Pentagon Climate Change Author Interviewed 385
cynical writes "Just in time for the opening of The Day After Tomorrow, the futurism/technology/environment blog WorldChanging has an interview with futurist Doug Randall, co-author of the "Abrupt Climate Change" scenario [PDF] commissioned by the Pentagon earlier this year. The report generated a storm of controversy a couple of months ago, and drew attention to the possibility that global warming could disrupt things enough to trigger a rapid-onset ice age. Now that the furor has died down, Randall can talk about climate change, how the report came to be, and just what he thinks about the new disaster movie."
ice age (Score:4, Funny)
Re:ice age (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ice age (Score:2, Funny)
Re:ice age (Score:2)
Any Calgary fans know the story on Regehr? The guy was born in Brazil?
Re:ice age (Score:2)
If teams actually took players from around the cities they play in, Tampa wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell against Calgary. If it got cold enough to skate on Tampa Bay on the other hand they might catch up in a few decades.
Re:ice age (Score:3, Funny)
They play Hockey in Tampa? That isn't what I heard. :) (I'm an Oilers fan BTW).
Re:ice age [OT] (Score:2)
Total Bunkum (Score:5, Funny)
the great quote was "the film makers left the laws of science on the cutting room floor"
However, it just goes to show; make a movie about a meteor hitting earth and we spend billions on searching for NEO's (near earth objects), make a movie about climate change and all of a sudden we are at risk from "Abrupt Climate Change". The planets lasted this long already, I personally am not too concerned.
However, I do think they should make a movie about how all geeks get laid daily!
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:4, Insightful)
Whereas I share your view (to an extent, it wasn't billions!) on the knee-jerk reactions to disaster films, it's not the planet that really has anything to care about - the moon was formed when the planet was hit by a rock, and the planet is still here. It could happen again. Anything living would be from a time after that event, of course. Anything. The planet itself is fairly resilient, even when it came close to being completely destroyed.
Simon
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:5, Funny)
We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how t
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:2)
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, we only had enough nukes to destroy all life X amount of times (if that). To me, destroying the planet means cracking it in half or something. I don't think we had enough nukes for that. Especially not if they were only detonated in a MAD scenario (surface and atmosphere only).
Of course, now I'm too busy worrying about terrorism to care about that stuff.
Blowing up the Earth (Score:5, Interesting)
The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is U = GM^2/R, where G is Newton's gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Earth, and R is its radius. Plugging in the appropriate numbers (see Wikipedia [internet-e...opedia.org]), you get 2.24x10^32 joules. For reference, if a ton of TNT is 1 billion calories (4.184 billion joules), then that works out to be 5.35x10^22 tons of TNT, or about 50 trillion gigatons. By way of comparison, I think I read that the world's nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War was somewhere between 20 and 50 gigatons.
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, and guess how much of that time was comfortable for current homo sapiens.
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:2)
Yeah, and guess how much of that time was comfortable for current homo sapiens. I would actually argue that the current homo sapiens could adapt and survive in quite a bit of that history. We could probably survive in temperatures and climates quite different from the current temperature with relatively few population losses. Now, our society would have to change a little bit from the commercialism to survialism, but have a little faith
Now the evolution of m
"Eskimos" is incorrect. (Score:3, Informative)
"Eskimo" is a derogatory term originally applied by Francophones ("Esquimaux") and meaning "eaters of raw meat".
Cheers!
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:2)
At least they have learnt from previous mistakes and we don't have Will Smith and any "punk ass aliens" that can be destroyed by a computer virus this time... oh wait...
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:5, Funny)
They left the laws of science on the cutting room floor, not the laws of probability.
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:2, Funny)
No, make that millions. [abc.net.au] We spend more on create rainforests in Iowa than searching for things that could end civilization. Screwed up priorities? Yup.
Re:Total Bunkum (Score:4, Insightful)
Day After Tomorrow said to be terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Day After Tomorrow said to be terrible (Score:2, Insightful)
And cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets throw in a few "Bjorn Lomborg (a statistician with no environmental science training, let alone numerical modelling or fluid dynamics) is right and everyone else was wrong" too. That'll be fun.
And some recycling of the "Wasn't everyone warning about Global Cooling 30 years ago?" posts (erm, no, frankly, though there were one or two apocalyptic popular science books on the subject).
Re:And cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
So at least he is realistic about the quality of the science.
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Interesting)
"We know lots about the history of climate change" - great, but can't do anything about the past...
"we know little about the future of climate change" - great, so do we make policy for ice age or global oven, no one knows, so, do nothing.
Re:And cue... (Score:2, Insightful)
For a start...
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think you understand. Our knowledge isn't good enough to understand what triggers what. It's plausible (but not proven) that increased carbon dioxide emissions could be the the "trigger" for huge changes in the climate. However, out knowl
Re:And cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you often state opinions that are wholly contrary to the facts?
Re:And cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US we don't have any new nuclear plants and they never can build any because the environmentalists block new nuclear power plants at every turn.
So the economic impacts of Kyoto in the US would be quite large. We would have coal and gas power plants that would have to be shut down because they would never meet emmissions standards, but we would be unable to build nuclear (no emmisions) plants to replace them.
I do not like the environmentalists claiming that the US should do something about carbon dioxide emmissions and then saying that one of the best solutions to no emmissions power generation can't be used.
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Informative)
I think the big problem with nuclear power is that it isn't really "no emmisions". Yeah, a nuclear plant doesn't belch smoke in the air, and that's great, but it still produces byproducts and waste that are undeniably hazardous. Nuclear power would be a lot less unpopular if we had a real, viable solution to the nuclear waste problem (and no, Yucca Mountain doesn't count).
Another problem with you nuclear power folk is that you seem to think that nuclear is
Re:And cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't say that for certian. The "science" of economics involves an order of magnitude more BS than even climatology. For all we know, it might be good for the economy, just like the counterintuitive notion of nationalizing most industrial production and then blowing up most of the output was excellent for the economy during WWII.
People who practice hand wringing over how every human action could destroy the economy are just as stupid as the worst tree huggers. Maybe they should be called economentalist whackos.
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know which is worse -- the "Let's do nothing" mentality, or the let's panic NOW (and blame our problems on SUV's) mentality. Both the naysayers and the alarmists (at least, the vocal ones) seem pretty irrational. The fact is that there's gotta be some middle ground because the fact is that we don't know. For every bit of evidence, there's contradictory evidence (ie historical trends). For every bit of
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if we all drive big honkin fuckin cars and burn off all the oil that's out there, we will no longer be dependent on foreign oil. Had we hurried up and burnt the oil 5 years ago, we wouldn't be in Iraq, instead Bush would be harassing Balla
I'm impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I'm impressed. I was ready to read another misguided rant filed with half-baked theories and unsubstantiated jumps to conclusions, but the guy is actually displaying the exact right mindset.
He is humble.
In any debate on this subject, many people get into a religious frenzy and froth at the mouth when you present evidence that real
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
A statistician with no training in numerical modelling, eh?
Seriously, tho', Lomborg's background is an advantage. If you want to be a serious academic, you need tenure. Who grants tenure? People who already have it. So, it's pretty much impossible to become an academic without adhering to the orthodoxy of the established acade
Re:And cue... (Score:4, Insightful)
God, I hate this myth, especially the "laughs in derision" part. Einstein's work was immediately recognized by "all those tenured professors" as having immense value, being a unified explanation of some serious problems with classical physics that had been bothering physicists since the mid-19th c.; there may have been those who disagreed with some aspects of his work (as, indeed, they were right to do; note that we still haven't unified relativity with quantum theory) but controversy is not the same as derision. Einstein's major papers were published in respected, established journals managed by those old fuddy-duddy academics you decry.
Newton, Darwin, Watson and Crick -- pretty much all of them worked their way through the scientific establishments of their day. Every once in a great while a major breakthrough is greeted with open derision (e.g., Mendeleev's periodic table) but the vast majority of those dismissed as crackpots are, in fact, crackpots; and the vast majority of scientific advances come from scientists working within the established system.
Re:And cue... (Score:3, Informative)
Lomborg doesn't have a model.
Do a little more research [mylinkspage.com] then. Theres reams of the stuff, including almost an entire edition of Scientific American.
(PS : you'll get more abundant critical responses (and politer ones, too) if you submit to peer review, something that Lomborg seems to think beneath him -- or too unprofita
Job (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:measuring...yes you can! (Score:3, Interesting)
actually it can be measured.
several years ago I was watching a documentary on some Antarctic geologists or something and they made a tunnel under the surface to "x" depth so they could look at the layers of ice and what they contained and over how many years the span was. I don't know why they didn't just use core samples, maybe they did the tunnel for the documentary so they could bring the camera in?
That movie looks so awful (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a mistake to advertise that a movie was directed by a guy who directed a really awful previous movie! On that basis alone, I am absolutely not ever going to allow any of this movie to come into view of my eyes, other than what I've already suffered through by seeing the ludicrous trailer about a billion times.
Re:That movie looks so awful (Score:3, Informative)
If they wanted compare it to a bad movie they could of said from the director of Godzilla.
However from the trailer this could be worse; but probably not as bad as Sky Captain.....
Re:That movie looks so awful (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That movie looks so awful (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That movie looks so awful (Score:4, Informative)
ID4 grossed close to $306 Million in the US domestic market(1996 dollars) and is soon to have it's third DVD release. It was the highest grossing movie the year it was released. By any capitalistic measure it was/is an excellent movie.
All of that points to the fact that a lot of people went to see it--some probably multiple times. If it's garnered three different DVD releases then there is strong evidence that people are buying it for their collections even now. To all of those people the phrase, "from the director of Independence Day" is a very positive thing.
Can someone calrify (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone tell me how a warming can start an ice age. I thought warming melted ice.
Re:Can someone calrify (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone calrify (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can someone calrify (Score:5, Informative)
If that turns off, you switch off the major heat transport mechanism from the equator to the poles, and that means abrupt cooling for the mid-latitude and polar regions.
An answer to your question (Score:2)
This current is responsible for most of the northern hemisphere's weather systems, and as such results in the catastrophic effects demonstrated in the movie.
One interesting part of the movie is when the Jake Gyl
Re:Can someone calrify (Score:5, Informative)
The thing which people do not understand about global warming is that it sooner or later brings the gulfstream to a standstill due to decrease in water salinity in the arctic. As a result New England, Iceland and most of Wester Europe freeze as the temperature drops down by up to 9C. After all, London is at the lattitude of Alaska and the only thing keeping it warm is the Stream.
Latin America overheats and goes into a draught. There are some effects going as far as changes in the monsoon patterns and draughts in South East Asia.
This is also the reason why you cannot indiscriminately use historic data sets about climate without weighting. This is also the reason why a recently published right-thinking-tank flamebait (honoured on Slashdot) that the original global warming research is flawed because they did not use all data including Texas is what it is - flamebait. Texas is probably the only place to go cooler in such an event because the rain that currently drops on Latin America will drop there.
The simulations have been run many times and the result is always the same. In fact sod the temperature, the most scary fact of global warming is the gradual decrease of flow in the antigulfstream and water salinity which have been picked up for the last several years.
For a lamers overview see this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/bigchil
For non lamers - see Science as well as a few other magazines where the results have been published over the years
Also, I am not amazed that the Pentagon has asked for this. The most scary part of global warming is the stop of the gulfstream and the 2+ billion of hungry and thursty armed people on the move. Some of them with nuclear weapons...
Re:Can someone calrify (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to admit, I did not do a full RTFA before doing the previous post.
Here are my 2p after reading the rest of it.
There are several incorrect assumptions in this article:
It forgets to account that EU deliberately expands towards less affected countries. It also forgets to notice that the agriculture in all of EU except Poland, Italy, Spain and possibly South France lives only on life support. If British, German, Northern France agriculture will die for climate reason the shelves in the supermarket will not even change and the Mediterranean regions are not going to be affected that much. Poland, Bulgaria and Romania are largely outside the affected zone (if the british met simulations are to be believed). After they join the EU (Poland already, BG and RO in 2007) EU will go fully selfsufficient in agriculture even if UK, DE and Scandinavia will freeze.
It forgets to mention that another least affected country - Russia. There will be some cooling around St Petersburg, Baltic, Murmansk, but the rest of the climate will stay where it is and it is largely selfsufficient.
The assumption that US is selfsufficient is deeply flawed. Nearly all large agricultural states in the US will be hit by either draught or multiple class 5 hurricanes per year. So in fact US is the only place that cannot fold into itself (yeah, we know who ordered the report and what do they want to hear).
complex (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can someone calrify (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes.
First off, the cooling is regional, not global. Average tempurature globally will rise, with equatorial climates rising more than average while temperate climates drop.
That said, the effect is caused by the melting of ice. As the ice melts, the salinity of the ocean drops. This has an adverse effect on the thermohalide conveyor, which is a north-south water current. This current rises at the equator, cycles both north and south from there at the surface of the ocean, cools (warming the regions i
Its a hoax (Score:5, Funny)
The Aliens will save us (Score:4, Funny)
You've seen the movie too?? (Score:2)
Preemptive strike (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Preemptive strike (Score:2)
In the immortal words of C. Montgomery Burns (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Preemptive strike (Score:3, Funny)
Mr. Burns: "Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favor? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and she wants to quit because she's losing? Well, I say Hard cheese!"
~Episode 4F17 "The Old Man and the Lisa"
Science vs. Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Isaac Asimov: "It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong."
Re:Science vs. Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Dachshund you need to stop browsing at +5.
Re:Science vs. Slashdot (Score:2)
And how is the Bill Gates in a Borg suit image an indication of scientific intelligence and not of emotion?
It'll happen anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
What is there to be concerned with. It will change wether we want it to or not. We have to learn to live with it, try not to kill ourselves off, make sure we don't do too much damage (climate change is not damage. although damage can cause climate change), and enjoy our short time on this earth.
Re:It'll happen anyway (Score:3, Informative)
What makes the scientist worry are graphs like these [pbs.org]. The PBS pages contain much info about the global warming debate [pbs.org].
From the makers of Independence Day (Score:3, Informative)
Mars (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mars (Score:2)
There is a massive storm on Jupiter that's been going for about 400 years. [utk.edu]
But Mars and Earth are about as different as astronaut ice cream and Ben & Jerry's. Mars has no water in its meteorological system, whereas Earth's is heavy with water. Mars is also flatter than the Earth, meaning winds can get up to higher speeds, lifting the very, very tiny dust particles into the up
Re:Mars (Score:2)
As far as a massive global storm, it isn't unrealistic. Just look at Mars.
It isn't unrealistic on Mars. Jupiter has storms that last centuries. It doesn't follow that Earth could.
hehe (Score:4, Funny)
"When Hell freezes over bonds".
Hell stocks were down two points on the news.
Why can't people just watch a movie? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why can't people just watch a movie? (Score:5, Insightful)
We want to connect to the storyline, and through it the characters.
If a movie has too much of a break with reality - either because of it being too 'fantasy' for a person (i.e. how some people reacted to LotR, though not too many of course) or because it asks for too intense a suspension of disbelief (i.e. how many of us react to The Day After Tomorrow) - then people cant relate to it. Sure, its touching that Quaid's character wants to reach his son, but the setup is simply too absurd.
Another post aluded to aliens visiting; given the absurdity of the environmental effects visible in the movie, it actually is no less absurd to show an alien ship arriving, causing this damage and then leaving, than to have these environmental effects.
Think of it this way: suppose you were watching a sci-fi movie, and in the middle of it the writers changed the internal rules (i.e. a given cause had a new and different effect, unpredictably so). You'd be angry, because you can no longer connect to the story, because you cant predict results. Its the same thing: we're angry because this significant a suspension of disbelief calls for an absurd break from reality (think those crazy maneuvers they depicted in ID4 for existing aircraft).
The Day After....Tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW, The Day After had a realistic representation of the effects of nuclear war. Too bad the current The Day After Tomorrow seems to be according to many accounts just a modified, updated Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno. To some extent that undercuts my theory that there may be political motivation behind this, but the less realistic it is, the less effective it is, and it becomes just a fantasy type movie. Unfortunately, people often take fantasy (i.e. "JFK") and turn it into their reality because they are too intellectually lazy to find out whether something on the big screen has any basis in reality. Too many people just guzzle the shit that the media pumps out to them without questioning any of it. That goes for for left, right, and plain old profit-seeking media alike.
I'm feeling cynical this morning for some reason. Please excuse my negativity and have yourself a really nice day. Maybe it'll offset the negative karma I'm giving off this morning.
GF.
Long scale economics (Score:5, Insightful)
- whether things will get hot or cold
- or whether we are causing the changes
We are very sure that change of some sort is absolutely unequivocal.
Change is generally bad, usually costing money. On that all parties agree.
So it is economically wise to proact rather than react.
When economics begin to look at the whole timescale - 10 years or 100 years things will change. That's the real challange.
Re:Long scale economics (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The thing to do is adapt.
Climate change will come with humans, or without. It's been going on since long before humans arrived on the scene, and there is no reason to believe it'll stop just because we ask it nicely.
There is also no reason to believe we know enough, or have power enough, to hold the planet's climate in long-term stasis. So let's forget that option.
Concentrate on what we CAN do.
If we are shifting the CO2 balance in the atmosphere, then work on fixing our contributions. But don't expect that because we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, that the CO2 balance will stabilize. There's no reason to believe it will, and even less reason to believe that the "historical" level is some magical stable point.
Another thing we can work on is becoming less dependent on environmental fresh water. Rain is all well and good, but if we don't start making our own fresh water soon, we'll be in deep before too much longer.
Same with food supplies - too dependent on weather. We've been able to grow things hydroponically and aeroponically for a long time, so it's time to start looking at them in the large scale. It'll help in all sorts of interesting ways, not least will be reduction of our (current) need to dump fertilizer into the Gulf of Mexico.
All about Chaos (Score:5, Interesting)
For a great intro to chaos theory try this book [amazon.com] by James Gleick.
Re:All about Chaos (Score:2)
Models Required, Apply Within (Score:3, Informative)
I was actually surprised about how much the scientific community knows about the history of climate change, and how little it knows about the future of climate change...
sounds like we need a whole bunch of Earth Simulators [jamstec.go.jp] asap!
its a movie!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that its Lord of the Rings to take seriously.
Re:its a movie!! (Score:2)
Warming or cooling, which is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems to me that consequences of global warming are not dire enough for the greenies (more rainfall, higher crop yields) so they came up with the idea that warming will somehow lead to catastrophic cooling. Amusing!
Re:Warming or cooling, which is it? (Score:2)
In other words: Do you have references other than Rush Limbaugh? Didn't think so.
Re:Warming or cooling, which is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry non-scientist, it wasn't the "greenies" that came up with ANY of this. SCIENTISTS doing SCIENCE are the ones who started the global warming debate and, there is no disjoint, by the way, the discussion on how warming could actually start an ice age.
I suggest you put your money politics aside and actually look into the SCIENTIFIC literature on this. Global warming increases the average global temperature. This does NOT mean that every place on earth experiences a climb in temp, and certainly not of
Re:Warming or cooling, which is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an a B.S. and M.S. in Geophysics from Cornell and Arizona State. I still contend that global warming SCIENCE is twisted for political purposes by liberal left environmentalists.
Too much movie promotion. (Score:2)
Then the evening news started including gratuitous clips from movies in many of it's stories. But the news has become more tabloid over time, so I guess I'm not shocked.
But now we have political debate as movie promotion. Am I supposed to endure public policy being set to promote a movie? Especially one that has been blasted for being far-fetched as this? G
Interview with Patrick Michaels this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
He was there to respond to the "day after tomorrow" myths, and spent 20 minutes picking apart this Pentagon report.
He basically said that the one event they base this entire article on, was actually caused by huge freshwater reserves that dumped into the ocean. These reserves came from pools left from the ice age.
I recommend tracking down the audio on wpr.org.
7am - 8am hour this morning.
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
We know that over the last 100 years that the world-wide temp has gone up by roughly 1 degree. But before that time period, there is no climate data at all. So, how can we conclude that this is unnatural or not?
Or, more importantly, how can we use a ~100 year data set to make forecasts on a planet that is millions of years old. I mean hell, we know that the magnetic field inverts every couple 100,000 years and that we're over due for that... maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
Isn't this possible?
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Even weather forecasts for next tuesday are a mix of thumb-rules, heuristics, ad-hoc models empirically improved over the years, some fortune-telling and phsycic vision; and they still miss it!
However, we do have some (innacurate and incomplete, though) data throughout written history of mankind, as well as geological evidence that enables us to make reasonable educated guesses about what was the climate like.
Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)
There are no direct measurements, but there is a considerable indirect record. During parts of the 1700s, the Thames River froze over on a regular basis, with ice thick enough to support a horse and sleigh. Ask any of the British folks who read Slashdot how long it has been since that happened. Around 900, the climate in the Northern Hemisphere wa
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
There is not much direct temperature evidence before the 19th century, but there is plenty of inferential evidence. Isotope ratios in Arctic ice give a good record going back 10s of thousands of years. This might sound doubtful, but the earlier part of this evidence can be cross checked with more obvious sources, such as tree rings (more than a thousand years) and sediment layers in lakes (thousands of years.) There is a great deal of fossil evidence, of which the best comes from pollen and hard-shelled micro-organisms (e.g. diatoms.) These (when embedded in countable sediment layers) tell us when conditions allowed the organisms to live in a particular locale. Beetles are also very useful, with many temperature-sensitive species having conserved their morphology for quite a long time (a million years.) In general, the most useful species are small organisms with hard parts; these leave more remains and travel less than larger organisms (a rare fossil could easily be in an atypical location.) Geological evidence tells us about glaciations over quite long time scales (millions of years.)
All of these sources of evidence are beset with problems and complications, and therefore highly technical (i.e. beyond a
maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
The world's climate does indeed vary on many different timescales and for many different reasons - it even gets a little hotter every 100,000 years or so! In fact it's in a hot period right now; that is why you haven't noticed that we are living in an ice age. The reason for the cycle is not magnetic fields, but rather the shape and timing of the earth's orbit around the sun (the amount of eccentricity, the amount of "wobble", and the timing of northern summer relative to the orbital position are not constants.) This is the "Milankovich cycle."
The people who think that human activity might make dramatic short-term changes in the earth's climate know all this and try to take it into account.
The Real Disaster Movie (Score:4, Interesting)
In this movie, millions of worlds poorest and most vulnerable die horribly when the economic systems that keep them alive are disrupted by Ivory tower plans of the world's frivileged elite.
The ironic twist at the end of the movie comes when it is reveled decades latter that massive economic dislocations that killed all those people where made in response to exaggerated dangers based on flimsy scientific evidence. All those people died for nothing.
We could call it "The Energy Crises part II: This time it's personal"
Re:The Real Disaster Movie (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty much what happened in China. The Communist government of Mao needed to increase crop yields, so it ordered every farmer to plant seeds only a third of the distance apart that they normally did. What happened of course is that none of the plants could get enough nutrients from the soil to mature, and tens of millions starved. However, no Communist party officials starved, and were free to try a new plan the following season.
Re:The Real Disaster Movie (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Real Disaster Movie (Score:3, Insightful)
Exaggerated danger of Communism (aka Domino Theory) -- See Southeast Asia. Millions dead. For nothing.
The sequel, starring George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, isn't looking much better.
Was this for the local high school paper? (Score:5, Funny)
It's like sitting down with an expert on nuclear energy to discuss the latest advances in reactor designs and the movie The Hulk.
Pentagon contingency plan (Score:5, Funny)
Climate Change resources with an eye on reality (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Weather (Score:4, Insightful)