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Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#71

Post by scarmig »

hyperbovine wrote: post #46
scarmig wrote: post #19

The Maunder minimum argument has been around awhile. A useful counterbalance from NASA 2008: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/ -------------------------- "Solar irradiance: The solar output remains low (Fig. 4), at the lowest level in the period since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s, and the time since the prior solar minimum is already 12 years, two years longer than the prior two cycles. This h…

> that's a godsend. You're saying that if the problem disappeared tomorrow, people would suddenly become more serious about combating global warming? Pardon the pun, but what on Earth makes you believe that? I don't think an ice age is really imminent, but its occurrence would be a outright calamity. We'd continue merrily down the present course, and be seventy years more fucked when the pendulum came swinging back.

Let's say we could kick it down the road 50 years--I don't believe a mini-Ice Age is coming either, and even if it is NASA for one expects it to counteract only around seven years of carbon emissions. So this is all a bunch of pointless hypotheticals. But bear with me.

50 years from now, assuming around 2% annual global growth (a conservative guess), the world will be over two and a half times richer than it is now. We'll have had 50 years of technological advancement. Given that right now the biggest roadblocks to dealing with climate change are (a) the very real costs of mitigation and (b) the lack of technological ability to cost effectively generate carbon-free energy and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, there's a decent case on the face of it that we'd be more able to deal with it, notwithstanding the couple hundred extra ppm of CO2 we'd have to worry about.

Part of my motivation is also that I'm increasingly pessimistic about us getting our shit in order in the present day. The current radically corporatist administration in the USA gives only lip service to the problem, and the opposition... well, the less said about the opposition, the better. So if the hand we're dealt is that we have to deal with climate change in the present, we're pretty much fucked. Kicking it down the road would at least offer some hope.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#72

Post by dstorrs »

wunderfool wrote: post #60
run4yourlives wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that there is nobody living on a planet like say, Mars. Last I checked, there are a whole bunch of people with nowhere else to go on Earth as it stands.

nowhere to go? really? last time i checked most of the earth's surface was uninhabited. why do people want to go to mars when the land can be had in the mojave desert for practically no cost? its just as dry but has an oxygen atmosphere, and there is virtually no demand for the land or forget about the mojave. northern canada has a population per square km that is effectively zero. pretty mars-like, but you can hunt…

A) Because every dollar invested in the US space program since inception has created about $7 of economic benefit to the consumer economy.

B) (Related to A but worth mentioning separately:) Because the space program has led to major advances in medicine that have improved length and quality of life on Earth. [1]

C) To gain access to essentially limitless energy resources via space-based solar.

D) To gain access to material resources (e.g. minerals) that are scare or absent on Earth. [2]

E) To create an off-Earth breeding population of humans so that one asteroid / plague / nuclear war / whatever cannot wipe out the entire species.

[1] Here's a simple example: When the Hubble telescope was initially launched, it had a small lens defect that blurred the pictures slightly (the pictures were still better than any Earth-based 'scope, though). Image processing software was developed to clean up the pictures until a replacement lens could be deployed. That software then migrated over to MRI machines where it is now used to detect tumors much earlier than used to be possible.

[2] These resources are better accessed from the asteroids than Mars, but going to the latter gives you access to the former.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#73

Post by J3L2404 »

ugh wrote: post #56
randallsquared wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at (b) is "We're only being saved from a mini ice-age by CO2-induced global warming, therefore it's urgent to avoid cutting emissions and plunging into it for real". The Earth has seen warmer and colder than now, but the warm extremes have been better for life than the cold extremes.

Which life? Industrial age humans? That's who we care about. Our goal is (or at least I hope it is) to enable humans to thrive, we don't really care about other life (at least if we had to pick between humans and other life) as long as it is not instrumental to our success.

;)

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#74

Post by Helianthus »

michaelpinto wrote: post #6

Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet. Right now we're still in high gear contributing to global warming, but predicting sun spot activity isn't a sure thing. I'd like to think that as techies we see not just the humanitarian potential but the business potential of energy efficiency, new storage techniques and even new sources of the s…

>Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet.

Based on what? A single sunspot may be many times the size of the earth. There is no question that if the sun "wanted to" it could do drastic things to our climate, dwarfing any mechanism on the earth, man-made or no. Predicting sun spot activity is on the same level of difficulty as predicting the climate, after all: chaotic systems.

I don't question your overal premise; carbon-based global warming isn't going to just "go away." I'm also in favor of embracing 'disruptive' technologies.

But your language comparing sunspots to global warming seems inadequate, somehow.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#75

Post by ellyagg »

michaelpinto wrote: post #6

Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet. Right now we're still in high gear contributing to global warming, but predicting sun spot activity isn't a sure thing. I'd like to think that as techies we see not just the humanitarian potential but the business potential of energy efficiency, new storage techniques and even new sources of the s…

> Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet.

What possible basis could you have for making this judgment? I dearly hope that folks aren't going to accept only the science that agrees with their previous public policy goals. In the face of new evidence, one's opinions are required to change.

For my part, an ice age is more scary to me than a hot age. I can't quite tell if that's just because I personally hate cold weather or if my observation that humans seem to thrive more easily in warmer weather is a fact.

Incidentally, that global warming happens is a sure thing. The magnitude and effects of global warming aren't any more of a sure thing than predicting sun spot activity.

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#76

Post by scott_s »

nathanb wrote: post #35
run4yourlives wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably easier to just colonize other planets than it is to go farting around with something as delicate as Earth's climate.

Wouldn't this then require us to "fart around" with the climate of the planets we colonize to make them more like Earth's?

See last week's submission, "Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#77

Post by RuadhanMc »

Hawramani wrote: post #57

Reading the comments on here and many other places about global warming, it makes me sad that nobody is open-minded enough to entertain the possibility that an increase in the Earth's temperature could be a positive-sum change. We know very little about the Earth's natural cycles and the effects we have on them, so we are very far from knowing whether things are going in a good* or bad direction. * Good for everyone…

It is probably because people are comfortable with the familiar. Sure, a warmer earth might be a positive-sum change, but there's an equally good chance that it won't be. So why take the risk of losing what you have if you can avoid it?

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#78

Post by ChuckMcM »

My comment from the other link: reference: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

Some more sensational coverage in The Register [1]. The correlation between low sunspot activity and the 'mini ice-age' is well documented, its not proven that solar activity caused that ice age, but it looks like we are getting a chance to run the experiment again.

I'm continuing to follow are reports from the STEREO mission [2]. After reading this paper [3] on the correlation between geomagnetic activity on the sun and terrestrial temperatures.

BTW, the last chart in that paper is pretty amazing.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/

[2] http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

[3] http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..9...

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#79

Post by dolvlo »

hugh3 wrote: post #10

This is exactly why I think the debate should be less about "how can we as humans stop affecting Earth's natual climate" and "how can we as humans gain control over Earth's natural climate". Climate change happens with us or without us. If we're going to protect our huge investments in climate-dependent infrastructure (i.e. cities) then we're gonna want (say) giant space mirrors to compensate for any zany things that…

This sounds like a horrible idea; you can't backup the planet and revert if shit hits the fan (and it does, it always finds a way).

Re: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

#80

Post by Daniel14 »

AndyKelley wrote: post #20
hugh3 wrote: post #10

This is exactly why I think the debate should be less about "how can we as humans stop affecting Earth's natual climate" and "how can we as humans gain control over Earth's natural climate". Climate change happens with us or without us. If we're going to protect our huge investments in climate-dependent infrastructure (i.e. cities) then we're gonna want (say) giant space mirrors to compensate for any zany things that…

"The political problem of who gets to control the Earth's thermostat is, of course, a tricky one." Understatement of the year. Can you imagine?

I could imagine it, as always, being the guys that paid for it.
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