An excellent informative post! You and your readers would be interested in this 2005 Scientific American article by Ruddiman that shows very nicely that humans started warming the planet about 2000 years ago with the advent of agriculture and subsequent enhanced methane production (mostly) and that we are, in fact, now holding off the effects of the earth sliding naturally towards the next glaciation. His last graph in the article is most compelling as it shows that when this fossil fuel nonsense is exhausted (soon) the earth will resume the longer term cooling. Never fear; Canada will be under a mile of ice soon enough. I confess, I will miss Duluth (oh right, I will be long gone…never mind). http://www.w2agz.com/Library/Climate%20Change/Ruddiman,%20March%202005,%2016207527.pdf
“2000 years ago with the advent of agriculture” ¿Que?
It was in a *circa-*1960 American Heritage that I first encountered the hypothesis that ice ages could be caused by warm waters flowing over the North Pole in a period of global warming.
Droughts, cold winters, and hurricanes are rough, but really – worse than an ice age? Are you seriously claiming that a hurricane is worse than burying most of North America under a mile of ice?
You’re comparing apples and oranges and then you made it worse by comparing a truck load of apples to just ONE orange.
Yeah yeah yeah, of course it’s true that “burying most of North America under a mile of ice” would be worse than “a hurricane”. But we’re not talking about “a hurricane”. We’re talking about multiple hurricanes every year, decade after decade, century after century. You should have asked the question “Are 150,000 category 5 hurricanes spread out over the course of 30,000 years worse than a mile of ice which would take 10,000 years to gradually bury most of North America and then gradually retreat again 20,000 years later?”
Of course, that’s still not a fair comparison because you left out all the other effects of AGW, like rising ocean levels, changing ocean pH, et cetera. You even left out the droughts and cold winters which you yourself mentioned in the first sentence of your post.
Still, even if you had asked the reasonable question “Are the effects of AGW better or worse than the effects of the natural glaciation cycle?”, there’s a quite reasonable answer to the question: It’s a dangerous gamble because we KNOW that life in the past has in fact adapted to the natural glaciation cycle (many many times) and it can do it again but we DON’T KNOW how well life in the future can adapt to AGW because this is unprecedented.
If it’s your opinion that Ice Ages are a disease and AGW is the cure, then you must admit that this disease is not fatal and consider the possibility that the cure might be worse.
Junior Moderator to the rescue again, here’s the article in question “What effect will global warming have on the next ice age?”
That’s what all the climatologists that speak on NPR say as well. We just don’t know and we have many many people and organizations actively researching this. If we had the answers already, then we wouldn’t be doing so much research. What The Master has said in this article is pretty much exactly what we do know, no speculation, no guesses, just the facts.
Now I’m not saying there wasn’t a big flood 8,000 years ago … but I will say this kind of event was somewhat common 15,000 years ago. The high water marks for the Columbia River floods are still obvious, 800 feet above river level !!!
I’ll accept that the number of Denialist is waning, but that only reflects the number of amatuer Denialists who are finally giving up. The number of professional Denialists is increasing. Vladimir Putin wants every American tongue speaking about climate change, he wants every one of us talking about climate change and nothing else. He thinks that there’s absolutely nothing more important for Americans to be talking about than climate change. Vladimir Putin is hiring photochoppers and trolls to do everything they can to make sure Americans are talking about climate change. What a nice guy he is.
Okay, not quite Godwin’s Law, but close enough.
Count me out of this thread.
Less than half of North America, but during the last glacial maximum almost all of Canada all of New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis were under ice- enough to displace well over 100 million of the current population. In Europe all of Scandinavia, the east and south Baltic coasts, most of Belarus, NE Germany including Berlin, and about the northern 2/3 of the British Isles would also be under. The maps I am finding on search show little glaciation in Asia during the last glacial maximum, although ice sheets may have varied greatly in extent during the last several million years.
“Multiple hurricanes every year, decade after decade, century after century” has been taking place for all recorded history. The question is whether a long-term trend toward stronger hurricanes has been established, and I do not think we have had world-wide scientific instrumental coverage long enough to answer.
Now, 150,000 C5 hurricanes in 30,000 years would be 5 per year, and there were 6 such in 2005 (4 in the Atlantic and 2 in the Pacific). Even though those included the notorious Katrina I think it is reasonable to say we could learn to live with 5 C5 hurricanes a year. We could not learn to live off any land where the ground is permanently under under ice.
Nowhere in that link is the word climate mentioned.
Nor do I recall Putin speaking a whole lot about climate change. He is mostly responding to all the flack he’s getting over Ukraine. And he is mostly speaking to people in the Federation of Russia. Their support is all he needs. But this is off-topic.
I agree with the person who opined that Cecil is restricting himself to the known facts, in this article. And I agree that we do not know how well we would adapt, but one thing for certain - it will be easier for humans to adapt to a relatively quick change in climate than it will be for other living things. They need time to adapt, or they’re done for. This would include, I think, many of the life forms we depend on for food. I would recommend that future generations be raised as vegetarians. (And no, I am not a vegetarian, myself, but I won’t be around to see the worst of this.)
If Putin wants that, it would be to make more money for himself. Global warming is a hoax. Satellites don’t show any warming in 18.5 years, that breaks all the models. The only thing that shows recent heating is the surface record which has been heavily doctored.
The whole 1970’s ice age scare was created by actual falling temperature. If you look up the old articles, you will see that they were claiming global temperatures had dropped about 0.7C from 1940-1975. That’s what was causing the ice age scare. Now if you look at the graphs from NASA/NOAA/GISS, that cooling has been erased. The past has been cooled significantly. It’s an amazing feat. Every year the global warming gets worse and worse even though satellites say the temperature has remained the same for the last 18 years. (3 years of steady Arctic Ice Growth… during the supposed warmist months in modern history.)
Arctic Ice peaked in 1980 which is when we launched our newest satellites. You can read articles from the 1930’s saying the Arctic is melting down. There is ZERO significant data showing that weather is more extreme now than in the past. ZERO. (Aren’t we at a record for length of time without hurricanes hitting the USA?
100% wrong, and misleading from the denier sources.
[QUOTE]
Christopher Booker comes across as no better than extremist conspiracy nutters who write for WUWT or Prison Planet or Above Top Secret or some other lunatic blog. Apparently before he declared his denialism, Christopher Booker had a career as a journalist. He still manages to persuade some gullible or attention-seeking editors to publish his nonsense.
Kevin Cowtan is a scientist. He’s not a climate scientist but he has made a very valuable contribution to the science of global temperature records. You may have heard of the Cowtan and Way paper that was widely acclaimed last year.
He investigated the claims made by Paul Homewood and Christopher Booker. Here are two you tube videos to let you know what he found.
The first is about claims made about Paraguay:
The second one is about the Arctic. Go to YouTube to get the files that Kevin refers to. [/QUOTE]Really, where? The colling pause of the 70’s is still there:
And Climate Crocks dealt with the 70’s misrepresentations a long time ago:
Wrong again, you do not know that basic difference between cap ice that will increase the ocean level from the growth of ocean surface ice that will not do much of a difference for that sea rise.
The data does not show that the ice is growing were it is needed to prevent an acceleration of the loss of ice that will lead to a rise in sea level.
We can see that so far were reliable sources are concerned you have Zero support.
http://marine.rutgers.edu/~francis/pres/Francis_Vavrus_2012GL051000_pub.pdf
From: Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes
Jennifer A. Francis and Stephen J. Vavrus, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L06801, doi:10.1029/2012GL051000 , 2012
Ah, you young guys. I was there in the 1970s. I read the articles. I read the books. The popular articles kept referring to the work of one guy, Stephen H. Schneider and most of the popular books weren’t any better. He was a top scientist and sincere about his findings. He was such a good scientist that he later admitted that he got it wrong about CO[sub]2[/sub] and warned against the further rise of greenhouse gases.
That’s real science.
Even Gigo’s favorite source of pro-catastrophic warming propaganda readily admits that total hurricane intensity isn’t increasing:
And even I pointed at that before to show that deniers are the ones that indeed want to paint scientists as alarmists, they are not. As Richard Alley reported too, even when the few Republicans that were left that looked at the science wanted to get more of the Republicans in congress to care and expected Alley and others to express more worry than what he showed at his congressional hearing.
What should really worry us more when they report an item that became worse that what they expected, like the ice cap loss.Ran out of edit time, correcting this:
What should really worry us more is when scientists report an item that became worse than what they expected, like the ice cap loss.
And really neuroman? Skeptical Science is a resource to use to check the published science just like TalkOrigins is used to counteract creationist tripe. Declaring that it is propaganda is just tossing a reassurance bone to the deniers out there. As Conservative scientists like Richard Alley, Kerry Emmanuel, Barry Bickmore and independent ones like Neil DeGasse Tysen can tell you, the idea that what climate scientists report should be considered propaganda is asinine.
If that happened, Minisota schools would have a delayed opening!
I’m adding theIce Core data here so we’re all looking at the same thing. I’d be guessing when I say this is what The Master is using when he answers the question. As anyone can see, we’ve been warming for the past 10,000 years. It’s also fair to say that, except for burning long buried carbon deposits, we’ll be seeing a slow gradual cooling period, and an eventual return to large ice caps and glaciers, looks like maybe 100,000 years from now. Like Exapno Mapcase, I too was around in the 1970’s and remember all the talk about “the coming ice age”, but it was understood to be a concern in 10,000 years. Hardly something to get alarmed about when any second we could witness our entire nuclear ICBM arsenal take flight leaving us with about fifteen minutes until the USSR inventory lands.
But we are burning carbon deposits that have been buried for 300 million years, generally speaking. This makes any projection of future climate using the Ice Core data questionable, VERY questionable. We all know how these silly scientists get when there’s an unanswered question at hand, they research the matter. What information that is coming out of this research gives us “Does that mean the glaciers are about to return? No, but we’re pumping enormous amounts of energy into a system with few safety valves.”
Nearly 3,500 Days Since Major Hurricane Strike… Despite Record High CO2
Hear that Houston? I want no whining from you about Bill. Bill isn’t cat. 3, so it doesn’t count.
And Andres, I don’t care if you were only the fifth major May hurricane in the Eastern Pacific since accurate records began. No soup for you.
Hey, Carlos, you’re going to hit as a tropical storm even though you’re now described as a “feisty little hurricane.” Do all the damage you like. Nobody will care.
Sure, it’s only mid-June. Sure, real climate scientists have gone on record that we can’t tie any individual hurricane to global climate change. Sure, lots of damage and deaths have occurred in the past 10 years. But Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. proclaims that they don’t count. So we don’t have to do anything. Anything, I tells ya. Go out and rev your engines just for lulz.