Abrupt Climate Change
(After the Gold Rush):

[Excerpts throughout]



The Atlantic Monthly January, 1998

"The Great Climate Flip-flop"

by William H. Calvin

One of the most shocking scientific realizations of all time has slowly been dawning on us: the earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, and with breathtaking speed.

The Great Climate Flip-flop - 98.01


The New York Times
Sunday December 15, 2002

Climate Jumping
By WILLIAM SPEED WEED

In April 3, the high temperature in New York City was a balmy 77 degrees -- a full 17 degrees warmer than the previous day. New Yorkers were delighted; many wore shorts. But what if the earth's whole climate system were to snap warm like that? It would be anything but delightful. Imagine the global temperature spiking 17 degrees in a decade. Enough polar ice could melt to cause oceans to surge over New York, Amsterdam and Bangladesh faster than people could build dikes or relocate to higher ground. A global warming snap could wreak havoc on regional weather patterns: rain forests would dry up, tundras would melt. Imagine a centuries-long, Sahara-hot drought setting upon the West Coast and withering crops (and Californians).

This dire situation bears little resemblance to the global-warming picture, currently in vogue among policy makers, of a slow, steady warming that creeps along imperceptibly year by year. This picture is dead wrong, according to a National Academy of Sciences study published this year. Climate change often isn't gradual. It's sudden and ferocious. When it happens, we won't have time to adjust.

The report, ''Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,'' collates a mass of geological evidence showing that the earth's climate system is a jumpy beast: long, dormant spells are overturned suddenly by drastic events. Instead of smoothly transitioning over 10,000 years from ice age to warm era, the earth jumps from one ''regime'' to another in just a few years. For instance, 11,500-year-old ice cores taken from Greenland show that annual precipitation doubled in three years and that the annual mean temperature jumped 14 degrees in just 10 years. ''That means a third to half of the warming that took place between the last ice age and today all happened in one decade,'' says Richard Alley, the Penn State geologist who presided over the study. Two dozen such climate jumps have occurred in the last 100,000 years.

As for what causes abrupt climate change, Alley says that ''nobody know what the triggers are.'' Does that let us off the hook with greenhouse gas emissions? Not at all. ''The climate has changed most drastically when something was forcing it, like a change in the earth's orbit around the sun,'' says Alley. ''Our emissions today are definitely forcing the climate.'' William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who also worked on the report, says that the impact of gradual global warming would be relatively modest. But the ''abrupt stuff is more dangerous,'' he says. ''What we're triggering is in a sense irreversible. . . . If we flip into that mode, it may be like that for 5,000 years.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15CLIM.html?tntemail1


Friday March 1, 2002

Goodbye cruel world

A report by top US scientists on climate change suggests that catastrophe could be imminent

Jeremy Rifkin

We live in a world that has become so desensitised by watching calamities unfold on global television - both natural and human-induced - that it takes something really spectacular even to get our attention.

And it usually has to be visually dramatic to register, much less elicit a deep emotional response - such as the tragic events of September 11.

Recently, I came across a frightening report published by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - the nation's most august scientific body. Yet, because there was no visually provocative content, the report had received only a couple of short paragraphs tucked away inside a few newspapers.

Here is what the academy had to say: it is possible that the global warming trend projected over the course of the next 100 years could, all of a sudden and without warning, dramatically accelerate in just a handful of years - forcing a qualitative new climatic regime which could undermine ecosystems and human settlements throughout the world, leaving little or no time for plants, animals and humans to adjust.

The new climate could result in a wholesale change in the earth's environment, with effects that would be felt for thousands of years. If the projections and warnings in this study turn out to be prophetic, no other catastrophic event in all of recorded history will have had as damaging an impact on the future of human civilisation and the life of the planet.

According to the study: "An abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause." Moreover, the paleoclimatic record shows that "the most dramatic shifts in climate have occurred when factors controlling the climate system were changing". Given the fact that human activity - especially the burning of fossil fuels - is expected to double the CO2 content emitted into the atmosphere in the current century, the conditions could be ripe for an abrupt change in climate around the world, perhaps in only a few years.

What is really unnerving is that it may take only a slight deviation in boundary conditions or a small random fluctuation somewhere in the system "to excite large changes ... when the system is close to a threshold", says the NAS committee.

The committee lays out a potentially nightmarish scenario in which random triggering events take the climate across the threshold into a new regime, causing widespread havoc and destruction.

Ecosystems could collapse suddenly with forests decimated in vast fires and grasslands drying out and turning into dust bowls. Wildlife could disappear and waterborne diseases such as cholera and vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever, could spread uncontrollably beyond host ranges, threatening human health around the world.

The NAS concludes its report with a dire warning: "On the basis of the inference from the paleoclimatic record, it is possible that the projected change will occur not through gradual evolution, proportional to greenhouse gas concentrations, but through abrupt and persistent regime shifts affecting subcontinental or larger regions - denying the likelihood or downplaying the relevance of past abrupt changes could be costly."

Global warming represents the dark side of the commercial ledger for the industrial age. For the past several hundred years, and especially in the 20th century, human beings burned massive amounts of "stored sun" in the form of coal, oil and natural gas, to produce the energy that made an industrial way of life possible. That spent energy has accumulated in the atmosphere and has begun to adversely affect the climate of the planet and the workings of its many ecosystems.

We have affected the biochemistry of the earth and we have done it in less than a century. If a qualitative climate change were to occur suddenly in the coming century - within less than 10 years - as has happened many times before in geological history, we may already have written our epitaph.

When future generations look back at this period, tens of thousands of years from now, it is possible that the only historical legacy we will have left them in the geologic record is a great change in the earth's climate and its impact on the biosphere.

· Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Biotech Century (Gollancz) and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington DC

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4365494,00.html


December 14, 2001

Be prepared: sudden shifts in climate coming

Data from ancient tree rings and ice cores suggest Earth may soon experience intense periods of drought and cold.

By Robert C. Cowen | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

SAN FRANCISCO

If you're concerned about forecasts of long-term global warming, you might be worried about the wrong thing.

The US National Academy of Sciences warns that sudden, unexpected climate change - on a scale that could cause widespread drought or plunge Earth into a deep freeze - pose a more immediate danger.

The evidence? Embedded in ancient tree rings and ice cores are signs that quick, drastic change is a fundamental characteristic of Earth's climate. These data show that the climate can switch abruptly from one mode - such as an ice age - to another, such as a milder interglacial period, climatologists say.

Humans have no remembered experience of such sudden, far-reaching shifts. If one were to occur in the near future, human civilization could be vastly ill-equipped to adjust.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1214/p2s2-usgn.html


Early Civilizations Casualties of Rapid Climate Change ARCHAEOLOGY: What Drives Societal Collapse? Science, Jan. 26, 2001 By Harvey Weiss and Raymond S. Bradley

Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse. These climatic events were abrupt, involved new conditions that were unfamiliar to the inhabitants of the time, and persisted for decades to centuries. They were therefore highly disruptive, leading to societal collapse--an adaptive response to otherwise insurmountable stresses. These past climatic changes were unrelated to human activities. In contrast, future climatic change will involve both natural and anthropogenic forces and will be increasingly dominated by the latter; current estimates show that we can expect them to be large and rapid.

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3629&method=full


Triggering Abrupt Climate Change

A perspective on potential climate changes presented by Dr. Robert B. Gagosian, President and Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Over the past two decades, we have heard about greenhouse gases and the idea that our planet is gradually warming. I’d like to throw a curveball into that thinking—specifically the “gradually warming” part.

This new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated by policymakers and world and business leaders—and even by the wider community of natural and social scientists. But evidence from several sources has amassed and coalesced over the past 10 to 15 years. It points to a completely different—almost counterintuitive—scenario.

Global warming could actually lead to a big chill in some parts of the world. If the atmosphere continues to warm, it could soon trigger a dramatic and abrupt cooling throughout the North Atlantic region—where, not incidentally, some 60 percent of the world’s economy is based.

When I say “dramatic,” I mean: Average winter temperatures could drop by 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States, and by 10 degrees in the northeastern United States and in Europe. That’s enough to send mountain glaciers advancing down from the Alps. To freeze rivers and harbors and bind North Atlantic shipping lanes in ice. To disrupt the operation of ground and air transportation. To cause energy needs to soar exponentially. To force wholesale changes in agricultural practices and fisheries. To change the way we feed our populations. In short, the world, and the world economy, would be drastically different.

And when I say “abrupt,” I mean: These changes could happen within a decade, and they could persist for hundreds of years. You could see the changes in your lifetime, and your grandchildren’s grandchildren will still be confronting them.
And when I say “soon,” I mean: In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold. If we cross it, Earth’s climate could switch gears and jump very rapidly—not gradually— into a completely different mode of operation.

http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.whoi.edu/home/about/whatsnew_abruptclimate.html
[This is an excellent site with many graphic illustrations]


[Excerpt]

Scientists Now Fear 'Abrupt' Global Warming Changes

Climate: Severe and 'unwelcome' shifts could come in decades, not centuries, a national academy says in an alert.

By USHA LEE McFARLING
TIMES SCIENCE WRITER

December 12, 2001

SAN FRANCISCO -- Just six months after informing the White House that global warming is indeed real, largely the result of human activity and likely to cause adverse effects, the National Academy of Sciences issued an even more disturbing alert Tuesday.

Global warming, the academy reported, could trigger "large, abrupt and unwelcome" climatic changes that could severely affect ecosystems and human society.

Until recently, most discussion of global warming has assumed that change would occur gradually, with average temperatures slowly increasing over the next century. The idea that large changes in climate could instead occur abruptly and with little warning has been percolating through the climate research community but had remained controversial. The consensus report from the academy indicates that the idea has reached the scientific mainstream.

"We're reflecting the thinking," said Richard Alley, a Penn State University climate expert and the report's lead author. "We're not driving it.

"We need to deal with this because we are likely to be surprised," Alley added.

A prime example of what scientists mean when they talk about the possibility of abrupt change involves the Gulf Stream. It is a current of warm water that runs from the Caribbean Sea across the Atlantic Ocean, keeping the climate of northern Europe temperate.

Scientists know that in the past, melting of arctic ice caused a flow of fresh water into the North Atlantic that reversed the Gulf Stream.

Many scientists believe the current could reverse again--over a period of a decade or two, rather than a century--leaving much of Europe far colder than it now is.

"It's as if climate change were a light switch instead of a dimmer dial," Alley said.

The possibility of such abrupt changes complicates the task of policymakers in two ways. It could mean that the amount of time available to adjust to climate change is much shorter than government officials have thought. It also increases the uncertainty of predictions, indicating that future climate cannot simply be projected forward in a straight line from the present.

But officials of the Global Climate Change Coalition, an industry group, warned against making policy decisions on climate with science so uncertain.

"This really highlights the uncertainties and complexities that remain," Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the coalition, said of the report.

Other scientists said the possibility of abrupt climate change made it even more important that the federal government establish a reliable climate monitoring system. Federal agencies have been unwilling to spend the estimated $10 million to $15 million needed for the system, said Bruce A. Wielicki, a climate researcher at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., who was not involved with the new report.

http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2D000098689dec12


[Excerpt]

Daily University Science News
December 13 ,2001

Warming May Increase Risk Of Sudden Climate Change

Most climate change research has focused on gradual changes, such as the processes by which emissions of greenhouse gases lead to warming of the planet.

But new evidence shows that periods of gradual change in Earth's past were punctuated by episodes of abrupt change, including temperature changes of about 10 degrees Celsius, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit, in only a decade in some places.

A new report from the National Academies' National Research Council says greenhouse warming and other human alterations of the climate system may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events.

Researchers do not know enough about such events to accurately predict them, so surprises are inevitable.

If the planet's climate is being forced to change -- as is currently the case -- it increases the number of possible mechanisms that can trigger abrupt events, the report says. And the more rapid the forced change that is taking place, the more likely it is that abrupt events will occur on a time scale that has immediate human and ecological consequences.

http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1213011.htm


Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary

by Jonathan Adams, Mark Maslin, & Ellen Thomas

All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental changes.

Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years. Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years.

http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html


September 26, 2002

Into the cold?

Slowing ocean circulation could presage dramatic – and chilly – climate change


By Robert C. Cowen | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Call it global warming's dirty little secret. Those much-publicized scenarios of how carbon-dioxide (CO2) pollution may gradually heat up the earth don't tell you another key fact: that climate has sometimes changed without warning. It can go from warm to cold – or cold to warm – in less than decade, and stay that way for centuries.

Water-circulation data from the North Atlantic now suggest the climate system may be approaching that kind of threshold. If man-made warming or natural causes push it over the edge, the system will chill down many temperate parts of North America and Europe, even while the planet as a whole continues to warm.

Terrence Joyce, chairman of the physical-oceanography department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, is one of a handful of scientists trying to raise awareness about this possibility. He says he is "not predicting an imminent climate change – only that once it started (and it is getting more likely) it could occur within 10 years."

http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0926/p14s02-sten.html


DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 9 (September 2002)
Table of Contents

The New Ice Age

Worried about global warming? Talk to a few scientists at Woods Hole. Oceanographers there are seeing big trouble with the Gulf Stream, which warms both North America and Europe

By Brad Lemley

"It could happen in 10 years," says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. "Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse." And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously. In a letter to The New York Times last April, he wrote, "Recall the coldest winters in the Northeast, like those of 1936 and 1978, and then imagine recurring winters that are even colder, and you'll have an idea of what this would be like."
   
A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises," produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
   
The reason for such huge effects is simple. A quick climate change wreaks far more disruption than a slow one. People, animals, plants, and the economies that depend on them are like rivers, says the report: "For example, high water in a river will pose few problems until the water runs over the bank, after which levees can be breached and massive flooding can occur. Many biological processes undergo shifts at particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation."
   
Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world's poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn't work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. "To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people," says the report.

http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.discover.com/sept_02/featice.html


[Read the complete National Academy of Sciences report on line:]

Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises

[Excerpts:]

Large, abrupt climate changes have repeatedly affected much or all of the Earth, locally reaching as much as 10 degrees C change in 10 years. Available evidence suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.

This report is an attempt to describe what is known about abrupt climate changes and their impacts, based on paleoclimate proxies, historical observations, and modeling. The report does not focus on large, abrupt causes-nuclear wars or giant meteorite impacts - but rather on the surprising new findings that abrupt climate change can occur when gradual causes push the earth system across a threshold. Just as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light, the slow effects of drifting continents or wobbling orbits or changing atmospheric composition may "switch" the climate to a new state. And, just as a moving hand is more likely than a stationary one to encounter and flip a switch, faster earth-system changes - whether natural or human-caused - are likely to increase the probability of encountering a threshold that triggers a still-faster climate shift.

The new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system 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 policy-makers. At present, there is no plan for improving our understanding of the issue, no research priorities have been identified, and no policy-making body is addressing the many concerns raised by the potential for abrupt climate change. Given these gaps, the US Global Change Research Program asked the National Research Council to establish the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change and charged the group to describe the current state of knowledge in the field and recommended ways to fill the knowledge gaps.

http://books.nap.edu/books/0309074347/html/R7.html#pagetop
http://www.nap.edu/books/0309074347/html/
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10136.html
http://search.nap.edu/nap-cgi/napsearch.cgi?term=%22abrupt+climate+change%22


POLITICS- A BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM

We point out that global warming has been part of earth's climate for millions of years. It isn't a "liberal vs. conservative" issue, it's a geological fact. Right now, liberals favor funding for global warming research and conservatives are against it. Liberals want support for the academic institutions where most of them work. Conservatives want to protect the profits of the companies that give them their funding.

The whole argument is absurd. This is not a political issue, it's a people issue. Liberal or conservative, it's something we've got to be concerned about. And as far as global warming not happening-that's just a fantasy. It's happening all right. But it's also true that it's part of the way the earth's climate works. We haven't caused it. But perhaps we've sped it up, and if we stopped bickering and started funding the in-depth science that's needed, maybe we could understand it well enough to prepare for the future. But two sides sitting across a table, one blaming human activity and the other saying that it isn't even happening-that gets us nowhere.

The crucial next step is to fund more study and monitoring of ocean currents, especially the North Atlantic Current. The oceans are the key to the weather. With a good monitoring system in place, we might be able to gain many years of warning of impending climate change, so that we could take the steps necessary to prevent or at least forestall it. Unfortunately, the artificial debate about whether or not global warming is real has frozen congress solid. There is not enough money for studies like this, and many congressmen fight it constantly, doing immense damage to the scientific community with 'funding warfare.' You can change that by writing your congressman and telling him that you've read The Coming Global Superstorm and you want funding for climatological and oceanographic research NOW.

Let's take this issue off the liberal-conservative table and put it where it belongs, on the list of things we need to deal with on behalf of our children and grandchildren.

[Authors Strieber and Bell may be a little 'out there' (!?), but the above statement as it stands does seem to get it 'right' ]

http://www.globalsuperstorm.com/frames.html
http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/opinion/06HERB.html?todaysheadlines
http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0606-01.htm
http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/343/editorials/In_denial_on_warming+.shtml


Sunday April 1, 2001
The Observer
Global warming

The President Who Bought Power and Sold the World

George Bush's decision to ignore global warming and pull the plug on Kyoto is payback for the energy industries which backed him. The story behind the singular determination of Bush to fly in the face of world opinion, the sentiments of most Americans and even many in his own government reveals adherence to ideological rigor and a payment of debts to the business interests that helped him to the White House - above all, oil and coal. Oil runs through every sinew and vein of the Bush administration; rarely, if ever, has a Western government been so intimately entwined with a single industry.

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,466615,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1138009.stm
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/21652_energyed.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/opinion/05KRUG.html?todaysheadlines
http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/oil_coup.html


Yahoo! Full Coverage: Climate Change (Coverage Updated Daily)

http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=world&cat=global_warming


Surviving Climate Change

[Many links relating to climate change issues]

http://www.mymethow.com/~joereid/%20http://www.mapcruzin.com/globalchange21/