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The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

harpers.org

21–29 of 29 posts

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key thing to remember is 'global': while the East Coast of the US has had one of the colder, snowier winters in recent history, the West Coast has just come out of a hot, dry winter. Local weather is a terrible guide to global climate.

Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a brutal winter and leaving California dry. W…

> Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.

Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful, you'll fall foul of fashionable thought and the marauding thoughtcrime enforcers. Questioning that perhaps modelled climate sensitivity to co2 has been well overstated will get you branded a heretic, a denier and earns bucket full of down votes. [1]. Even obliquely hinting that past history of scientific theorems have proven themselves to be wrong despite widespread support is dangerous territory, lest one q…

For the record, I'm voting you down for your annoyingly smug persecution complex, not for your opinion on climate models.

Brc's assessment is 100% correct. The bombastic tone of the "climate change" cult is disturbing hostile. That is because climate change proponents use propaganda to advance their self-interests. This is no different then the other disturbingly condensending and deliberately polarizing tactics then use to advance other left wing fictions. This is politics, not science.

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a brutal winter and leaving California dry. W…

> Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about. Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.

Well, being skeptical of an entire field of study is different than being skeptical of the predicted outcome. One often sounds like the other, and it is 99.99% likely that something is happening, even if we don't do a good job understanding it.

For example, regardless of "warming", we'll still have to deal with ocean acidification and all of the fallout from that.

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#24
I vaguely remember reading this article before. It's clear our planet is changing, I don't see how anyone can deny that. We can argue all day long about how much CO2 produced since the industrial revolution is affecting it, but the melt's happening either way. Even partially wrong, I think there were a lot of interesting points in that article. Thanks for posting it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/201...

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#25
post #20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the exact same thing. :) If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple of years, it would not have been implausible. The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much warmer weather around the arctic c…

The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to the current alignment. If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the…

True enough. But I am not a geophysicist or a geologist or anything even remotely close to that.

Is the article talking about the geographic poles (the rotational axis of earth) or the magnetic poles? Because I think I remember reading that the magnetic poles of earth have been moving around quite a bit over time, that the magnetic poles are (slowly) moving today at a speed that scientists can measure, and that at some point, the magnetic north pole was rather close to the rotational south pole. (Although I do not know if the location of the magnetic poles has any impact on climate.)

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about. Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.

Well, being skeptical of an entire field of study is different than being skeptical of the predicted outcome. One often sounds like the other, and it is 99.99% likely that something is happening, even if we don't do a good job understanding it. For example, regardless of "warming", we'll still have to deal with ocean acidification and all of the fallout from that.

Something is happening, its called weather. And before weather was co-opted by political agents with an agenda to control people to enrich themselves, that's all it was.

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#27
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to the current alignment. If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the…

True enough. But I am not a geophysicist or a geologist or anything even remotely close to that. Is the article talking about the geographic poles (the rotational axis of earth) or the magnetic poles? Because I think I remember reading that the magnetic poles of earth have been moving around quite a bit over time, that the magnetic poles are (slowly) moving today at a speed that scientists can measure, and that at so…

The hypothesis is that the geographical North Pole was in the Atlantic 1 million years ago, and rapidly shifted to where it is now.

The problem with the hypothesis is it doesn't answer the question (quoting from page 7):

> What started off the first Ice Age cycle?

> “We know that during the past million years, the world has swung back and forth between ice ages and weather like today’s,” Ewing and Donn told me. “Before then, the whole earth was much warmer. There were no zones of extreme heat or cold; palms and magnolias grew in Greenland, and coral around Iceland; subtropical plants thrived within eleven degrees of the North Pole. Why didn’t the Arctic Ocean-glacier ‘thermostat’ work then? What suddenly turned it on one million years ago?

(We now know there have been multiple periods of glaciation. We are now in the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which started 2.5 million years ago. The previous, the Karoo Ice Age, was 360–260 million years ago.)

It only explains why there are cycles, but if the planetary conditions were the same 3 million years ago, and there were no cycles, then the hypothesis would be in error.

Remember, in the 1950s the new theory of plate tectonics was only just coming into wide acceptance. The quote from the Harper's piece assumes that the crust moves a lot faster than the evidence found though the successive decades of research.

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a brutal winter and leaving California dry. W…

> Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about. Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.

Well, you have to be careful where you place your skepticism. Some science is complex, but some science is simple.

So when most people -- including most experts -- say "global warming", they're referring to the observed and predicted increase in the average temperature measured at the surface of the Earth. The observed trend, both the direct measurements and the inferences made about historical temperatures, is pretty solid science.

But there's another way to think about global warming, and that is the heat content of the Earth. The Earth generates a little bit of heat itself, from its radioactive core, receives a boatload more from the sun, and then radiates most of it off into space. And we're also pretty confident that a little surplus is left over. That little surplus of heat goes to heat the oceans, melt the ice caps, and also towards the atmospheric heating that we commonly refer to as "global warming".

Now, this underlying change in heat content is relatively simple. It's a lot of work to measure -- you need to keep track of how much ice there is, measure the temperature of the oceans at various places and times and depths, track atmospheric temperatures. It's also not guaranteed to be constant -- if the albedo of the Earth changes (like through there being more or less ice, or lots of dust going into the air) or the composition of the atmosphere dramatically changes, Earth will gain or lose heat at a different rate than it is now. But it's still relatively simple.

Where it gets complex is how this change in the heat content of the Earth relates to climate. There, you've got a million variables. If the oceans heat faster or slower, the atmosphere will heat faster or slower. If it affects wind currents, you can get warmer or or colder air pushed into places it doesn't normally go. If it affects the ocean currents, the climate in some parts of the world could get dramatically colder, even as the heat content of the Earth continues creep up. If it somehow magically melted all the ice first, without changing the surface or ocean temperatures, you'd have no climate change at all for about a thousand years, but the oceans would rise dozens of feet over that same time. If the atmosphere heats first, the climate would get dramatically worse but the ocean levels would stay the same.

So I think it's quite reasonable to be skeptical about any specific predictions of how the climate or the conditions on Earth will change as the Earth continues to warm -- that is complex. But I hope you aren't terribly skeptical that the Earth is warming, that its total heat content is going up -- that is much simply, much more definite. It may not be certain how this will affect the climate, but so far none of the options look good.

Re: The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

#29
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful, you'll fall foul of fashionable thought and the marauding thoughtcrime enforcers. Questioning that perhaps modelled climate sensitivity to co2 has been well overstated will get you branded a heretic, a denier and earns bucket full of down votes. [1]. Even obliquely hinting that past history of scientific theorems have proven themselves to be wrong despite widespread support is dangerous territory, lest one q…

For the record, I'm voting you down for your annoyingly smug persecution complex, not for your opinion on climate models.

I don't care about up-votes or down votes. I hope 1 person reads my comments and thinks.

Look at the parent comment - it uses name calling and labels to advance the argument. That is not science. The entire topic was raised as possibly heretical in case someone might suspect this pointed to anything but a complete and utter belief in co2 as the planetary thermostat.

People need to back away from the political bandwagon on this and start using their heads again.

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