Climate Change/ Gulf Stream (thermohaline circulation)
"The UN's top climatologists have robustly rejected US President George Bush's claim that scientists are divided over whether global warming is real. They insist that scientists who doubt that human activity is causing climate change are in a tiny minority. John Houghton, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that no more than 10 of at least 3000 international climate scientists reject the idea that emissions of greenhouse gases are raising global temperatures.
-New Scientist April 6 2001
I have quoted extensively from Ross Gelbspan's book The Heat is On. It summarises thousands of papers on the subject, and the excellent web site is constantly updated. As a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Mr. Gelbspan's penmanship is second to none. Alternatively, click here for New Scientist's quick background on the politics of climate change. This page is updated weekly, sometimes daily, with an extensive list of links to current scientific papers.
For those who 'don't believe in global warming', here's a link to the Flat Earth Society, I'm sure you'll get along very well together.
For everyone else, listed below are quotes and references as they appear by chapter.
The Pentagon's paper on climate change and security. It parallels the premise of climate change in the Rhesus Factor. Coincidentally, the paper and the book were published the same week. NASA is now putting out the same warning. For full details of ice cap melting data, see Goddard Space Flight Centre
Larsden Ice Shelf B (above) The opening sequence in the Movie Day After Tomorrow was based on actual events. This is the result.
Click image below for interactive popup window on melting glaciers.
The Rhesus Factor - quotes and references
- Chapter
2 :
“Climate doesn’t change smoothly. It happens in jumps and jolts,” says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Polsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany. In Buenos Aires, he revealed… that northwest Europe could cool by several degrees as global warming shuts down the Gulf Stream. The current has already been weakened by increased flows of freshwater into the North Atlantic, says Rahmstorf…While Europe faces a sudden chill, most of the planet could face equally rapid heating. Abrupt climate change is the historical norm, says Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institute if Oceanography.
- New Scientist 14th November 1998 Fred Pearce, vol 160 issue 2160, 14/11/1998, page 15
“Until three weeks ago I would have had to admit that (predictions were) a purely theoretical calculation,” Rahmstorf (Stefan Rahmstorf of the Polsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany. says. “But now we have received data showing that the (Gulf Stream) has decreased by 20 percent since 1950.”
- New Scientist 21st July 2001
Ice-cold in Paris TO NORTHERN Europeans shivering in the grip of an unusually icy winter, global warming might suddenly seem an attractive proposition. How pleasant to bask in a balmy Mediterranean climate without ever leaving home. Dream on. Evidence now emerging reveals a risk that global warming could plunge most of Europe into a big chill lasting hundreds of years, bringing with it effects that could be felt right around the world.- New Scientist 08 February 1997
The Younger Dryas was a period of dramatic cooling that occurred during the warming trend to the current interglacial - ~10,000 years ago. The Younger Dryas period lasted ~700 years and led to enormous but short-lived changes in the climate of Northern Europe. These changes were first noted in the pollen records, which indicate a change-over from forests to herbaceous plants (such as Dryas, a plant that thrives on glacial tundras) and back to forest again. In the early 1980's, evidence for the Younger Dryas was obtained from CO2 ice-core bubble measurements also, confirming that it was an event of global significance (since carbon dioxide is well-mixed throughout the global atmosphere).
The Younger Dryas period has caused much debate, since it challenged the previously-held idea that climate could only change very gradually. It had been thought that the thermal inertia of the ice sheets was so large that significant advances or retreats could only happen over long periods of time. The Younger Dryas demonstrated unambiguously that change can be abrupt. Climate appears sometimes to respond in a manner similar to earthquakes where stress and strain builds up over years, leading to sudden abrupt changes, rather than slow incremental changes.(My emphasis)-In Confronting Natural Disaster: Engaging the Past to Understand the Future, G. Bawden and R. Reycraft, editors, pp. 75-98. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2000.
"Although Holocene climate events are relatively minor on a glacial/interglacial perspective, the small Holocene changes in the polar vortex and atmospheric storminess documented by O'Brien et al. (1995) would probably cause widespread disruption to human society if they were to occur in the future" {my emphasis}(Keigwin and Boyle 2000:1343)
The earliest Holocene abrupt climate changes occurred at 12,800, 8200, 5200, and 4200 B.P. The 4200 B.P. abrupt climate change is especially well documented across West Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and parts of the New World. Limnological and speleothem radiometric dates situate the beginning of this event at ca. 3800 radiocarbon years before 1950 (3.8 ka bp) or ca. 2200 B.C. High resolution paleoclimate records, including the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core, Lake Van varve sediments, and U.S. Southwest dendrochronology now also provide absolute calendar dating for this event in addition to quantification of its amplitude relative to prior and succeeding climate states. Social adaptations to this event are recorded in the contemporary archaeological records of southeastern Europe, North Africa, and West Asia: habitat-tracking, regional population abandonments, migrations, and sociopolitical collapse.
The Holocene abrupt climate changes, hemispheric and global in extent, were of lesser magnitude than those characteristic of the Pleistocene, but they profoundly disrupted late hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agriculture-based societies within various environments and at various levels of socioeconomic hierarchization, centralization, and regional command. These climate changes were natural, not anthropogenic, and therefore add a new string of variables to the analysis of agro-pastoral production and politico-economic process within prehistoric and early historic West Asia.
The earliest of the Holocene abrupt climate changes (Figure 21) was the Younger Dryas interval, dated by GISP2 to ca. 12,800-11,500 B.P. , which quickly created a colder and drier Arctic, North Atlantic, Europe, North America, and West Asia after a thousand-year period of post-Pleistocene climate amelioration (Alley 2000; Peteet 2000). The effects of this climate change on humans--and possibly Hordeum and Triticum populations as well (Rossignol-Strick 1999)--were radical. Hunting and gathering bands were forced to adapt to rapid drying and cooling of niches where wild plants and animals had formerly provided abundant subsistence (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1992; Moore and Hillman 1992). The decreased annual yields of wild cereal stands increased both the need and the motivation for cultivation. (Emphasis is mine)-Beyond the Younger Dryas: Collapse as Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change in Ancient West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean by Harvey Weiss
"Atmospheric extremes--which include floods, droughts, severe heat and cold, and storms--have resulted in steady increases in economic costs and lives lost in the United States since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. ....Costly proactive structural policies to prevent losses during disasters were finally recognized as unable to control all losses. A "nonstructural" philosophy emerged in national policies: move people out of hazardous areas.(again, my emphasis)
-U.S. Policies Pertaining to Weather and Climate Extremes. Stanley A. Changnon and David R. Easterling
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute: includes numerous links to Gulf Stream issues
Leave it to the Irish to have a sense of humour (and forward planning).... http://www.winterolympics2026.com
-
Chapter 6
“On the island where I live, it is possible to throw a stone from one side to the other. Our fears about sea-level rise are very real. Our Cabinet has been exploring the possibility of buying land in a nearby country in case we become refugees of climate change.”
- Teleke Lauti, Minister for the Environment, Tuvalu, 1992
A group of nine islands, home to 11,000 people, is the first nation to pay the ultimate price for global warming...The authorities in Tuvalu have publicly conceded defeat to the sea rising around them. Appeals have gone out to the governments of New Zealand and Australia to help in the full-scale evacuation of Tuvalu’s population. After an apparent rebuff from Australia, the first group of evacuees is due to leave for New Zealand next year...Tuvalu is paying for the rich world’s experiment with the global atmosphere. At that price you could say that it has become the world’s greatest creditor nation.- Andrew Simms, ‘Farewell Tuvalu’ Monday, October 29, 2001, The Guardian
- Chapter
7
A major battle is underway: In order to survive economically, the biggest enterprise in human history - the worldwide coal and oil industry - is at war with the ability of the planet to sustain civilization. The trillion dollar a year coal and oil industry is pitted against the oceans, forests, ice-caps and mountains of the earth as we know them today… In the U.S., the mere threat of impending climate change has impelled (these) industries to engineer a policy of denial. While their campaign may seem at this point no more sinister than any other public relations program, it possesses a subtle antidemocratic, even totalitarian potential insofar as it curbs the free flow of information, dominates the deliberations of Congress, and obstructs all meaningful international attempts to address the gathering crisis.- Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On
With White House Approval, E.P.A. Pollution Report Omits Global Warming Section. "For the first time in six years, the annual federal report on air pollution trends has no section on global warming..."
-New York Times September 15 2002 Andrew C. Revkin.
Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050 -Washington Post January 07, 2003 Guy Gugliotta
- Chapter
8
Today, 25 million environmental refugees are roaming the world…Their numbers exceed all other types of refugees - political, economic and religious... In thirteen years, if not before, their number is expected to double. But if predictions of increasingly severe conditions…are realised, the tidal wave of environmental refugees will dwarf even that projection. At that point, the number could grow tenfold, to more than 200 million homeless migrants wandering the planet. This forecast is not the speculation of chicken little. It is based on an eighteen month research project using input from several UN agencies, the World Bank, refugee assistance groups, scientists and field workers from all over the world…in their extraordinarily well-ignored report titled Environmental Exodus, published in 1995 by the Climate Institute…
- Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On (Page 160)
“You’re worried about 400 now - with the effects of global warming your children will be worrying about 400,000!”
- 42nd President of the United States, William J. Clinton, 09 September 2001 speech in Sydney referring to an incident involving 400 illegal immigrants attempting to enter Australia by boat. Extract of speech televised on all commercial news stations. President Clinton was referring specifcially to the Tampa incident.
- Chapter
10
“The likelihood of such a (Gulf Stream) shutdown will be highest…at a time when the world will be bulging with people threatened by hunger and disease and struggling to maintain wildlife under escalating environmental pressure. It behooves us to take this possibility seriously.”
- Wallace Broeker Deep ocean current dynamics researcher, Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Scientific American November 1995
- Chapter
12
Polar Bears extinct within 100 years due to ice cap melting -- what the PCBs and dioxins don't achieve...
- Chapter 25
- Chapter
29
“For the sake of argument, lets retreat into a more comforting scenario. Let’s assume that droughts (brought on by climate change) in the wheat growing areas of North America are not so severe that they starve our own population. They only starve those in poor countries who depend on us for basic nutrition…”- Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On
Long before the systems of the planet buckle, democracy will disintegrate under the stress of ecological disasters and their social consequences. Two different men independently expressed this chilling insight to me - William Ruckelshaus, the first head of the EPA and now CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries; and Dr. Henry Kendall of MIT, the recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics.
- Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On - Link to Full Quote
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