Community News
The Next Ice Age?
by Kiara Windrider (kiara@doorwaytoeternity.com)
Editor's Note: Here in Canada, in 2005 we experienced one of the coldest winters on record. But 2006 was one of the mildest... As psychics, we have been predicting some significant weather shifts for some years now... we print this now in our ongoing desire to warn people, to suggest that this would be a very good time for us to be changing our ways...
I have been compiling the following information from several internet lists that I belong to. This research on the connection between global warming and a potential ice age is irrefutable. It offers a sobering 3-D perspective on what we could see in the years to come, and make no mistake, from a 3-D perspective this could very well spell the end of civilization as we know it. But then so could a number of other factors, including nuclear war, rampant deforestation and pollution, or the politics of a New World Order taken to its extreme. We are closer to catastrophe than we may realize, and have been for a long time. Pretending this isn't going to happen is the best way to ensure that it will.
However, this very potential is the evolutionary force which could propel us into the most powerful shift in human and planetary consciousness ever. There are realms beyond the 3-D which already exist, which are beginning to make their presence increasingly felt, and which we are birthing into collective "reality". In my articles on the "supramental awakening" I refer to the possibilities of how this might come about. In the acceleration of consciousness currently taking place. I believe that our experience of time itself is undergoing a radical change, and that we could collectively experience a number of parallel realities at the same "time", allowing us to choose which we would like to make "real" for us. Please read these reports, not with a sense of dread or hopelessness, but with the recognition that we are getting ready for a planetary birth, and that we can influence this with our collective thoughts and intentions. We have come here on Earth at this time precisely because we chose to make a difference, and there is a collective soul force that is guiding the process.
If you think this could be useful, please pass this information along. To add or delete yourself from this e-list, please contact kiara@doorwaytoeternity.com. I would also appreciate feedback, perspectives, and other information on this and related themes. Please also check out my website, www.doorwaytoeternity.com, and my book, "Doorway to Eternity: A Guide to Planetary Ascension". Love, Kiara
1. How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age...
Published on Friday, January 30, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
by Thom Hartmann
While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore's recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere - a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they're finding is not at all comforting.
In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world.
Here's how it works.
If you look at a globe, you'll see that the latitude of much of Europe and Scandinavia is the same as that of Alaska and permafrost-locked parts of northern Canada and central Siberia. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia. Why? It turns out that our warmth is the result of ocean currents that bring warm surface water up from the equator into northern regions that would otherwise be so cold that even in summer they'd be covered with ice. The current of greatest concern is often referred to as "The Great Conveyor Belt," which includes what we call the Gulf Stream.
The Great Conveyor Belt, while shaped by the Coriolis effect of the Earth's rotation, is mostly driven by the greater force created by differences in water temperatures and salinity. The North Atlantic Ocean is saltier and colder than the Pacific, the result of it being so much smaller and locked into place by the Northern and Southern American Hemispheres on the west and Europe and Africa on the east.
As a result, the warm water of the Great Conveyor Belt evaporates out of the North Atlantic leaving behind saltier waters, and the cold continental winds off the northern parts of North America cool the waters. Salty, cool waters settle to the bottom of the sea, most at a point a few hundred kilometers south of the southern tip of Greenland, producing a whirlpool of falling water that's 5 to 10 miles across. While the whirlpool rarely breaks the surface, during certain times of year it does produce an indentation and current in the ocean that can tilt ships and be seen from space (and may be what we see on the maps of ancient mariners).
This falling column of cold, salt-laden water pours itself to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it forms an undersea river forty times larger than all the rivers on land combined, flowing south down to and around the southern tip of Africa, where it finally reaches the Pacific. Amazingly, the water is so deep and so dense (because of its cold and salinity) that it often doesn t surface in the Pacific for as much as a thousand years after it first sank in the North Atlantic off the coast of Greenland.
The out-flowing undersea river of cold, salty water makes the level of the Atlantic slightly lower than that of the Pacific, drawing in a strong surface current of warm, fresher water from the Pacific to replace the outflow of the undersea river. This warmer, fresher water slides up through the South Atlantic, loops around North America where it's known as the Gulf Stream, and ends up off the coast of Europe. By the time it arrives near Greenland, it's cooled off and evaporated enough water to become cold and salty and sink to the ocean floor, providing a continuous feed for that deep-sea river flowing to the Pacific. These two flows - warm, fresher water in from the Pacific, which then grows salty and cools and sinks to form an exiting deep sea river - are known as the Great Conveyor Belt.
Amazingly, the Great Conveyor Belt is only thing between comfortable summers and a permanent ice age for Europe and the eastern coast of North America. Much of this science was unknown as recently as twenty years ago. Then an international group of scientists went to Greenland and used newly developed drilling and sensing equipment to drill into some of the world's most ancient accessible glaciers. Their instruments were so sensitive that when they analyzed the ice core samples they brought up, they were able to look at individual years of snow. The results were shocking. Prior to the last decades, it was thought that the periods between glaciations and warmer times in North America, Europe, and North Asia were gradual. We knew from the fossil record that the Great Ice Age period began a few million years ago, and during those years there were times where for hundreds or thousands of years North America, Europe, and Siberia were covered with thick sheets of ice year-round. In between these icy times, there were periods when the glaciers thawed, bare land was exposed, forests grew, and land animals (including early humans) moved into these northern regions. Most scientists figured the transition time from icy to warm was gradual, lasting dozens to hundreds of years, and nobody was sure exactly what had caused it. (Variations in solar radiation were suspected, as were volcanic activity, along with early theories about the Great Conveyor Belt, which, until recently, was a poorly understood phenomenon.)
Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years. Something was flipping the weather of the planet back and forth with a rapidity that was startling. It turns out that the ice age versus temperate weather patterns weren't part of a smooth and linear process, like a dimmer slider for an overhead light bulb. They are part of a delicately balanced teeter-totter, which can exist in one state or the other, but transits through the middle stage almost overnight. They more resemble a light switch, which is off as you gradually and slowly lift it, until it hits a mid-point threshold or "breakover point" where suddenly the state is flipped from off to on and the light comes on. It appears that small (less that .1 percent) variations in solar energy happen in roughly 1500-year cycles. This cycle, for example, is what brought us the "Little Ice Age" that started around the year 1400 and dramatically cooled North America and Europe (we're now in the warming phase, recovering from that). When the ice in the Arctic Ocean is frozen solid and locked up, and the glaciers on Greenland are relatively stable, this variation warms and cools the Earth in a very small way, but doesn't affect the operation of the Great Conveyor Belt that brings moderating warm water into the North Atlantic.
In millennia past, however, before the Arctic totally froze and locked up, and before some critical threshold amount of fresh water was locked up in the Greenland and other glaciers, these 1500-year variations in solar energy didn't just slightly warm up or cool down the weather for the landmasses bracketing the North Atlantic. They flipped on and off periods of total glaciation and periods of temperate weather. And these changes came suddenly.
For early humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago - when the cave paintings in France were produced - the weather would be pretty much like it is today for well over a thousand years, giving people a chance to build culture to the point where they could produce art and reach across large territories. And then a particularly hard winter would hit. The spring would come late, and summer would never seem to really arrive, with the winter snows appearing as early as September. The next winter would be brutally cold, and the next spring didn't happen at all, with above-freezing temperatures only being reached for a few days during August and the snow never completely melting. After that, the summer never returned: for 1500 years the snow simply accumulated and accumulated, deeper and deeper, as the continent came to be covered with glaciers and humans either fled or died out. (Neanderthals, who dominated Europe until the end of these cycles, appear to have been better adapted to cold weather than Homo sapiens.)
What brought on this sudden "disappearance of summer" period was that the warm-water currents of the Great Conveyor Belt had shut down. Once the Gulf Stream was no longer flowing, it only took a year or three for the last of the residual heat held in the North Atlantic Ocean to dissipate into the air over Europe, and then there was no more warmth to moderate the northern latitudes. When the summer stopped in the north, the rains stopped around the equator: At the same time Europe was plunged into an Ice Age, the Middle East and Africa were ravaged by drought and wind-driven firestorms. . If the Great Conveyor Belt, which includes the Gulf Stream, were to stop flowing today, the result would be sudden and dramatic. Winter would set in for the eastern half of North America and all of Europe and Siberia, and never go away. Within three years, those regions would become uninhabitable and nearly two billion humans would starve, freeze to death, or have to relocate. Civilization as we know it probably couldn't withstand the impact of such a crushing blow.
And, incredibly, the Great Conveyor Belt has hesitated a few times in the past decade. As William H. Calvin points out in one of the best books available on this topic ("A Brain For All Seasons: human evolution & abrupt climate change"): ".the abrupt cooling in the last warm period shows that a flip can occur in situations much like the present one. What could possibly halt the salt-conveyor belt that brings tropical heat so much farther north and limits the formation of ice sheets? Oceanographers are busy studying present-day failures of annual flushing, which give some perspective on the catastrophic failures of the past. "In the Labrador Sea, flushing failed during the 1970s, was strong again by 1990, and is now declining. In the Greenland Sea over the 1980s salt sinking declined by 80 percent. Obviously, local failures can occur without catastrophe - it's a question of how often and how widespread the failures are - but the present state of decline is not very reassuring."
Most scientists involved in research on this topic agree that the culprit is global warming, melting the icebergs on Greenland and the Arctic icepack and thus flushing cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north. When a critical threshold is reached, the climate will suddenly switch to an ice age that could last minimally 700 or so years, and maximally over 100 000 years.
And when might that threshold be reached? Nobody knows - the action of the Great Conveyor Belt in defining ice ages was discovered only in the last decade. Preliminary computer models and scientists willing to speculate suggest the switch could flip as early as next year, or it may be generations from now. It may be wobbling right now, producing the extremes of weather we've seen in the past few years. What's almost certain is that if nothing is done about global warming, it will happen sooner rather than later.
This article was adapted from the new, updated edition of "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann (thom@thomhartmann.com), due out from Random House/Three Rivers Press in March. http://www.thomhartmann.com/ Copyright 2004 by Thom Hartmann.
2. History's Greatest Disaster Has Begun
January 27, 2004
The greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history is now unfolding. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has announced that the North Atlantic Oscillation is failing, and, along with it, the Gulf Stream. The Institute has observed "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments," in an analysis of Atlantic ocean currents from pole to pole. Woods Hole has found that salinity levels are changing in ways that they have changed in the past leading to periods of abrupt climate change. Polar waters are becoming far less saline, meaning that the "heat pump" effect that draws warm water north is failing.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling."The director of Woods Hole, Robert Gagosian, said: "We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes."
Last summer, Unknowncountry.com reported an ominous sign that the North Atlantic Current was weakening, when cold northern water suddenly appeared along US coastlines as far south as Florida. This suggested that the Gulf Stream had moved farther offshore than normal, which would happen if it weakened and was not flowing north normally.
The extremes of heat and cold that the northern hemisphere has experienced over the past twelve months may be further signs of this effect. Extraordinary heat killed at least 20,000 people in Europe last summer, and extreme cold in north America this winter has been responsible for at least 35 deaths. World weather patterns have become extremely bizarre recently, exemplified by blocks of ice falling from the sky in regions as diverse as New Zealand, Spain and the American South and, within the past few months, tornadoes in Wales and, just yesterday, on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.
From now on, there is an immediate potential for abrupt climate change. The key factor in the sudden climate change scenario described in the Coming Global Superstorm and many other places is the collapse of the system of currents that equalizes heat and cold over the surface of the earth.
It is likely that climate change will take place over a single season, as the fossil record tells us. It will not be a protracted process, unfolding over hundreds or even tens of years. It will begin with an outburst of violent weather unlike anything recorded in the historical era, and then be followed by years of climactic turmoil. At some point, the climate will either return to the interglacial state it is in now, or we will slip into another ice age, but this is likely to be hundreds of years into the period of turmoil.
Mankind, for the foreseeable future, will experience the full effects of the turmoil and disaster caused by sudden climate change.
This process is going to devastate the northern hemisphere, dramatically altering growing seasons in the United States, Canada and Europe, shortening them, making them entirely unviable in northern areas, and crippling many regions such as the central-western US, with drought so intractable that it will likely result in large scale population movement out of these areas.
This unfortunate situation is in part the result of natural climactic cycling, but it has been sped up by human emissions of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and the process could have been controlled by considered worldwide attention to controlling those emissions. Proper leadership in the developed countries could have prevented this catastrophe, and without significant disruption to business activities or the lives of individuals.
Instead, nothing useful has been done, and now we will go through a significant stage of climatic upheaval that will be accompanied by the death and impoverishment of millions of the best educated and most productive people on earth. This will result in a vast diminishment of mankind and the likely collapse of many of the structures of government, business and finance that we depend upon to insure our safety, prosperity and freedom.
Even if a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gas emissions were achieved within a year, the process would still continue. What we will be able to do, if human society remains organized at a high enough level to achieve this, is to make a slide into another ice age somewhat less likely, and hasten the return of a more acceptable climate.
Questions will be asked: why has this happened? Who is responsible? Among Americans, the answer is clear: political leaders and media personalities have, at the behest of corporate sponsors who feel threatened by environmental controls, lied to the public about the problem, promoting the fallacy that the situation was a matter for debate when, in fact, nature had already cast the die.
Worldwide, various governmental and private entities have misused the threat of environmental disaster as a means of imposing a level of planning on all human activities that many found unacceptable.
In fact, government, the corporate world and environmental groups should all have faced the real and imminent problems in a clear-headed and practical manner, instead of viewing them through the crazy lens of ideology, be it left or right. Instead, ideology has been placed above need in virtually every case, with the result that the worst possible situation has become true: human activities in the form of greenhouse gas emissions have been allowed to exacerbate a natural cycle, with results that promise to be devastating beyond imagination.
It is ironic indeed that the Day After Tomorrow, the film related to the Coming Global Superstorm, will be released in May of 2004, which is likely to be the first month in the past ten thousand years at least that the extreme weather conditions described in that book could actually occur.
At present, only a few paleoclimatologists will admit to the actual violence that the fossil record reveals, and there remain questions about the degree to which the debris from these extremely violent weather events of the distant past actually relates to sudden climate change.
For example, there have been questions surrounding the cause of the quick-freezing of mammoths, whose remains have been periodically found in Alaska and Siberia, often with still undigested food in their mouths and stomachs. It has been claimed that no weather-related mechanism could possibly cause this, and therefore that the mammoths must have fallen into sinkholes and frozen there.
Recently, however, the discovery of quick-frozen plants embedded in glaciers in Peru has revealed the fact that very extreme weather changes to take place on this earth, and result in long-term effects. For example, plants that froze in the Peruvian Andes in a matter of minute ten thousand years ago are only just now being disgorged by glaciers. In other words, plants that were living in a moderate climate were plunged, over what appears to have been the course of just a few hours or even minutes, into extreme cold that held them in its grip for ten thousand years.
All mankind is now threatened by such a danger. Where and when it will strike, or if it will unfold with such super-violence at all is unknown. But the greedy and the foolish among our leadership have released the bull from the paddock, and we are not likely to see it returned anytime soon.
Two questions remain: what can we do and what are the warning signs of sudden climate change?
The primary warning sign has always been the failure of ocean currents, and Woods Hole is telling us that this is happening now. On a more detailed, day-to-day basis, any excursion of warm tropical air into far northern latitudes, from now on, is apt to trigger ferocious storms, and the farther that air penetrates, and the warmer and more humid it is, the more violent the consequences will be.
We will be making certain changes to our Quickwatch on this website to reflect the changing situation. For example, we are going to expand the number of points from which we pick up air temperature measurements and drop the ocean current measures and observations, except for the Gulf Stream, as they have already been triggered and will not change anytime soon. We will be watching for the dissolution of the Gulf Stream. If this should happen between May and October, the immediate weather effects will stun the world. No matter when it takes place, and it is now certain that it will, it will lead in a single season to an entirely new climate of a kind that is far less viable for us than the one we have known.
Also on our Quickwatch page is an article that contains a series of simple steps that world leaders should have been aggressively asking individuals to take for the past ten years. Instead, they remained mired down in their various political and ideological issues, either claiming that there was no significant environmental problem or that there was a huge problem that could only be solved by massive government intervention, imposing draconian new levels of planning on society at every level, with special emphasis on corporate enterprise and economic development.
However, the fact remains that a great deal can be done:
To reduce individual emissions dramatically, only a few minor lifestyle changes are needed: Replace the 20-year-old fridge with an energy-saver model. CO2 savings = 3,000 pounds. Send out one fewer 30-gallon bags of garbage per week. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Leave the car at home two days per week. CO2 savings = 1,590 pounds. Recycle cans, bottles, plastic, cardboard and newspapers. CO2 savings = 850 pounds. Switch from standard light bulbs to fluorescents. CO2 savings = 1,000 pounds. Replace the current shower head with a low-flow model. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Turn the thermostat down two degrees for one year. CO2 savings = 500 pounds. Cut vehicle fuel use by 10 gallons in 2003. CO2 savings = 200 pounds. Switch from hot to warm or cold water for laundry. CO2 savings = 600 pounds.
If these steps were taken by just 20% of U.S., Japanese, Canadian and European inhabitants, world CO2 emission levels would drop to a point that the human factor would be vastly reduced as a source of global warming, and the upheaval that we now face would be reduced in its duration and effect, perhaps to the point that the world as we know it might be restored, not in our lifetimes, but with luck in those of our children.
3. CLIMATE COLLAPSE:
From The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare Jan 26, 2004 by David Stipp
Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade, like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies, thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia, it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed, in some cases, just a few years.
The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropics, that's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.
But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered such collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it wasn't humans and their factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were dismayingly similar to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began drawing to a close about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels near those of recent decades. Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions. (A dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at the time.)
Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us. In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.
Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades. Such jeremiads are beginning to reverberate more widely. Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate change as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issue-next summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global warming.
Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying. But what would abrupt climate change really be like?
Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda", a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.
When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks, he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from - at least in public.
The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies.
Here is an abridged version:
A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down, potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild compared with the Younger Dryas.
For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill-its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by 2020:
At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation, allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.
Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.
Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.
Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands, waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses. Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.
Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location. The conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope. Its government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.
China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.
As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistible. History shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations, invading Russia, which is weakened by a population that is already in decline, for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil and gas reserves to power desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land. Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rights, fisheries are disrupted around the world as water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats.
Growing tensions engender novel alliances. Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.) North and South Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified bloc to curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors. Russia, threatened by impoverished neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.) Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.
The changes relentlessly hammer the world's "carrying capacity"; the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population. Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth's carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisis. It is too widespread and unfolds too fast.
As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.
Over the past decade, data have accumulated suggesting that the plausibility of abrupt climate change is higher than most of the scientific community, and perhaps all of the political community, are prepared to accept. In light of such findings, we should be asking when abrupt change will happen, what the impacts will be, and how we can prepare; not whether it will really happen. In fact, the climate record suggests that abrupt change is inevitable at some point, regardless of human activity. Among other things, we should:
Speed research on the forces that can trigger abrupt climate change, how it unfolds, and how we'll know it's occurring.
Sponsor studies on the scenarios that might play out, including ecological, social, economic, and political fallout on key food-producing regions. Identify "no regrets" strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security.
Form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.
Explore ways to offset abrupt cooling - today it appears easier to warm than to cool the climate via human activities, so there may be "geo-engineering" options available to prevent a catastrophic temperature drop.
In sum, the risk of abrupt climate change remains uncertain, and it is quite possibly small. But given its dire consequences, it should be elevated beyond a scientific debate. Action now matters, because we may be able to reduce its likelihood of happening, and we can certainly be better prepared if it does. It is time to recognize it as a national security concern.
The Pentagon's reaction to this sobering report isn't known - in keeping with his reputation for reticence, Andy Marshall declined to be interviewed. But the fact that he's concerned may signal a sea change in the debate about global warming. At least some federal thought leaders may be starting to perceive climate change less as a political annoyance and more as an issue demanding action.
If so, the case for acting now to address climate change, long a hard sell in Washington, may be gaining influential support, if only behind the scenes. Policymakers may even be emboldened to take steps such as tightening fuel-economy standards for new passenger vehicles, a measure that would simultaneously lower emissions of greenhouse gases, reduce America's perilous reliance on OPEC oil, cut its trade deficit, and put money in consumers' pockets. Oh, yes!-and give the Pentagon's fretful Yoda a little less to worry about.
4. Global warming will plunge Britain into
new ice age 'within decades'From: http://news.independent.co.uk/
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor, 25 January 2004
Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.
A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change "of remarkable amplitude" in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.
Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden "flips" of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development - described as "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments", by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research - threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild.
If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador - which is on the same latitude - bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.
A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden - launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists - warned last week that pollution threatened to "trigger changes with catastrophic consequences" like these.
Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as "likely". But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.
The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling."
Robert Gagosian, the director of Woods Hole, considered one of the world's leading oceanographic institutes, said: "We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes. "Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates." The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become "very much" saltier in the tropics and subtropics and "very much" fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years.
This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.
The change is described as the "fingerprint" of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold ones fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water.
Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.
The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as "the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light". Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.
When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.
Some scientists say that this is the "worst-case scenario" and that the cooling may be less dramatic, with the world's climate "flickering" between colder and warmer states for several decades. But they add that, in practice, this would be almost as catastrophic for agriculture and civilisation.
5. Glaciers and Sea Ice Endangered
by Rising TemperaturesFrom: Earth Policy Institute Also from: http://truthout.org/
By Janet Larsen, The Earth Policy Institute, 27 January 2004
By 2020, the snows of Kilimanjaro may exist only in old photographs. The glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park could disappear by 2030. And by mid-century, the Arctic Sea may be completely ice-free during summertime. As the earth's temperature has risen in recent decades, the earth's ice cover has begun to melt. And that melting is accelerating.
In both 2002 and 2003, the Northern Hemisphere registered record-low sea ice cover. New satellite data show the Arctic region warming more during the 1990s than during the 1980s, with Arctic Sea ice now melting by up to 15 percent per decade. The long-sought Northwest Passage, a dream of early explorers, could become our nightmare. The loss of Arctic Sea ice could alter ocean circulation patterns and trigger changes in global climate patterns.
On the opposite end of the globe, Southern Ocean sea ice floating near Antarctica has shrunk by some 20 percent since 1950. This unprecedented melting of sea ice corroborates records showing that the regional air temperature has increased by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950.
Antarctic ice shelves that existed for thousands of years are crumbling. One of the world's largest icebergs, named B-15, that measured near 10,000 square kilometers (4,000 square miles) or half the size of New Jersey, calved off the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. In May 2002, the shelf lost another section measuring 31 kilometers (19 miles) wide and 200 kilometers (124 miles) long.
Elsewhere on Antarctica, the Larsen Ice Shelf has largely disintegrated within the last decade, shrinking to 40 percent of its previously stable size. Following the break-off of the Larsen A section in 1995 and the collapse of Larsen B in early 2002, melting of the nearby land-based glaciers that the ice shelves once supported has more than doubled.
Unlike the melting of sea ice or the floating ice shelves along coasts, the melting of ice on land raises sea level. Recent studies showing the worldwide acceleration of glacier melting indicate that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate for sea level rise this century?ranging from 0.1 meters to 0.9 meters?will need to be revised upwards. (See http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update32_data.htm for selected examples of ice melt from around the world.)
On Greenland, an ice-covered island three times the size of Texas, once-stable glaciers are now melting at a quickening rate. The Jakobshavn Glacier on the island's southwest coast, which is one of the major drainage outlets from the interior ice sheet, is now thinning four times faster than during most of the twentieth century. Each year Greenland loses some 51 cubic kilometers of ice, enough to annually raise sea level 0.13 millimeters. Were Greenland's entire ice sheet to melt, global sea level could rise by a startling 7 meters (23 feet), inundating most of the world's coastal cities.
The Himalayas contain the world's third largest ice mass after Antarctica and Greenland. Most Himalayan glaciers have been thinning and retreating over the past 30 years, with losses accelerating to alarming levels in the past decade. On Mount Everest, the glacier that ended at the historic base camp of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first humans to reach the summit, has retreated 5 kilometers (3 miles) since their 1953 ascent. Glaciers in Bhutan are retreating at an average rate of 30-40 meters a year. A similar situation is found in Nepal.
As the glaciers melt they are rapidly filling glacial lakes, creating a flood risk. An international team of scientists has warned that with current melt rates, at least 44 glacial lakes in the Himalayas could burst their banks in as little as five years.
Glaciers themselves store vast quantities of water. More than half of the world's population relies on water that originates in mountains, coming from rainfall runoff or ice melt. In some areas glaciers help sustain a constant water supply; in others, meltwater from glaciers is a primary water source during the dry season. In the short term, accelerated melting means that more water feeds rivers. Yet as glaciers disappear, dry season river flow declines.
The Himalayan glaciers feed the seven major rivers of Asia?the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Huang He (Yellow)?and thus contribute to the year-round water supply of a vast population. In India alone, some 500 million people, including those in New Delhi and Calcutta, depend on glacier meltwater that feeds into the Ganges River system. Glaciers in Central Asia's Tien Shan Mountains have shrunk by nearly 30 percent between 1955 and 1990. In arid western China, shrinking glaciers account for at least 10 percent of freshwater supplies.
The largest aggregation of tropical glaciers is in the northern Andes. The retreat of the Qori Kalis Glacier on the west side of the Quelccaya Ice Cap that stretches across Peru has accelerated to 155 meters a year between 1998 and 2000?three times faster than during the previous three-year period. The entire ice cap could vanish over the next two decades.
The Antizana Glacier, which provides Quito, Ecuador, with almost half its water, has retreated more than 90 meters over the last eight years. The Chacaltaya Glacier near La Paz, Bolivia, melted to 7 percent of its 1940s volume by 1998. It could disappear entirely by the end of this decade, depriving the 1.5 million people in La Paz and the nearby city of Alto of an important source of water and power.
Africa's glaciers are also disappearing. Across the continent, mountain glaciers have shrunk to one third their size over the twentieth century. On Kenya's Kilimanjaro, ice cover has shrunk by more than 33 percent since 1989. By 2020 it could be completely gone.
In Western Europe, glacial area has shrunk by up to 40 percent and glacial volume by more than half since 1850. If temperatures continue to rise at recent rates, major sections of glaciers covering the Alps and the French and Spanish Pyrenees could be gone in the next few decades. During the record-high temperature summer of 2003, some Swiss glaciers retreated by an unprecedented 150 meters. The United Nations Environment Programme is warning that for this region long associated with ice and snow, warming temperatures signify the demise of a popular ski industry, not to mention a cultural identity.
Boundaries around Banff, Yoho, and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies cannot stop the melting of the glaciers there. Glacier National Park in Montana has lost over two thirds of its glaciers since 1850. If temperatures continue to rise, it may lose the remainder by 2030.
In just the past 30 years, the average temperature in Alaska climbed more than 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit)?easily four times the global increase. Glaciers in all of Alaska's 11 glaciated mountain ranges are shrinking. Since the mid-1990s, Alaskan glaciers have been thinning by 1.8 meters a year, more than three times as fast as during the preceding 40 years.
The global average temperature has climbed by 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) in the past 25 years. Over this time period, melting of sea ice and mountain glaciers has increased dramatically. During this century, global temperature may rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius, and melting will accelerate further. Just how much will depend in part on the energy policy choices made today.
For more information on this and related themes, please see my book, "Doorway to Eternity: A Guide to Planetary Ascension", available through www.doorwaytoeternity.com or www.hoep.org. To add or delete yourself from my e-list, or to make comments, please contact kiara@doorwaytoeternity.com.
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