Abrupt Climatic Change Coming Soon?

rRaAnNiI writes "Just read an extremely interesting article about the possibility of having a 'little ice age' quite soon - within a decade. The frightening thing is that it makes a lot of sense to me. Does anyone know how to build an igloo?"

How to build an igloo

[Devil's BSD]

Here [no.net] are instructions on how to build an igloo, if anyone is interested.
But if you ask me, I think global warming is the trend.

Re:Not as extreme as headline may imply

[digidave]

won't put us into what we think of as an 'ice age'

Are you aware of what an ice age is? An ice age is characterized by summers that aren't hot enough to melt back the advancing ice sheets that developed over the winter. 1C - 2C changes in temp can affect this to some degree. The thing with long ice ages is that they are measured in geographic time, so even a few feet advancement a year can leave much of North America under ice in several tens of thousands of years.

Re:Year without a summer

[Lord Omlette]

That must be why we need to invade Iraq so desperately. We can stockpile all the oil and use it to stay warm when the blizzard of pure death hits us.

Wouldn't an entire year without crops have a seriously fucked up effect on our food supply?

People blamed other people for what happened. The usual suspects were, of course, sinners. But one unusual suspect was the late Benjamin Franklin. Some people believed that Franklin's experiments with lightning rods disrupted heat from the sun.

But Ben Franklin would still figure into all this; as the man who would help provide an explanation. In 1920 American weather researcher William Humphreys read some writings by Ben Franklin. The statesman wrote about the cold summer of 1783. He blamed volcanic dust coming from Iceland for the drop in temperature. From this Humphreys was able to make the connection between summerless 1816 and the explosion of Mount Tambora.

Holy shit, Ben's even cooler than I initially thought [keenspace.com]!

Re:hmph!

[Waffle Iron]

Where are those global warming nutcases now? Methinks they'll be very quit until the ice age ends, then get all worked up about the ice sheet over Calgary thinning.

Read the damned article. The ice age may be caused by global warming via changes in ocean salinity.

The climate is a chaotic nonlinear system. The results of twiddling its parameters may be counterintuitive or unpredictable. There never seems to be any shortage of armchair climatologists who can't comprehend this fact.

Igloo 101

[onyxruby]

Ah, the joys of Boy Scouts, where one can learn how to build an igloo in Minnesota Winter Survival training camp.

You need a long saw / chainsaw and it helps to have an ice auger.

Drill a hole in the ice (at least 8" deep) with your auger - this is your starting point.

Use your long saw (they have speciality [fishingmn.com] ice saws for this used by ice fishermen) to cut away from the hole. Make your cuts parallel from each other. Cut longways before crossways. Make your blocks about 8 inches cubed.

Once you have your first row cut, remove the ice with special tongs [kaleden.com] made for the purpose. Do not try to remove these by hand as you'll throw out your back and likely end up in your now open hole in the ice.

Work parallel from your hole towards shore, do not work towards the center of the water, and the ice can thin dramatically and quickly (especially over rivers with strong currents).

As a good safety guide, have someone else with you and a large ladder nearby if available.

Once you have enough ice blocks, you will want to choose a place to put them. As heavy as the ice blocks are, it may be tempting to build the igloo right next to where you removed them. This is a bad idea as the finished igloo will be quite heavy and could easily crash through the ice. Be careful to build this over stable flat terrain.

Arrange your first row of largest ice blocks in a circle. It doesn't need to big. The smaller it is inside, the better it will preserve warmth. Once you have the first row done, pack the crevices with snow. Put snow on top of the first row as a sort of mortar. Remember to put a hole for getting in and out!

Add one layer at a time, adding in a small opening for crawling in and out of. The opening needs to in the form of an arch, and no taller or wider than about 1 1/2 feet at most. Just barely big enough to crawl through is good.

As you build up, you can start to discover that you are bring the ice blocks towards the middle. This is the tricky part to get right. Have one person on the outside, and one in. The snow that you have been using a mortar can help or hinder here, depending on where you got it. Try to find stick snow

Cap the igloo. For your first igloo, this can be pretty tricky. If you have built it tightly, it will lean in on itself and support itself. The top piece needs to be a pressure fit piece. For this, you'll want to start with a bigger piece and cut it down to size.

You can also build an igloo out of snow, the process is much the same, but not all snow can be used for this.

Finally, pack all the crevices with snow. This will help preserve warmth and keep the wind out. All things considered these things are actually pretty comfortable for winter camping.

Remember, your just building a big Roman arch, get help, and you'll be fine. It helps to bring ice fishing gear to go ice fishing when your done:)

Thanks for the link, but...

[red_shift]

But if you ask me, I think global warming is the trend.

Hey Sherlock, how about you take your foot out of your mouth and read the article? The issue is that global warming *is* melting the polar ice caps, which in turn could cause a local cooling effect in northern Europe -- to the point of ice age.

That global warming doesn't make it hotter everywhere is old news, too. The BBC wrote about about this exact scenario (temps up --> ice melts --> atlantic currents change --> temps down...) years ago. It plays out with a rapid & general failure of agriculture across the British isles and western Scandanavia, due to massive increases in snowcover.

(There is some debate about how the Gulf Stream moving south from the British Isles to Iberia would affect the weather in Spain, and Portugal. One camp thinks it would bring traditionally British rains; another argues the local heating effect of the Gulf Stream would rapidly create more arid/desert conditions. Either change devastates local agricultures however, destroying traditional grape & olive industries of the region.)

Re:Year without a summer

[Bartab]

Wouldn't an entire year without crops have a seriously fucked up effect on our food supply?

Define 'ours'. If you mean the US, and for only one year, then no. Prices would go up, but more because of a perceived threat than a real one (much like gas prices go up within hours of something happening in the middle east.) The US stockpiles, and let rots generally, a tremendous amount of food. Our exports and handouts would most certainly be affected.

On the other hand, having a year where every single growing season failed across this entire nation would be .. well, difficult. There are winter crops, we'd just grow more of those if the the article is correct.

Re:Insight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exponential growth is a poor model for population change. In the short term, it can seem like a nice, simple approximation, but in the long term, populations are affected by factors besides initial size and time. Catastrophes are possible of course (like the Black Death), but also gradual slowdowns. For example, throughout the developed world, the birthrate is near the replacement rate (i.e. 2 children per woman). Whereas in the past people had large families so that, after war and disease, there would still be children to care for their elderly parents; now between pensions and government assistance, individuals can have a comfortable old age without any children.

Extrapolating populations using an exponential model is overly simplistic. Don't let the enormous results scare you.

Re:Not as extreme as headline may imply

[Peyna]

Go talk to you local geologist and he will explain to you that we are STILL in an ice age right now. Here is some more info. [state.il.us]

Re:Igloo 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Building igloos out of snow is actually more effective since snow is a better insulator.

It *is* true that as kids we had to hunt around for properly packed drift snow, but believe me, it is easier to locate and cut than ice blocks are.

Also, for the lazy man.
Simply scoop a whole bunch of snow into a pile about five feet high. Wait a little while, then start digging at the bottom. You'll find you can hollow it out quite nicely. Often to the point where the walls are blue as the light shines through.

And after you've been in there a while, the warmth of your body makes it very solid. We could jump on those things after we were done with them without cracking 'em.

Global Thermohaline Circulation

[yellowcat]

I am working on a master's degree in Oceanography...and I have studied the subject a little bit.

The global thermohaline circulation, better known as the great oceanic conveyor belt, transports warm, salty water from the equitorial pacific ocean to the far North Atlantic via the Agulhas Current (south Africa), North Brazil Current, and the Gulf Stream. In the southern hemisphere, water temperature at the surface is essentially 0 C at 60 S latitude. In the north pacific, the same is true at 60 N latitude. In the north Atlantic, at 60 N latitude, the water temperature west of Greenland is 0, and the water temperature east of Greenland is +10. This warm water is the reason that Norwegian fjords are ice free in winter, despite the fact that they are located far north of the arctic circle. It is also why Labrador, Canada and Iceland have wildly different climates, despite their being near the same latitude.

During the boreal spring through fall, the (relatively) warm, salty water enters the Norwegian, Greenland, and Labrador seas. When winter sets in, winter storms cause the surface waters to cool (through mixing and heat flux into the atmosphere) until the water is of constant density to depths of 1000m or more. Further winter storms cool the surface waters even further, making the surface waters more dense than the deeper waters. Under these conditions, oceanic deep convection occurs. Deep convection is a rare thing--it only occurs in 6 places worldwide. Most of those are in the northern North Atlantic (Labrador Sea, Greenland Sea, Irminger Sea, Norwegian Sea). One is in the Mediterranean (Gulf of Lyons) and one is in Antarctica (Weddell Sea).

Oceanic deep convection is a fragile thing. There are three conditions that must be met before it can occur: A closed, bounded circulation; weakly stratified or unstratified water to depth; and sudden density change (e.g. rapid cooling at the surface). If any of these conditions is absent, deep convection cannot occur. This is why global warming presents a problem to the conveyor belt--fresher water from melting glaciers, melting multi-year sea ice, and increased rain and snow sits on the surface, but even though it might be strongly cooled, the density will not change enough for this cooled water to sink to depth. If the surface mixed layer is only 50m deep, and the layer below the surface mixed layer is cooler saltier than the surface layer, then even if the surface layer is cooled to the same temperature as the next layer, *it will only sink to that same level*. That is, 50 m. Here, deep convection is not possible.

If the conveyor belt stops, then we have a thermohaline catastrophe. In thermohaline catastrophe, then certainly the climate of western Europe would change dramatically. A lot of models are being run on this. They are trying to couple the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice, and are running simulations such that 2x, 4x, and 8x the present level of CO2 is in the atmosphere. Thermohaline catastrophe occurs in a few of them, and doesn't occur in others. In some, the conveyor belt fails for a few years, but then starts up again as the a salinity gradient develops between the tropical oceans (where evaporation is high) and the subpolar oceans.

There is one other weak link in the conveyor belt--the Agulhas current. The Agulhas winds down the east coast of South Africa before leaving the coast, heading south, and then bending back east again. Occasionally the current sheds warm, salty Indian Ocean eddies into the south Atlantic before bending back on itself. These eddies, called Agulhas rings, transport heat and salt from the tropical pacific into the Atlantic basin. A Dutch-South African experiment (MARES) tracked a few of these rings for a while. The Dutch team came to the conclusion that if the Agulhas ring-shedding breaks down, that there is a risk of thermohaline catastrophe.

Here are some websites with a bit more info:
*http://earth.agu.org/revgeophys/schmit01/n ode8.ht ml (American Geophysical Union)
*http://kellia.nioz.nl/mare (MARES experiment)
*http://www.marine.csiro.au/seminars/ sem-abs95/ASc hiller.html (Aussie coupled ocean-atmosphere-ice model)

----yellowcat >- ??

Re:How to build an igloo

[pete-classic]

This is called a "quincy."

It is better to drive the sticks 12 inches and leave the holes open when you pull them out (or if you really want them plugged, because you don't like breathing, just leave them in).

And a garbage bag full of snow makes a great door to keep the wind out.

-Peter

Re:Look before you leap

[Dyolf Knip]

Much of the world ocean is fairly uninhabited, microbiologically speaking. Iron plays a large aprt in plankton growth and most of the planet is very poor in it. Experiments have been performed with pumping large quantities of iron sulfate into one of these dead zones. The ensuing microbial bloom was impressive, especially considering the quantities of CO2 that it could suck up. But it's not yet certain that this sort of thing would work on a large scale.

Re:the disturbing part of all this is the source

[Xerithane]

You can throw more money each year at telling people to turn down the heating, but each year the human population increases closer to (or perhaps beyond) the carrying capacity of the planet. This is the real problem.

Sorry, I'm in a foul mood but shove this up your ass. We are no where near the capacity for the planet. Here's something to prove my statement:
Land area of Texas: 678,054 km^2
Land area of Tokyo: 2,187 km^2
Population of Tokyo: ~26 million
Population of World: ~6.2 billion
Population density of Tokyo: 11,888 people per KM^2
Population density if the world lived in Texas: 9,143 people per KM^2

That's 2,000 people less per KM^2, and Tokyo is a very livable area.

What's orange and yellow and looks good on hippies?

Fire

Re:the disturbing part of all this is the source

[jkramar]

No concern exists over whether we can all fit on the planet (or Texas); your plan fails in that you have a person every 10m x 10m, even though a 10m x 10m square of the soil with highest fertility, and constant ideal amounts of sun, rain, wind, and erosion, will not be able to feed you. There isn't enough food, even if you're just growing plants. If you must eat meat, you're even more doomed, due to the high metabolismic requirements of the livestock. This is the only point in favour of vegetarianism that I truly believe and respect. Eating meat has a dramatic effect on the size of our ecological footprints. [utexas.edu]

Re:Year without a summer

[DunbarTheInept]

If the usual suspects were "sinners", then Franklin also being a suspect really isn't all that unusual. He was not well liked by many church leaders, who already considered him heretical because of his tendency to spread inventions to the public that helped them evade "god's wrath". He was already disliked by some for the lightning rod because lightning was viewed as God's rightful wrath, and if it hits your house God must have had a good reason for doing so. Trying to evade the wrath of God via an invention was seen as excessive hubris. (That argument ended when it became apparent that churches also benefitted from having lightning rods installed. It looks bad to keep claiming lightning rods are sinful when churches that install them get destroyed from lightning much less often than churches that don't.)

A little ice age would not destroy all farmable land. It would just destroy a large amount of it, leaving only the areas nearer to the equator as usable farmland. It would also reduce rainfall, as more of the earth's water is locked up in ice instead of circulating in the rain cycle (or whatever that cycle is called where it rains, runs off to the ocean, evaporates into clouds, rains again. etc)

An full (not "little) ice age would certainly mess up most of Canada, except for thin strips of land right near the oceans (Vancouver wouldn't be covered, Nova Scotia wouldn't be covered, but everything in-between would be.) Further south, the last ice-ages had glaciers reaching down into northern Michigan and Minnesota, and the southernmost point being an elongated lobe covering most of Wisconsin. Where I live (Madison, WI) was just barely inside the southernmost extent of that lobe, and the effect on the geography was drastic. What was under the glacier got sanded down into smooth gently rolling terrain. What was not under the glacier still looks like it did before - rocky outcroppings, hills with cliffs, rugged and pretty terrain. The difference is drastic. Those things must have been very thick.

Re:Igloo 101

[nels_tomlinson]

An igloo made of ice wouldn't be a good idea at all. Hardpacked snow has enough air trapped in it to make good insulation. You can easily bring the temperature inside an igloo or snowcave up above freezing. That melts the inner surface and forms a thin layer of ice, which cements everything together and makes a strong structure.

You need to have snow which has been hardpacked by the wind. Up on the Bering and Arctic coasts there is plenty of that. If you live where there are trees, you will probably never be able to build one. You just won't get the right sort of snow. This is why the indians never used igloos; they lived inland, below the treeline. If you can shovel your snow, you can't build an igloo.

You cut the blocks from a circular area, making a pit in the snow. If you can't cut your snow with a saw and lift the blocks in one piece, you have the wrong sort of snow. Make the center deeper, so that there are ledges around the sides. Cut the entrance tunnel down low, so that the ledges are above the top of it. That way the tunnel is like a p-trap, which keeps the warm air inside.

I've lived in places where the locals used igloos many years ago (before my time), and I've seen igloos built by the old grandpas, to show the youngsters how it was done. I don't think that there are many people left who have ever built one. They were practical, temporary, travel shelters for folks on the Arctic coast. Someone who knows what he's doing can build a small igloo in an hour or so. Since the snow is fairly light, it can be done by one man.

Re:History Lesson

[dragons_flight]

During the last 750 thousand years, the ice age cycle seems to last about 100,000 years with ~10-15% of that as warm interglacials (with 10-15 depending on how you define warm). We have been in an interglacial for about 8000 years, so empirically we are due for a switch in the next 5000 years or so, but we know that some interglacials have been shorter than 8000 years, so it's hard to say.

Incidently from 750k years ago to more than 2.5M years ago, the ice age cycle was ~41 thousand years long. The full fledged ice age cycle is generally explained as being forced by changes in the Earth's orbit (due to perturbations of other planets). Two of the most well known such perturbatins have 41 and 100 thousand year periods.

Of course he's not talking about an actual ice age, which would result in a global temperature dip ~15 F, but rather a locally important dip whose global impact would only be a degree or two. Such as the "Little Ice Age" that froze much of Europe circa 1700.

In case you didn't know it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The current interglacial period has already lasted longer than any of the three others seen in the last 400,000 years.

The same cannot be said for the current day.

Re:Insight.

[ytseschew]

Actually, according to the UN's population growth report [unfpa.org] the world's population should stop growing by around 2050. This is due to the replacement rate trends going down throughout the world. Of course, there is no guarantee that the report will be accurate and certainly the large population at that point could be a problem, but it's not the doom and gloom scenario you propose.

I have read Ishmael and it was quite interesting. I agree with some of Quinn's points about having to think about the consequences of our actions and how we're all immersed in a "story." I don't believe that we have to reject all of our current "story" however. And some of his points about population growth are not born out by the UN report. Read it.

Steve

Re:Look before you leap

[Metrol]

And what effect does dumping iron in the ocean have on that biosphere, and by extension, the climate? Killing off the Great Barrier Reef doesn't seem like the answer.

Your first bit is an outstanding question. The second is jumping WAY too fast to a conclusion. For a more detailed analysis of what all is being talked about here, please refer to the Wired article Dumping Iron by Charles Graeber [wired.com].

More interestingly are the counter viewpoints to the approach be described in this article. First off, the folks who don't think this will do anything but burn dollars. The second group of those critical are concerned with the notion that we're not 100% certain that the globe is warming, or if it is, by how much.

What if we took corrective action to cool things off, only to find that it wasn't as bad as was thought. The cure would definitely be worse than the symptoms.

I do find myself in agreement with Dr. Gagosian's main point from the original article. We need a LOT more data, and a much more complete understanding of exactly what is going on before we seriouly consider corrective actions.

Re:the US will live up to its responsibility, righ

[Mr. Firewall]

I'd also like to see some proof that the Amazon rainforest does not contribute significantly to the oxygen content of the air.

Here it is:

http://www.nature.com/nsu/020408/020408-7.html

Note that this is NOT from an anti-global-warming site. It's a site that promotes the notion that human activity is warming the planet.

Proof enough?

Re:One Word: Nanotechnology

[layyze]

Yes, its true that in certain parts of the South Ocean the limiting nutrient for certain types of phytoplankton is iron. It is also true that adding that nutrient will stimulate growth and reproduction of that phytoplankton. And of course phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
BUT, how does that solve anything. Its a temporary fix for a much larger problem. Shouldn't we use that time, money, research, etc. and put it into preventing the need to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the first place? I assure you the same thing that any ecologist worth their degree can tell you -- your fix won't last. We will end up with the same problems that we started with. If you stop playing with knives, then you need less band-aids.

Re:Look before you leap

[tuxtomas]

I was just discussing this idea last night in company fairly educated on the subject.

Yes, you get a great bloom of CO2 absorbing algae, but when it dies, it sinks and decomposes. Then it absorbs oxygen, giving off CO2 and Methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25X as effective as CO2. The ratio of CO2 to Methane given off is dependent upon water temperatures.

Yes, it would be a grand experiment with some huge results. I first read about this 5 years ago. The article talked about what one barge loaded with powdered iron and fans to disperse it could do. It sounded amazing.

Re:Global Thermohaline Circulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey there,

To solferino, thanks for the spelling advice, some days it's hard for me to even spell my own name (and it's a simple one too). And as for the whole "boreal" bit, I'm in the southern hemisphere too. ;)

donnz, As far as fresh water having a lower temperature than salt water and thus possibly freezing faster, there are a couple of things going on. First, the article didn't do a very good job of translating from oceanographer into english. If you look at my original post, you'll notice I said "fresher water" and not "fresh water." The typical salinity of the arctic ocean surface water is roughly 34.5 parts per thousand (http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/paleo/ocean/node2.h tml). Glacial input will be mixed here to salinity around 30ppt or so on. It will still be pretty salty, but just not salty enough for the deep convection to occur. The density difference will not be large, but it will be large enough to keep deep convection from happening.

A mini version of "fresher water shutting down the thermohaline circulation" idea actually happened in the late 60's/early 70's. Read more here. http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/paleo/ocean/node14.h tml (scroll down for Great Salinity Anomaly)

The other important thing going on is evaporation. If the ocean is warmer than the air, and there is no blanket of sea ice like there is in the southern ocean, then you will get evaporation. (I know, I know, duh...) CO2 is the most highly touted of greenhouse gasses, but it isn't the most powerful one by far. Methane is a big one (flatulent cows, etc), but probably the most underrated one is good old water vapor. If you've ever been outside on a cloudy night in winter and a clear night in winter, you can tell the difference immediately. So warmer atmosphere + evaporation + insulation from the clouds can actually start a positive feedback cycle.

This isn't to say that plain old covection will completely stop--it will continue, but only down to the depth of the constant-density mixed layer and not down to depths of 1000m or more (deep convection). As for absorbing fresh water, I don't know about that.

Hope this helps!

Re:Global Thermohaline Circulation

[yellowcat]

Texas A&M dept of oceanography has some good links on it, and a glossary of oceanography. You can access that here: http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/paleo/ocean/ocean.ht ml

Things to look up: thermohaline circulation, great salinity anomaly, labrador sea

The article didn't do a very good job of translating oceanographer into english. Using the term "fresh water" can be misleading, and if you look at my original post you'll notice that I said "fresher water." Kind of like saying that "there is no statistically significant difference" = "no difference."

Typical surface salinity in the Arctic Ocean is about 34.5 parts per thousand. If that surface salinity decreases to, say, 30 ppt, then it is (in oceanography) fresh water, but that is enough to stop deep convection. So yes, fresh water has a lower freezing point, but true fresh water (0-10 ppt salinity) would either form a very thin surface layer, or just be mixed in pretty quickly by the wind. So I don't think the negative feedback mechanism will work.

The other little bugaboo that the article doesn't really mention is atmospheric-ocean interaction. Water vapor is actually one of the strongest greenhouse gases out there. If you live in a cold climate, and you have stood outside in winter on a cloudy night and on a clear night, the clear night is almost always a LOT colder. It is theoretically possible to start a *positive* feedback loop: without a sea ice blanket, warmer water temperature => evaporation => greater insulation of surface heat in lower atmosphere => warmer air temperature => unstable atmosphere and more storms => strong winds => more turbulent heat flux into the atmosphere (e.g. evaporation), and so on and so forth.

Hope this helps.

IGLOO HOWTO

[Anonymous Coward]

home.no.net/gedra/igloo_bg.htm

A couple of things to note...

[scarhill]

First, the theory isn't new. Here's a good article [williamcalvin.com] from The Atlantic.

Second, as the article explains, this has apparently happened before with drastic results. (How does a 13 degree Farenheit change in 50 years sound?)

Obviously it can happen due to natural processes. There's also a chance that human-caused warming could kick it off. Either way, the results wouldn't be good.