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Let me to be the person to say the Emperor has no clothes.

I do not think that in the event of abrupt climate change that mankind will have the available resources to impliment a solution like seeding sulfur into the upper atmosphere, or launch sun shades into orbit.

First, I suggest anyone reading this look up the phrase "rapid climate change" or "abrupt climate change" in google. It is unintuitive that climate change is not gradual or linear. Outside of the scientific community it is a little known fact that when forced, the climate historically changes from one stable state to another abruptly.

Second, I suggest a person interested in learning would happen if the climate suddenly changed from the mild climate we've enjoyed for the last ten thousand years called the Holocene, to a hotter dryer climate that has been responsible for mass extinctions in the past, learn about past civilians that have suffered relatively mild droughts during the Holocene.

It is difficult to imagine, because people now are so removed from where their food comes from, and from the heat of summer. Supermarkets and air conditioners. In the event of an abrupt climate change, there will be difficulty growing food, and producing enough energy to keep everyone cool.

Third, if industrialized countries are whinning about their economy hurting my the small gradual cuts in greenhouse gas emission, imagine how they would react if they knew the large fast cuts they would have to make to avoid aburpt climate change.

Worse, think of their reaction if had to do that while suffering from a suddenly hotter dryer climate. Their economy would already be in a depression. Their energy needs would soar trying to run all those air conditioners.

Finally, imagine countries that are at each other's throats over resources trying to cooperate over a program that would cost trillions of dollars, and take years to impliment. I highly doubt that the world will prepare to pollute the upper atmosphere with sulfur, or shoot millions of shades into space, before the crisis hits. The IPCC calls it a low probability event-I beg to differ, but who listens to us global warming alarmists??

Yeah, the world is having big trouble just agreeing on rather painless small gradual cuts in emission. I doubt a climate crisis will make it any easier to reach a much more difficult agreement. Forget about it. It will be every man for himself. Every country for itself, with any resources used for crisis managment.

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Quote:
if the climate suddenly changed from the mild climate we've enjoyed for the last ten thousand years
Google
"Maunder Minimum" 90,800 hits

Jamestown was frozen out by -40 degree winters. Get a map and see where Jamestown is. The intractible cold wet weather of the Middle Ages until the 19th century moved England from growing cereals to root vegetables (and ending wine in favor of beer when grapes dating from Roman times would no longer grow). France stayed with cereals and starved, precipitating the French Revolution. Ireland got it good and hard when French and English potato imports from Mexico brought the local pathogen along for the ride.

You are a cement tunnel echoing noise. You know nothing. Melt the North Pole and Canada makes a fortune by modestly taxing shipping through its Northwest Passage. The rest of the world makes a much bigger fortune from saved shipping costs, lowered fuel consumption, and contingent lessened CO2 emissions. Capitalism means everybody benefits.

Globalization - universal opportunity creates pandemic poverty because only workers have money to spend.


Uncle Al
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http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz3.pdf
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Uncle Al ... events from the past do not presage events in the future. You can, no doubt, find an isolated example somewhere to prove any point you wish to make.

Which is morally equivalent to interpreting the bible.

I never thought you capable of merging the theological methodology into a scientific discourse.


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what was wrong with the first post?

lets see if i can find them all.

Quote:
First, I suggest anyone reading this look up the phrase "rapid climate change" or "abrupt climate change" in google. It is unintuitive that climate change is not gradual or linear. Outside of the scientific community it is a little known fact that when forced, the climate historically changes from one stable state to another abruptly
according to the graphs that da and others used to bring out to prove the connection between co2 and temperature changes (until i pointed out that the co2 followed the temperature by atleast a century), the "abrupt" changes usually take about 3 to 4 centuries. not that abrupt. The only graph that was every used that showed an abrupt change was the much disgraced Mann hockey stick graph.

As da pointed out, there are isolated examples that can, if streached, be able to argue your point.

Quote:
Second, I suggest a person interested in learning would happen if the climate suddenly changed from the mild climate we've enjoyed for the last ten thousand years called the Holocene, to a hotter dryer climate that has been responsible for mass extinctions in the past, learn about past civilians that have suffered relatively mild droughts during the Holocene.
the last 10000 years have been something of an anomoly. the great majority of earths history, the temperature has been much higher. the majority of the time that it was not higher, it was considerably colder, with evidence that ice cover the entire earth at least once. Life existed just fine when the temperature was higher. It was only when the ice covered the equator that there was a problem with life surviving, in fact only single cell sea life survived.

the greatest extinctions did not occur because the temperature went up (life adjusted), but because the temperature fell, such as when Mount Toba exploded 75000 years ago and 80 percent of life died, including all but about 1000 of our ancestors. They did not die due to the heat, but from the freeze caused by the so2 that was pumped into the upper atmosphere in a matter of a couple to 4 days.

another possible example is the dinosars, but there is some argument that it was not the cold that killed them, but disease, or other things. Ive read about many of these theories, but dont have the evidence to be conpletely convienced in any of them.

Quote:
It is difficult to imagine, because people now are so removed from where their food comes from, and from the heat of summer. Supermarkets and air conditioners. In the event of an abrupt climate change, there will be difficulty growing food, and producing enough energy to keep everyone cool.
some areas would need more cooling, but other areas that need cooling would not need it.

also some areas that cant produce food, due to the lack of a decent growing season would, plus areas that dont get rain would, allowing them to produce more food.

Quote:
Third, if industrialized countries are whinning about their economy hurting my the small gradual cuts in greenhouse gas emission, imagine how they would react if they knew the large fast cuts they would have to make to avoid aburpt climate change.
1st off, the cuts are not as gradual as you make them sound.

2nd, its more the fact that those cuts would do little in comparison with what good it might concieveably do, and the cost compared to the gain. They are talking about a 100 percent cut, which means that we would have to stop driving cars, stop using all carbon based energy plants, and get rid of the majority of the animals that produce co2.

3) all of this assumes that man is the cause, save the much disgraced Mann hockey stick graphs, and a few graphs like the ones that i mention, and a bunch of models that have to have their data continually adjusted, there is no evidence that man is causing any change in the temperature of the planet. There is even data that suggest the planet is cooling rather than heating.

Quote:
Yeah, the world is having big trouble just agreeing on rather painless small gradual cuts in emission. I doubt a climate crisis will make it any easier to reach a much more difficult agreement. Forget about it. It will be every man for himself. Every country for itself, with any resources used for crisis managment.
how painless is it to get rid of all cars, train, farm tractors and electric companies.

people talk about how little we have to get rid of, yet they dont see that it would destroy the worlds economy to do so. Millions if not billions would die from lack of food, because we could not grow the crops, or get them to market if we did. just using more efficent engines will not do the trick, it would require that ever industrial nation turn itself in to a preindustiral one to meet the criteria that GWA say is so easy to achieve.

ive yet to hear one GWA say how we are going to reduce the emission as much. its the same thing as a politician promising to raise benifits to everyone, yet at the same time reduce taxes to everyone. cant be done.

the biggest problem with this is that there is no evidence to back it up. no data, just another political lackey pumping more unproven hype into the stream.


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dehammer wrote:
"the "abrupt" changes usually take about 3 to 4 centuries."

No they don't. Look I am trying really hard not to explicitly tell you what I know to be true so lets try a softer approach. Where did you find this value that you claim to be valid?

And for those who still can't figure out what I am thinking. There will NEVER be a response with a link because no such thing exists. When we talk about abrupt changes ... the last one of record resulted in quick-frozen Mammoths in Siberia. And that was quite a bit longer ago than 300-400 years.

You keep putting 'em up dehammer and I'll just keep knocking them down. Don't you ever learn?


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DA:

"When we talk about abrupt changes ... the last one of record resulted in quick-frozen Mammoths in Siberia. And that was quite a bit longer ago than 300-400 years."

An explanation I read years ago about frozen mammoths suggestd they had been trapped in avalanches, fallen into snow drifts or through ice into bogs or lakes. No need to postulate rapid changes in climate. As you say though even 300-400 years is hardly really rapid.

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G'day all,

One parting post.

A thread about climate that most interested me, the flips between glaciations and interglacial periods and the time they took. 3 years!

Well actually there is evidence that suggests it might have been seven but centuries ... huh!

It takes centuries for 2 km thick ice sheets to melt but very little time at all to switch from vast areas that are covered by snow 9 or 10 months of the year to be snow free year round. And the evidence was available in the 70s that it took between three and seven years for the last glaciation to end. It was just very hard to find. Since then, ocean sediments have re-inforced the very rapid change.

But a change from an interglacial period to a hotter one? That's something that has not occurred in this Ice Age (ie for the last 3 million years). Would this be rapid? Well it would depend if you thought the two were different states of relatively stable self-correcting climate conditions.

Interglacial periods seem to be self limiting. Glacial periods not so much so. That might explain why for the past three million years, all but a few thousand have been glaciations rather than interglacial periods. It would be really good to this discussion if anyone knew why the flips occur in the first place but as far as I know, no one does.

So what limits interglacial periods from getting much hotter than we have now? If it gets hotter, you get much greater evaporation. Not at the tropics which do not change much at all, but at the near tropics and mid latitudes. This is one of the big questions about CO2 and just what it does as a greenhouse gas. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas but it can also make the whole planet much colder if there is too much of it in the air.

More heat, more evaporation, more water vapour, more clouds. The question is what type of clouds? Are they going to be reflective or absorb heat? I wouldn't have a clue and since this is the least understood area of climate, no one else does either. But one thing is certain, if you added say 2 degrees Celcius to the earth's temperature you will raise sea levels by somewhere around 12 metres. You then have the problem that plate techtonics says that more weight over a plate and some of it "pops" up in compensation. So you don't really get 12 metre increases. But you get somewhere around that. That is not the same as the doomsday predictions of sea level rises of as much as 500 metres (yes, I've seen a prediction with that really stupid figure on the front page of a major newspaper - and not the National Enquirer type either).

So 12 metres is it. No matter how much you melt, that's as far as you can go with the continents and land masses we currently have. This has a huge effect on evaporation and it will rain much more in a great many areas. Do you think this will cause drought? I believe it would, in some places. But overall, because of the spread of continents, the arable land area would go through the roof, mostly in third world countries.

So, starving because of it getting warmer? Hardly.

Of course, all of this pre-supposes that the warming is not some "tipping point" that results in a runaway warming of the earth. If you really want to scare people, and it would appear that there are many that do, then you compare our current situation with Venus, and suggest that the world would just keep getting warmer until the water boiled off the earth. Of course, this goes against everything we understand about climate variation over the entire history of THIS planet, but, hey, we're trying to scare people into doing the right thing. Global warming is going to destroy the earth. So what if we lie about what might happen so we can get some action. The last couple of lines were sarcasm by the way.

With that I take my leave. Adios.


Richard


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I remember reading about a scientist who had been looking at ice cores and he thought they showed that a climate could flip in as little as a year.

Can't find the reference now, but Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters, Chief Meteorologist, The Weather Underground says the following:

"In the debate on climate change, we are used to hearing about climate changes on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years. But since the early 1990s, a radical shift in the scientific understanding of Earth's climate history has occurred. We now know that that major regional and global climate shifts as recently as 8200 years ago have occurred in just a few decades or even a single year. If an abrupt climate change of similar magnitude happened today, it would have severe consequences for humans and natural ecosystems. Although scientists consider an abrupt climate change unlikely in the next 100 years, they concede that their understanding of the phenomena is so incomplete that such a change could be triggered at any time by natural processes or by human-caused global warming."


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See:

http://www.wunderground.com/education/abruptclimate.asp

for a more complete exploration of the science.

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TNZ wrote:
"An explanation I read years ago about frozen mammoths suggestd they had been trapped in avalanches, fallen into snow drifts or through ice into bogs or lakes."

That explanation must be incorrect for the following reason. Some of those frozen mammoths were found with green grass in the mouths and plants from temperate climates in their stomachs. All of which are incompatible with any conceivable avalanche.

That said if you can find a reference to the explanation I'd like to review it.


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Also,

Richard, you should stay. Your posts are well thought out and interesting (if a little too verbose). I have been moved from feeling sure, to a more fragile position on anthropomorphic Global Warming and have appreciated your input.

And what's more, you have carried yourself with dignity and self control when receiving insult or short shrift (even from me, which I regret). You are obviously a very nice guy.

This site sometimes does suffer from a lack of real discussion and hops over to an adversarial MO, but that will not be helped if people like you move on.

This site will be poorer for your depature.

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Please stay Richard.

But please try brevity and please try posting links so that we can discern what is personal opinion from that which is researched/verifiable fact.


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Quote:
Originally posted by DA Morgan:
dehammer wrote:
"the "abrupt" changes usually take about 3 to 4 centuries."

No they don't. Look I am trying really hard not to explicitly tell you what I know to be true so lets try a softer approach. Where did you find this value that you claim to be valid?

And for those who still can't figure out what I am thinking. There will NEVER be a response with a link because no such thing exists. When we talk about abrupt changes ... the last one of record resulted in quick-frozen Mammoths in Siberia. And that was quite a bit longer ago than 300-400 years.

You keep putting 'em up dehammer and I'll just keep knocking them down. Don't you ever learn?
they have yet to figure precisely how it died and froze so fast.

once again i say there are a few times when there were rapid changes, but most of those are related to things such as volcano's and very large ice dams bursting at the right place.

as you pointed out, there are always things that go against the norm. Mount Toba is an example of an extream change.

the next time yellowstone erupts it will also cause a massive sudden climate. When the ice dams burst something like 8 thousand years ago, they shut the atlantic belt down for a few years. that also cause a massive fast change in the global temperature.

unfortuantely, he was not refering to these events. he was refering to normal change. these are not fast changes but take centuries.

unfortuantely i did not keep the graph that one of the gwa on this forum put up showing the ice core readings.

admittedly you try to knock them down, but your aim is off more often than not. which for some reason you are never aware of the miss.


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Quote:
Originally posted by DA Morgan:
TNZ wrote:
"An explanation I read years ago about frozen mammoths suggestd they had been trapped in avalanches, fallen into snow drifts or through ice into bogs or lakes."

That explanation must be incorrect for the following reason. Some of those frozen mammoths were found with green grass in the mouths and plants from temperate climates in their stomachs. All of which are incompatible with any conceivable avalanche.

That said if you can find a reference to the explanation I'd like to review it.
there are two known rapid climate change events that occured in that time frame. one was the ice dam breaking, and another was a super volcano eruption in the same general latitude. either could have cause a snowstorm that could have caused a large amount of ice and snow to form above a normally temporate valley. The grass and plants would still be there, with the valley protecting it to a certain degree, until the avalance buried the mammoth. Neither would have required the extream temperature changes that other theories have suggested.

Rics, yes, i know of the one reversal that took only a few years but again, most of the changes have taken longer. I cant recall if it was there was any evidence linking or refuting a link between one of the cataclismic events (such as super valcano, or ice dam breaking at the right point). Seven years to me sounds like super valcanos.


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dehammer wrote:
"they have yet to figure precisely how it died and froze so fast."

That wasn't the point of what I wrote so please don't try to change the subject. The point was that our 300-400 year figure was smoke and mirrors. I asked you to provide a link ... you didn't. And we all know because you couldn't. Thank you for confirming that fact.


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actaully that is the point. you claim that there is evidence that changes happen within minutes and use the mammoth as proof.

why is it that you and others can make massively absurd statements and never back it up, yet you claim that others that dont have the data at their fingertips are wrong to debate you.

you have never shown a single sign of any quick change that did not occur as the result of a catasthophic event, yet you claim these are the norm. The last time anyone came up with a graph that they claimed showed this, proved in doing so that it was only when caused by catastphic events that it occured.

you cant make wild claims such as the climate changes over night (mammoth) on a regular basis (what this thread is about) and not back it up. yet you still claim that people that say the normal is normal have to prove it.

you are such a hypocrit.


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dehammer at November 06, 2006 03:16 PM you wrote and I quote:

"the "abrupt" changes usually take about 3 to 4 centuries."

What is the source of this information?

1. Actual data ... provide a link
2. You made it up ... admit it and move on


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DA Morgan quote:

"Some of those frozen mammoths were found with green grass in the mouths and plants from temperate climates in their stomachs."

People who have studied the vegetation on the ancient tundra agree that it was a mix of what are now warm and cold-loving species. Many plants now found only far to the south were present. The interpretaion is that the tundra was an example of "mosaic vegetation". Microclimates allowed warmth-loving species to survive. It's possible the extinction of the large herbivores caused the disruption of this pattern. Anything written by Paul Martin or Tim Flannery should cover the topic but I'll see if I can find a site.

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TNZ wrote:
"Anything written by Paul Martin or Tim Flannery should cover the topic but I'll see if I can find a site."

That would be great.

There is tremendous value to the entire science community when research is done and links provided. Then everyone can read the original and come to their own conclusion.

Too bad some people don't seem to get either how easy and how valuable it is.


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Here's one. I can't seem to raise the PDF version but you may be able to access it from here.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:vAqBqP2lSSoJ:www.sfu.ca/~qgrc/zazula_2003a.pdf+mosaic+vegetation+ancient+tundra&hl=en&gl=nz&ct=clnk&cd=8

Another one you might find interesting re. climate change. Couple of quotes from the post:

"It is true that in many areas during the LGM, the vegetation combined species that normally grow well apart from one another in separate vegetation/ecosystem zones. The most striking example is the steppe-tundra (Tallis 1990) which brought together species of modern-day steppe and tundra vegetation respectively. To a lesser extent, the same is true of much of early and mid Holocene vegetation of the world."
"In any case, it is sometimes difficult to decide whether these no-present-analogue vegetation types were similar enough to any presently widespread vegetation type to be mapped and treated as such. In the case of the steppe-tundra of the LGM, the difference from present vegetation is suggested here as being too great to fit into any of the standard present-day vegetation categories."

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/adams2.html

Other sites came up for "mosaic vegetation ancient tundra" but I couln't access them. Not a member etc. If you already subscribe to some of these sites you would find more info.

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