So what's the word in Sudden Climate change, is it real?, page 1

So what's the word in Sudden Climate change, is it real?, page

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Topic started on 3-4-2004 @ 06:54 AM by Muaddib

A year ago or two most scientists would have said sudden climate change is just another "new age scare tactic. It doesn't really happen, and only new agers believe in it." Just a couple of scientists would have said "off record" that sudden climate change have happened in the past and will most likely happen in the future.

It has only been recently that scientists are saying that sudden climate change is not only possible, but is the most likely scenario to occur in our future. More than that, most scientists agree that extreme weather changes in our not so distant future are a worse threat than terrorism.

World Bank, Pentagon: global warming red alert
Weather of mass destruction bigger threat than terrorism

Sun 22 February 2004
UNITED STATES/Washington, DC

A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The political capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the US and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons. Sound like the ravings of doom-saying environmental extremists? It's actually from a report commissioned by the Pentagon on how to ready America for the coming climate Armageddon.

Excertp taken from.
www.greenpeace.org...

What is it that is making the weather so crazy lately, and is it a sign of things to come? Is the weather going to get worse?

Some scientists believe now that the Earth goes through sudden climate changes on her own, but it could also be true that human activity may hasten, and worsen the effects of climate change. There are scientists that would say its only a natural occurrance, while others concur with the theory that human intervention can hasten and worsen sudden climate change.

No matter in which side of the debate they find themselves, they are all reaching the same conclusion.

Sudden climate change is real and it seems we are in one already, althou they don't know how long before the boat tips over and sinks. It is possible that we have 20 years or it could happen in a year from now. One thing is for certain, it will happen.

Every year we keep hearing and seeing in the news how strange and unpredictable the weather has become, and every year we have record storms and temperature that surpass those records we had in the past.

One thing scientists agree on, nomatter which side they take, is that the world's weather is affected by the north atlantic current. This current is what keeps a mild climate on northern territories and also helps on keeping a warm summer in such places as most of Europe, Canada, the northern part of the US etc, by pushing warm currents north.

This north Atlantic current is fed by the warm currents from the Ecuador and by the cold currents from the North Pole, but in recent years scientists have seen that the glaciers from the north pole are dissapearing at an alarmic rate, since 1972 more than 40% of the ice covering the north pole are gone, the same is happening to antartica, it is predicted that in our not so distant future, could be a year from now or 10 years from now there will be a new navegable ocean where the glaciers of the north pole are.

IS ARCTIC SEA ICE RAPIDLY THINNING?

Greg Holloway and Tessa Sou

Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC, Canada

ABSTRACT

Reports based on submarine sonar data have suggested Arctic sea ice has thinned nearly by half in only recent decades. Such rapid thinning is a concern for detection of global change and for Arctic regional impacts. Re-examining the inferred thinning while including atmospheric timeseries, ocean currents, rivers runoff, and modelled physics of ocean-ice-snow, we find that inferred rapid thinning was unlikely. Varying winds, which rapidly redistribute Arctic ice, create a difficult sampling problem, dominated by a recurring pattern where ice is expelled from the central Arctic while thickening in the Canadian sector. Timing and cruise tracks of then submarine surveys missed this mode of Arctic variability.

Excerpt taken from.
adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca...

Not only that but salinity plays a big role in keeping this North Atlantic current flowing also, and a small change in salinity will also affect the current, and as the glaciers from the north melt the salinity of the water changes.

As fresh water dilutes the salt in the North Atlantic, the water becomes less dense. And if the water arriving from the south can't sink even after it cools off, it won't make room for the next batch. By putting the brakes on this circulation, "fresher water in the North Atlantic could be real trouble," says Dan Seidov of Pennsylvania State University.

Igor Yashayaev, a Canada-based researcher working with Dickson, figures the lowered salinity is equivalent to adding a layer of fresh water 12 feet deep to the North Atlantic. Experts are unsure whether it is coming from heavier rain and river runoff or melting of Arctic glaciers and sea ice. Nor do they know whether the cause is a natural climate cycle, global warming due to human activity, or some mix of the two. And they don't know exactly how much additional fresh water it would take to push the Atlantic over the edge and cause its circulation to collapse.

Excerpts taken from.
www.usnews.com...

How would we know it has started?
Scientists agree in this that it will all start in the North Pole and those regions closer to the north, and the south pole is also affected.

YANRAKYNNOT, Russia � The native elders have no explanation. Scientists are perplexed as well. The icy realm of the Eskimo � the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland � has started to thaw.

Thunder and lightning, once rare, have become commonplace. An eerie warm wind now blows in from the south. Hunters who prided themselves on their ability to read the sky say they no longer can predict the sudden blizzards.

In recent years, seabirds have washed up dead by the thousands and deformed seal pups have become a common sight. Whales appear sick and undernourished. The walrus, a mainstay of the local diet, is becoming scarce, as are tundra rabbits.

The elders, who keep thousands of years of history and legend without ever writing it down, have long told children this story: If the ice that freezes thick over the sea each winter breaks up before summer, the entire village could perish.

Even Zoya Telpina, the schoolteacher in this outpost of 350 Chukchi reindeer herders and marine mammal hunters, said a winter sea without ice seemed like "a fairy tale."

But last winter, when Telpina looked from her kitchen window toward the Bering Sea, she saw something she'd never seen in her 38 years: the dark swell of the open ocean, water where there had always been ice.

Excerpt taken from.
www.commondreams.org...

The American Navy and some others are already making plans on how to defend that new ocean, but that's not the first concern for all nations in the northern hemisphere.

Global Warming

The most alarming trend yet is that of global warming. Though it has seen its share of denial, it�s very obvious in the measurable fact that the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland has started to thaw. In the last century, parts of the Arctic have warmed by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, 10 times the global average. Sea ice covers 15% less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago, and that ice has thinned from an average of 10 feet to less than 6. The U.S. Navy is already planning for an ice-free Arctic, exploring ways to defend the previously ice-clogged Northwest Passage from attack by sea! This year�s drought, which affected 46 counties in New York, New York City, and all of New Jersey is our most palpable example of this alarming climate change.

Excerpt taken from.
www.fcwc.org...

When the glaciers don't have enough strength to keep sending cold currents to the south, the current will collapse on the north and the current will stay in a small zone in the Ecuador. When this happens all of the northern nations will experience longer and colder weather which will not only disrupt those nations in the north but will cause drought in many sections of the ecuador or mild temperature zones.

Imagine prolonged drought in the mideast of the US, where farms feed more than half of the population of the world. All countries found in the northern hemisphere will be colder and their summers will be almost none-existant. There will be masss evacuations as people flee to more temperate areas and where food and water is obtainable.

This will cause nations to go to wars over water, food and territory as the north becomes a frigid zone. Water wars will be the first we will see.

The Pentagon predictions come as early as 2007... a mere three years from now.

"By 2007 violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south," the report read.

Mega-droughts will affect the world's major breadbaskets, including America's Midwest, where strong winds bring soil loss, is also among the report's warnings.

Excerpts taken from.
www.sunstar.com.ph...

Is there something we can do to stop this?

All the data is showing that, first of all, it seems to be normal for the Earth to go through these sudden catasthrophes, but that man has greatly increased the effects of the sudden climate change we have entered. The question is not whether it will happen anymore, it is going to happen. Now we can only speculate as to how severe it will be, and how soon and how can we be prepared for it.

reply posted on 3-4-2004 @ 08:46 AM by Muaddib

The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change
Physics Today ^ | March 2004 | Spencer Weart

Posted on 03/07/2004 2:20:49 AM PST by BabaOreally

How fast can our planet's climate change? Too slowly for humans to notice, according to the firm belief of most scientists through much of the 20th century. Any shift of weather patterns, even the Dust Bowl droughts that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s, was seen as a temporary local excursion. To be sure, the entire world climate could change radically: The ice ages proved that. But common sense held that such transformations could only creep in over tens of thousands of years. In the 1950s, a few scientists found evidence that some of the great climate shifts in the past had taken only a few thousand years. During the 1960s and 1970s, other lines of research made it plausible that the global climate could shift radically within a few hundred years. In the 1980s and 1990s, further studies reduced the scale to the span of a single century. Today, there is evidence that severe change can take less than a decade. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has called this reorientation in the thinking of scientists a veritable "paradigm shift." The new paradigm of abrupt global climate change, the committee reported in 2002, "has been well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policymakers."1

Much earlier in the 20th century, some specialists had evidence of abrupt climate change in front of their eyes. The evidence was meaningless to them. To appreciate change occurring within 10 years as significant, scientists first had to accept the possibility of change within 100 years. That, in turn, had to wait until they accepted the 1000-year time scale. The history of this evolution gives a good example of the stepwise fashion in which science commonly proceeds, contrary to the familiar heroic myths of discoveries springing forth in an instant. The history also suggests why, as the NAS committee worried, most people still fail to realize just how badly the world's climate might misbehave.

Excerpt taken from.
209.157.64.200...

Is the increasingly noticeable abrupt climate change we are in right now happening only on Earth. Could there be other causes outside of the Earth that are worsening the climate change in our blue planet?

Pluto

Puzzling Pluto Observations Reveal 'Drastic' Changes Atmosphere
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 03:25 pm ET
16 August 2002

Clever new observations of Pluto as it passed in front of a distant star reveal that the planet's thin atmosphere has cooled over the past 14 years while the surface seems to be getting warmer.

Astronomers are puzzled by the changes, which have occurred during a time when Pluto is moving farther from the Sun during its 248-year orbit. They said the results could only be fully explained by a robotic mission to Pluto, a project many astronomers are lobbying for but which NASA has put on the back burner.

Excerpt taken from.
www.space.com...

Mars

The martian ice caps are shrinking. As they are made mostly of frozen carbon dioxide, this evaporation could trigger an increase in Mars' own greenhouse effect.

Images from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show that ice ridges and escarpments have retreated over the past two years or so. The orbiting probe has also captured the ice thickening and thinning with the passing seasons.

The reason for the change is not yet clear. But it means that Mars' climate may be changing. "These observations," say Michael Malin and co-workers at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, "suggest that the present martian environment is neither stable nor typical of the past."

Excerpt taken from.
www.nature.com...

Mars Ski Report: Snow is Hard, Dense and Disappearing
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 02:00 pm ET
06 December 2001

Mars would make a lousy host for the Winter Olympics. Yes, there's the lack of air to consider. But more important, Martian snow turns out to be rock hard. Worse, it is melting away at an alarming rate.

In fact, Mars may be in the midst of a period of profound climate change, according to a new study that shows dramatic year-to-year losses of snow at the south pole.

Excerpt taken from.
www.space.com...

Jupiter

Amazing Blue Band Around Jupiter!
Presenter: Mike Corkill

Researcher: Kate Follington

Wednesday, 3 March 2004

Strange blue band around Jupiter (courtesy NASA)

An Amazing Disturbance In Jupiter's Clouds.....

It is a very elongated, bluish streak that runs along the interface of the dark South Equatorial Belt.

The first hint that that something unusual was taking place in the cloudy Jovian atmosphere came from Spanish amateur when he reported that a small, bicolored feature was formingt in the Southern Hemisphere a little over2 weeks ago. NOW, this disturbance has stretched, what looks like, right around the planet!

At the moment it's too early to be sure of the nature of this disturbance or its potential evolution. The wide band shown on the photograph could, quite easily measure, 3-4 times the diameter of the Earth!

Although Jupiter has, in the past, produced some unusual upper cloud features, nothing like this has ever been seen before!

Excerpt taken from.
www.abc.net.au...

We seems to be witnessing changes not only on Earth recently but throughout the solar system. From the inner planets to the outermost planets. Even the sun as of late has been acting up. What is going on?

Is the sun the one making all the extreme weather patterns we are witnessing in the Solar system?

The extreme changes we have seen on Earth up to date seems to be happening all over the Solar system. Human activities seem to have helped make things worse for us on Earth but the source of these extreme changes all over the Solar system is open to speculation.

�Very, very few people are aware of the work that is being done in the Russian National Academy of Sciences in Siberia, specifically in Novosibirsk, where they are doing this research. They�ve come to the conclusion that the only possible thing that could be causing this energetic change all throughout the solar system is that we are moving into an area of energy that is different - that is higher. The glowing plasma at the leading edge of our solar system has recently increased 1000 percent.

Excerpt taken from.
www.mysterious-america.net...

SUN: The Sun�s magnetic field is over 230 percent stronger now than it was at the beginning of the 1900s, and its overall energetic activity has sizably increased, creating a frenzy of activity that continues to embarrass NASA�s official predictions.

VENUS: Venus is now glowing in the dark, as is Jupiter�s moon Io.

EARTH: In the last 30 years, Earth�s icecaps have thinned out by as much as 40 percent. Quite inexplicably, just since 1997 the structure of the Earth has shifted from being slightly more egg-shaped, or elongated at the poles, to more pumpkin-shaped, or flattened at the poles. No one at NASA has even bothered to try to explain this yet. www.gsfc.nasa.gov...

MARS: The icecaps of Mars noticeably melted just within one year, causing 50-percent changes in surface features. Atmospheric density had risen by 200 percent above previous observations as of 1997.

JUPITER: Jupiter has become so highly energized that it is now surrounded by a visibly glowing donut tube of energy in the path of the moon Io. The size of Jupiter�s magnetic field has more than doubled since 1992.

SATURN: Saturn�s polar regions have been noticeably brightening, and its magnetic field strength increasing.

URANUS: According to NASA�s Voyager II space probe, Uranus and Neptune both appear to have had recent magnetic pole shifts � 60 degrees for Uranus and 50 for Neptune.

NEPTUNE: Neptune has become 40 percent brighter in infrared since 1996, and is fully 100-percent brighter in certain areas. Also, Neptune�s moon Triton has had a �very large percentage increase� in atmospheric pressure and temperature, comparable to a 22-degree Fahrenheit increase on Earth.

PLUTO: As of September 2002, Pluto has experienced a 300-percent increase in its atmospheric pressure in the last 14 years, while also becoming noticeably darker in color.

Excerpts taken from.
www.crawford2000.co.uk...

Is what the Russians suspect true, or is there another cause for all of the strange weather patterns we see in our Solar system?

reply posted on 3-4-2004 @ 09:42 AM by Ambient Sound

Nice stuff. Now these are the type of things that really worry me.

You might defeat your enemies, but if nature turns on you there is not much you can do.

reply posted on 3-4-2004 @ 10:26 PM by Seekerof

I personally think that it is because of the increased Solar Flare/Sunspot activity.

seekerof

reply posted on 4-4-2004 @ 01:38 AM by Muaddib

It is very possible Seeker of, and you are right Ambient. However i think this is just as important as what terorrists are doing. Two things we have to keep our eyes on.

Since 1998 i am a listener to Art Bell's coast to coast. He wrote a book in 1997 with Whitler Strieber, i forgot the name of the book, the one i have is "The Quickening."

Back then rapid climate change was still taboo and "officially" science said it was bs. There is a movie being done that takes the info from the book and what the pentagon has found. It is called The Day After Tomorrow.

You can find a link to a trailer of this movie at.

www.thedayaftertomorrow.com...

This movie pretty much predicts the worse case scenario that the Pentagon thinks will happen once the North Atlantic current stops.

As i was listening tonight to Art Bell he said something that he was reading from the news that scientists have just found that carbon dioxide has increased dramatically and seems to be out of control. He mentioned that measurements were done at 14,000 ft, but as always he doesn't say from where he got this info from.

I have tried to find any links with this info, but had no luck as of yet. If anyone knows where this info is please post it.

More often than not I know that Art Bell and George Noory talk of things in the news sometimes before anyone else. I do not listen to all their programs as there are some topics i don't fully ..."agree with" but on the overall they present pretty good interviews in different topics.

reply posted on 4-4-2004 @ 01:51 AM by Springer

"Dune" is one of my favorite works of fiction so here's to your "name"...

I am familiar with Bell and Streiber's book as well and frankly don't beleive it holds much water. Many of their predictions simply have not come to pass and the "science" behind the global warming rancor has been proven ludicrous.

Astrocreep, (a Moderator on this board) is a genuine scientist in this field and has lots of good, solid, research and fact on this subject.

While I am certainly NOT an expert I have looked at both sides of this and made my own decision based on the REAL evidence sited.

Like you said Mssrs. Bell and Streiber continuously site "non existent" factoids to make their story "play"...

That being said, if it is real we ARE SCREWED and there is nothing much we can do about it. That in and of itself makes it fascinating to me. I look forward to the movie.

PEACE...
m...

reply posted on 4-4-2004 @ 04:14 AM by Muaddib

Springer, that's a great movie, isn't it? (Dune)

The thing with Their book is that back then science was saying that the weather was still acting normal and that there is no such thing as sudden Earth changes, things have gotten worse, and now everything they said could happen is being acknowledged by many scientists.

There are some things I don't agree with with our current administration, and one of those things is that they think this is not a big threat, but as the information i have posted states, scientists from various fields think otherwise.

I think Art bell and Streiber did a service to most Americans and others, by showing them that global warming is a "real threat."

I am not a geologist, or am i an expert in any Earth science. Tonight Art made an interview with Paleontologist Peter Ward, who does think that what Bell's and Strieber's book describes is the most likely scenario.

Art Bell had the guts to bring this to the public and that's good. I read the Quickening and i don't think he is too far from the truth either, then again imo as well as that of many scientists.

We keep seeing the weather acting stranger and stranger.

[Edited on 4-4-2004 by Muaddib]

[Edited on 4-4-2004 by Muaddib]

reply posted on 4-4-2004 @ 04:47 AM by Muaddib

Found this link with more info on Sudden climate change and a model of how the North Atlantic current keeps the northern regions of the world warm in summer and mild in winter.

New Study Links Ocean Salinity to Climate Change

Mar 14, 2004, 18:21

New Study Links Ocean Salinity to Climate Change

Image Credit: US Global Change Research Program
Scientists from the University of California Davis have released a report showing salinity levels have decreased in the North Atlantic and increased in the tropical Atlantic in the last 50 years. This would indicate a slowing of the ocean circulation system which transports salt water and heat to the Northern Hemisphere. The scientists suggest this trend could reach a threshold which would produce radical climate changes.

From the UC Davis press release:
�Geology graduate student Matthew Schmidt, left, and Professor Howard Spero of UC Davis are studying elevated Caribbean salinity levels to understand bigger issues of global warming. (Mary Graziose/UC Davis Department of Geology photo)

A new study from the University of California shows, for the first time, that the deep-ocean circulation system of the north Atlantic, which controls ice-age cycles of cold and warm periods in the Northern Hemisphere, is integrally coupled to salinity levels in the Caribbean Sea.

This research reinforces concerns that global warming, by melting the glacial ice of Greenland, could quickly and profoundly change salinity and temperatures in the north Atlantic Ocean. One consequence might be much colder weather in northern Europe and Britain and perhaps even in eastern Canada and the U.S. northeast.