Global warming or ice age?

[Deja Q]

Forgive me, but I hear some people talketh of global warming.

Then I turn around and I see the "Another ice age cometh" folk make their claim.

Nothing against either side, but I'm confused.

It can't be both.

Unless you mean the global warming will turn the glaciers into water that'll flood us all?

So, you vote and I'll decide: Which is more likely to happen:

(edit: spelling)

[minkyboodle]

1. actually I think it can be both can't it

A change in the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic circulation pattern would throw parts of the northern hemisphere into ice age like conditions. This could be (some would argue is being) triggered by global warmings effects on the ocean salinity (ice melting). So I say both, throw in peak oil and you've got yourself a fiesta brothers and sisters!!!!
Scott

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Exactamundo, Cunningham

Read. Weep. Repeat.

When it hits, it's gonna hit hard. My own wild-assed guess is that it will take 2-5 years to establish the pattern and less than a decade for the first ten meters of glacial ice to form.

More sober-minded scientists would scoff and lecture me that I should have doubled or tripled my numbers. And I'll accept those rebukes with an open mind and my dignity intact.

It's here. I was put wise to the impending climate change scenario in the early 80s by a friend of mine who was in a PhD program in geoscience. Wallace Broecker made the initial discoveries in the late 50s, and there were scientists as early as the 1920s who proposed that ice ages could be triggered by small changes in climatary conditions and would happen pretty quickly.

We might luck out and avoid the coming of the ice for another 50 or 100 years. Maybe even 1000. But I think that's pushing it. Our "interstadial" warm spell has lasted longer than any in the last 2 million years. We probably have sped the clock up with our pollution, but our willful disregard of climate change is setting us up for disasters that could be ameliorated or avoided.

--bkl

[brokensymmetry]

4. Good link!

Thanks for putting it in your post!

[Kool Kitty]

5. Exactly, minky.

One (the heat) will bring on the other (the cold). I just don't want to wind up like the wooly mammoths that get disgorged by retreating glaciers, with half a chewed twinkie in my mouth. This is scary stuff. And if they are even giving this matter half a mention on the news, someone other than me is taking it seriously, too. Not that I expect this administration to do anything meaningful about it.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. uh huh huh huh.... he said "bippies"

was that from Laugh-in?

[Physicist]

6. warming.

The climate models and the paleoclimate record support global warming more than cooling, as we continue to pump greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. Read this month's Scientific American. But scientists are still kicking around the "global warming causing global cooling" theory.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. No uncertainty on two things --

1. We do know that over the past 2.5 million years, there has been a very well-defined cycle of glaciations and interstadial periods -- 100,000 years and 10,000 years repectively. We are 13,000 years from the end of the last major glaciation, and just over 10,000 years from the Younger-Dryas associated "little ice age".

2. The climate over the last millenium -- since the early midieval warm spell -- has been the most steady in 600k years.

We're not prepared for more chaotic -- i.e., normal -- weather, and we're not prepared to even think about a return to the ice age.

It's my observation that the scientific community may not agree on the jots and tittles, but in the last decade, they've learned that we have had fair skies and smooth sailing for an unusually long time. Wherever we go from "perfect" is going to pose problems. They need not wipe us out, but ignoring them, as industry-funded scientists tend to do, is just idiotic.

--bkl

[Boomer]

7. How utterly depressing

Unfortunately, your confusion is symptomatic of the cavalier dismissal of this entire topic as the fantasy of wild-eyed alarmists. "Oh, they say it's this and then that, so obviosly they don't know what they're talking about, yada, yada."

However, just a few hours of research on the internet fully outlines how our current global warming is a strong precursor to the beginning of a new Ice Age. The connection is not that difficult a concept to grasp for people who are willing to pay attention, which unfortunately does not appear to be a signficant percentage of our science-challenged population.