... who spoke of the "cold wind from the North?"

Man, some warm gulf air crashed headlong into that cold front earlier today here in 'Bama and we've got several people DEAD. We had severe thunderstorms (in December!) and tornadoes (in December) that have ransacked the state. The power's out over large areas north of here.

My engineer friend just called from Illinois and said that he's got seven feet of snow around his house. He's EASING his way back home down the interstate, about 30 miles per hour, trying to keep his rig out of the ditches.

Whether there's anything to this Global Warming stuff or not, I DO wonder sometimes if the weather hasn't become more violent or variable. The past several years, we seem to have moved straight from summer into winter, without the usual month or two of moderate temperatures.

Years ago, I read two different books: the first insisted that were are at the cusp of a new ice age, the second insisted that we were warming and that NYC would soon be under water.

Both worried me so badly I stopped reading such books for a while. :)

-- Anonymous, December 16, 2000

Answers

Cold and raw the north wind doth blow

Bleak in the morning early,

All the hills are covered with snow,

And winters now come fairly.

http://www.zelo.com/family/nursery/cold.htm

Here

-- Anonymous, December 16, 2000

Shrug.

Stephen, I can make a REALLY good argument that Global Warming will lead to an ice age in a hurry. Believe it or not.

So, I dunno. I have suspicions that we are seeing AREA warming, caused by situations near cities - and what effect that will have on the climate overall is not known. And we have a LOT of cities now, most of this planet's six billion are not living the rural life. How much area are we talking about here?

And I'd give a pretty to know just where that oft quoted '200 to 250 foot' rise in the ocean level comes from. I've looked at the maps of Antartica several times, and I'm simply damned if I can find that much ice that isn't already below sea level or floating like the Ross Ice Shelf. (LOTS of Antartica is below sea level - that ice is so heavy it has pushed the continent DOWN - and if the ice is below sea level, it won't add to any increase in sea level if it melts. And just WHO has proven that ALL the ice MUST melt if the temp climbs a degree or so worldwide? Divine revelation or what? It didn't ALL melt when the worldwide temp climbed several degrees at the end of the ice age!)

How high were the water levels in the interim between the last ice ages? And you have to add in a figure for movements in the seabed and near ocean shorelines to correct even that figure. And the Med was dry in that period - and that thing sucked up a LOT of water when the basin filled - as did the Great Lakes, which were carved by glaciers.

So can this figure be backed up by actual surveying measurements and depth of ice core drillings, with comparision to the local sea level? Or is it just the good old WAG?

So my position is that warming is a maybe, and the possible effects are still unknown, AFAIK.

-- Anonymous, December 17, 2000

Paul,

Really? Y'gotta link to something that I could read about that?

I can see it, because you'd get increased cloud cover ... which would eventually flip the other way and cause sudden global cooling. Right?

-- Anonymous, December 17, 2000

No link, unless someone has put a text on paleontological climatology (aren't those big words) on line.

But, to give you the short version, it works like this.

The North Pole is covered by water, which freezes solid every winter, but breaks up into the famous pack ice every summer. This enormous number of floating icebergs is trapped in the north by the shallow water of the Bering Strait, which is not deep enough to allow the ice to float south into the Pacific.

If the sea level rises, this ice can float south.

Large quantities of ice in the Pacific ocean would make the upper part of the ocean much cooler. Cool water absorbs CO2 and Nitrogen - both of which are greenhouse gasses. Moreover, the cooler water means less evaporation, which means less rainfall - which will result in desertification of large areas, which do not hold heat well and therefore cannot moderate the temperature as wet land will. Also, clouds act as a greenhouse barrier to escaping heat.

While the water level stays up, this reaction will increase. As things become cooler, more snow pack will remain through the summer in Canada and Siberia - thus reflecting more light/heat away from the earth.

By the time enough snow has packed into ice to reduce the water level, you have large deserts, combined with very spread out ice caps, that are reflecting heat into space - thus keeping the earth cool.

The planet will remain cool until that ice melts, and the ice pack at the south pole takes up enough ice to drop the water level.

Anyhow, that's the short version of the theory, as I remember it.

LOTS of evidence to support it. Known facts - more deserts during an ice age, each ice age seems to come on after a period of heating, each ice age was preceded by rising water - this thing is kind of hard to refute. Moreover, we don't seem to have ice ages unless we have a situation where the earth is oriented so that we have open water at one pole.

-- Anonymous, December 18, 2000

But keep in mind that this theory is quite dependant on the geography of the planet. Rises and falls in land masses would, by this theory, make an ice age quite a difficult thing - probably requiring a long term change in the solar insolation. IOW, the system might drift through a large dust cloud, or some other catastrophe might set off an ice age, at odd intervals. But this explains the periodicity of the last dozen or so ice ages.

Which brings us right back to the Med. Did the land subsidence in that area, which happened at or after the end of the last ice age, remove enough water from the oceans to prevent another ice age, by the theory above? I don't know if anyone has ever analyzed that.

-- Anonymous, December 18, 2000