>From http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17711
The Ice Age Cometh
By Thom Hartmann, Thomhartmann.com
February 1, 2004
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 has 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 the 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 land masses
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, due out from Random House/Three Rivers
Press in March.
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"The obstacles are ideological rather than political. It is the expression
of patriarchal thought that permeates everything, that makes for a one-sided
vision of society ... Not only is there tremendous ignorance of a feminist
agenda, but when it is addressed it is addressed paternalistically,
condescendingly, in welfare terms. We are lacking in
profound and serious reflection on the subject." -Sofia Montenegro,
Nicaragua
