[at-l] Follow Through On Global Warming (OT)

[gadog430 at charter.net (Gadog430)]

If you base the time that the Earth has been around on human's 24-hour time clock...humans make their appearance on Earth at 5 minutes 'til midnight. It may sound very pessimistic, but in the general scheme of things we don't matter that much. 

The Dawg, who knows one person on the list that will classify this statement alongside the 
Martin Luther King, Jr. hypothesis. An IQ of 140 will keep you single. 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bob C. 
  To: Steve Landis 
  Cc: AT-L 
  Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 10:28 PM
  Subject: Re[2]: [at-l] Follow Through On Global Warming (OT)


  here's what Fortune says in part. It doesn't sound to me like a simple war game
  scenario.

  "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 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.)...."

  Weary



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