The pentgon article is pasted below via this link
http://sierratimes.com/04/02/09/ar_weather.htm
This Article Published 02. 9. 04 [Feb. 9, 2004] at 22:52 Sierra Time
tallex2002 wrote:
Hi all,
the link I posted yesterday may have got cut. Here is an excerpt
Pentagon article link (free part)
The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all
national security issues.
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...
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,582584,00.html
CONTINUED ???...
...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
