global warming skeptic, but the evidence you're quoting is from the other side!
show me where he states the cause for the ice sheet melting
"GRACE has only been orbiting Earth for three and a half years, not long enough to determine if the increase in melting is due to global warming or natural variability, the University of Texas's Chen says.
Longer term trends, and confidence in data interpretation, must wait until several more years of data are collected, he says."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-greenland_2.html
"In these days of alarmist warnings about climate warming, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have an important role. Many papers have described their melting at the present times, and dire predictions of many metres of sea level rise are common. Christoffersen and Hambrey published a typical paper on the Greenland ice sheet in Geology Today in May, 2006.
Their model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland Ice Sheet, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow. They predict the behaviour of the Ice Sheet based on melting and accumulation rates at the present day, and the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming. The same misconception is present in textbooks such as The Great Ice Age (2000) by R.C.L. Wilson and others, popular magazines such as the June 2007 issue of National Geographic, and other scientific articles such as Bamber et al. (2007), which can be regarded as a typical modelling contribution. The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by meltwater seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/27/why-the-greenland-and-antarctic-ice-sheets-are-not-collapsing/
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it's so satisfying when I'm able to use their own statements to refute global warming
-- it's becoming more and more obvious that they are reaching for explanations of the increasingly cold temperatures that won't require them to eat their own words
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The last line of the originally linked article:
“If the Greenland ice sheet melted suddenly it would be catastrophic."
And the third paragraph is clearly talking about the previous "big freeze" being caused by a massive glacial melt.
Now you've quoted an article about how the Greenland ice sheet /isn't/ melting-- which means the "big freeze" from the first article you linked won't happen.
I wouldn't call that "using their statements against them..." It looks more like you're using the evidence from one argument (cold temperatures in one region caused by glacial meltwaters in another) to support the argument of the other (glaciers aren't melting).
Debunking the claims of the climate-change skeptic:
"The Danish political scientist won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists—that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic—are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It(in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is "a mirage," writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. "[I]t is a house of cards…Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature" of Lomborg's work."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233942?
the ice melts every summer and freezes every winter
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