No need for CAFE standards after all!

[Wm Holden]

The planet could face a freeze worse than an Ice Age starting in as little as 10,000 years, giving future societies a headache the opposite of coping with global warming, scientists said on Wednesday.


The researchers, based in Britain and Canada, said that now-vilified greenhouse gases might help in future to avert a chill that could smother much of Canada and the United States, Europe and Russia in permanent ice.
They said the study, based on records of tiny marine fossils and the earth's shifting orbit, did not mean the world should stop fighting warming, stoked by human emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.

"We're saying: 'don't push the panic button'," said Thomas Crowley, an American scientist at Edinburgh University who shared authorship of the study in the journal Nature with a colleague at Toronto University.

"There's no excuse for saying 'we've got to keep pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere," he told Reuters by telephone, adding that the cooling was projected to start in 10,000 to 100,000 years.

"Geologically it's tomorrow," he said. "But we have a lot of time to argue about the appropriate level of greenhouse gases."

The projected build-up of vast ice sheets across the Northern Hemisphere and over seas around Antarctica would also lower sea levels by perhaps 300 meters (980 ft) -- connecting Russia to Alaska by land.

FALLING, RISING

In the last Ice Age, sea levels fell about 130 meters and much of Russia escaped a big ice sheet. Scientists can build sea level records from fossils because ocean chemistry varies; salt, for instance, is more concentrated when there is less sea water.


"Presumably, future society could prevent this transition indefinitely with very modest adjustments to the atmospheric CO2 level," they wrote. Greenhouse gases are widely blamed as the main cause of current warming that may bring more heatwaves, droughts, food shortages and rising seas.

A shift to a bigger blanket of ice would mark the end of a period of warming that began 50 million years ago, when even Antarctica was almost ice-free.

The scientists said the recent swings between Ice Ages and warmer periods such as the present, over the past 900,000 years, were getting sharper. Models suggested that instability could herald a shift to a new, far colder and stable state.

A similar shift happened more than 34 million years ago when Antarctica was first covered by ice, the scientists said. A trigger could be a slight growth of polar ice sheets, with ice and snow reflecting more of the sun's heat back into space. That could accelerate a cooling.

"Historians of science hate to say 'this is a special time'," Crowley said.

"But when you go through the models, each step seems reasonable and you get to an astonishing conclusion that we are right at the end of a 50-million-year evolution."

Modern human societies might never have developed if such a freeze had happened slightly earlier. "Anatomically modern humans evolved only 150,000 years ago," he said.

Crowley said more tests of the projections were needed.

"It might not come for tens of thousands of years," he said. "I'm sure some headline writers will want to say 'CO2 good for the atmosphere', or 'CO2 is good for us'. That's not the case."

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/

(Editing by Tim Pearce)

sourcehttp://www.postchronicle.com/news/or...12186098.shtml

[The_Blur]

The alternative theory, of course, points out the this could make the freezing of the North worse. I like the one you posted better.

[Wm Holden]

PARIS: Scheduled shifts in Earth’s orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably
be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said on Wednesday.

[DGthe3]

wait, the climate has changed without human intervention in the past? But we are absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt responsible for things now. any contrary evidence is either an anomaly or created by the oil companies

[Iroczlover]

You need to stop watching"Day After Tomorrow" & get back to the real world here.

[zebra]

i'm gonna go rip the cats off my truck today!

[Wm Holden]

save the world..... buy some supercharged V8's and slap one into every car you can find.

[drivingincamaro]

Originally Posted by Wm Holden

save the world..... buy some supercharged V8's and slap one into every car you can find.

oh god even ricers?!?!

[Wm Holden]

gotta save the future...it's our job!!!

[CamaroSpike23]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

wait, the climate has changed without human intervention in the past? But we are absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt responsible for things now. any contrary evidence is either an anomaly or created by the oil companies

well, we arent the originators of global warming, we are however, adding to it, but its a cycle of the earth to go thru cooling and heating cycles every 10,000 years or so. what we are doing now is accellerating it.

Originally Posted by Iroczlover

You need to stop watching"Day After Tomorrow" & get back to the real world here.

funny you mention that movie, as the events depicted in it are roughly how things would go down. not in a matter of a couple days/weeks, but it would take place over years, but it will happen. Scientists have so far identified only one viable mechanism to induce large, global, abrupt climate changes: a swift reorganization of the ocean currents circulating around the earth. These currents, collectively known as the Ocean Conveyor, distribute vast quantities of heat around our planet, and thus play a fundamental role in governing Earth’s climate. Computer models simulating ocean-atmosphere climate dynamics indicate that the North Atlantic region would cool 3° to 5° Celsius if Conveyor circulation were totally disrupted. It would produce winters twice as cold as the worst winters on record in the eastern United States in the past century. In addition, previous Conveyor shutdowns have been linked with widespread droughts throughout the globe. basically, greenhouse effect causing the polar caps to melt. If too much fresh water enters the North Atlantic from the caps, its waters could stop sinking. The Conveyor would cease. Heat-bearing Gulf Stream waters would no longer flow into the North Atlantic, and European and North American winters would become more severe.

[Mr Twisty]

Does this mean the sky really is falling like that chicken from my childhood warned????

[TAG UR IT]

Well, THIS is a nice spin on things!!

[headpunter]

nothing america does will have any impact on global pollution considering how fast the pollution per capita in china and india is increasing faster then we can drop ours.....all of global warming is joke and the scientists who speak out against it get black balled...and get called holocaust deniers by al gore (who has alot to gain from his eco energy industries).

[Rallysport]

Global warming...now global cooling! It never ceases to amaze me that college-educated "experts" can be on two different sides of this subject. Heck....my local "meteoroligist" on TV can't even get the weather forecast correct, and he has all kinds of satellites and technology on his side. As far as I'm concerned, I think it all has to do with money and some people's long-term agendas. Take your global warming/cooling theories and shove 'em....I really could care less.