Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

I saw a big flock of birds over Hyde, Manchester last Saturday of a type I have never seen before.
They flocked like starlings or pigeons, and were about pigeon size, but they flew a bit like lapwings.

My birdy friend, consulted on the telephone, said they might have been waxwings.

I've never seen these around here before, in thirty years.

This proves nothing of course, but I just thought I'd mention it.

potential implications on United States national security.

We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts. The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.

We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately."

Executive Summary
There is substantial evidence to indicate that significant global warming will occur during the 21st century. Because changes have been gradual so far, and are projected to be similarly gradual in the future, the effects of global warming have the potential to be manageable for most nations. Recent research, however, suggests that there is a possibility that this gradual global warming could lead to a relatively abrupt slowing of the ocean's thermohaline conveyor, which could lead to harsher winter weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture, and more intense winds in certain regions that currently provide a significant fraction of the world's food production. With inadequate preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth's environment.

The research suggests that once temperature rises above some threshold, adverse weather conditions could develop relatively abruptly, with persistent changes in the atmospheric circulation causing drops in some regions of 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade. Paleoclimatic evidence suggests that altered climatic patterns could last for as much as a century, as they did when the ocean conveyor collapsed 8,200 years ago, or, at the extreme, could last as long as 1,000 years as they did during the Younger Dryas, which began about 12,700 years ago.

In this report, as an alternative to the scenarios of gradual climatic warming that are so common, we outline an abrupt climate change scenario patterned after the 100-year event that occurred about 8,200 years ago. This abrupt change scenario is characterized by the following conditions:
· Annual average temperatures drop by up to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over Asia and North America and 6 degrees Fahrenheit in northern Europe
· Annual average temperatures increase by up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in key areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa.
· Drought persists for most of the decade in critical agricultural regions and in the water resource regions for major population centers in Europe and eastern North America.
· Winter storms and winds intensify, amplifying the impacts of the changes. Western Europe and the North Pacific experience enhanced winds.

The report explores how such an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints such as:
1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production
2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts
3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess.

Abrupt Climate Change 2
As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world, leading to two fundamental strategies: defensive and offensive. Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. Less fortunate nations especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbors, may initiate in struggles for access to food, clean water, or energy. Unlikely alliances could be formed as defense priorities shift and
the goal is resources for survival rather than religion, ideology, or national honor.

This scenario poses new challenges for the United States, and suggests several steps to be taken:
· Improve predictive climate models to allow investigation of a wider range of scenarios and to anticipate how and where changes could occur
· Assemble comprehensive predictive models of the potential impacts of abrupt climate change to improve projections of how climate could influence food, water, and energy
· Create vulnerability metrics to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable to climate change and therefore, could contribute materially to an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world.
· Identify no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water
management
· Rehearse adaptive responses
· Explore local implications
· Explore geo-engineering options that control the climate.

There are some indications today that global warming has reached the threshold where the thermohaline circulation could start to be significantly impacted. These indications include observations documenting that the North Atlantic is increasingly being freshened by melting glaciers, increased precipitation, and fresh water runoff making it substantially less salty over the past 40 years.

This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.
_________ (End of Executive Summary)

[...] With at least eight abrupt climate change events documented in the geological record, it seems that the questions to ask are: When will this happen? What will the impacts be? And, how can we best prepare for it? Rather than: Will this really happen?

STUDY BOLSTERS GREENHOUSE EFFECT THEORY, SOLVES ICE AGE MYSTERY

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Critics who dismiss the importance of greenhouse gases as a cause of climate change lost one piece of ammunition this week. In a new study, scientists found further evidence of the role that greenhouse gases have played in Earth's climate.

In Thursday's issue of the journal Geology, Ohio State University scientists report that a long-ago ice age occurred 10 million years earlier than once thought. The new date clears up an inconsistency that has dogged climate change research for years.

Of three ice ages that occurred in the last half-billion years, the earliest ice age posed problems for scientists, explained Matthew Saltzman, assistant professor of geological sciences at Ohio State.

Previous studies suggested that this particular ice age happened during a time that should have been very warm, when volcanoes all over the earth's surface were spewing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

With CO2 levels as much as 20 times higher than today, the late Ordovician period (460-440 million years ago) wasn't a good time for growing ice.

Critics have pointed to the inconsistency as a flaw in scientists' theories of climate change. Scientists have argued that today's global climate change has been caused in part by buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere resulting from fossil fuel emissions.

But, critics have countered, if CO2 truly raises global temperatures, how could an ice age have occurred when a greenhouse effect much greater than today's was in full swing?

The answer: This particular ice age didn't begin when CO2 was at its peak -- it began 10 million years earlier, when CO2 levels were at a low.

"Our results are consistent with the notion that CO2 concentrations drive climate."

Saltzman and doctoral student Seth Young found that large deposits of quartz sand in Nevada and two sites in Europe -- Norway and Estonia -- formed around the same time, 440 million years ago. The scientists suspect that the sand formed when water levels fell low enough to expose quartz rock, so that wind and rain could weather the rock into sand.

The fact that the deposits were found in three different sites suggests that sea levels may have been low all over the world at that time, likely because much of the planet's water was bound in ice at the poles, Saltzman said.

Next, the scientists examined limestone sediments from the sites and determined that there was a relatively large amount of organic carbon buried in the oceans -- and, by extension, relatively little CO2 in the atmosphere -- at the same time.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that the ice began to build up some 10 million years earlier than when volcanoes began pumping the atmosphere full of the CO2 that ended the Ordovician ice age.

For Saltzman, the find solves a long-standing mystery.

Though scientists know with a great degree of certainty that atmospheric CO2 levels drive climate change, there are certain mismatches in the geologic record, such as the Ordovician ice age -- originally thought to have begun 443 million years ago -- that seem to counter that view.

"How can you have ice when CO2 levels are through the roof? That was the dilemma that we were faced with. I think that now we have good evidence that resolves this mismatch," Saltzman said.

Scientists at the three sites previously attributed these quartz deposits to local tectonic shifts. But the new study shows that the conditions that allowed the quartz sand to form were not local.

"If sea level is dropping globally at the same time, it can't be a local tectonic feature," Saltzman said. "It's got to be the result of a global ice buildup."

Saltzman wants to bolster these new results by examining sites in Russia -- where he hopes to find more evidence of sea level drop -- and in parts of South America and North Africa, which would have been covered in ice at the time.

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Instead the argument is about the costs and merits of doing anything about CO2 emissions. There are excellent reasons to believe the costs to humanity of fixing this problem will be several orders of magnidude greater than the benefits it will produce or the costs of doing nothing.

Seeing as, and note I'm not trying to be alarmist or anything, that the cost of doing nothing could very well be massively damaging to our ecosystem, I can't see how it would cost society more than the lives of the billions of people who rely on the weather.

I never thought I'd meet so many people who are pro-pollution.

Cycloptichorn

Squinney,

You are beating a dead horse. No one here denys the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or the warming it has caused. Extreme doubt has been expressed about some of the rather absurd "tipping point" and accelerated warming scenarios that have been offered by various zealots. There is no scientific basis for these predictions, and a large body of excel;lent reasons to reject them out of hand.

Instead the argument is about the costs and merits of doing anything about CO2 emissions. There are excellent reasons to believe the costs to humanity of fixing this problem will be several orders of magnidude greater than the benefits it will produce or the costs of doing nothing.