It could forestall another ice age. Fire up the SUVs.
Because I know how much my commenters love posts like this…
Though actually, I prefer the phrase “glacial advance” to “ice age,” because we never really left the ice age. We’re just in a (brief — it’s only been a few thousand years) interglacial. The earth has been cool for a long time.
I couldn’t get past the first paragraph. “milleniums” may be a legitimate alternate pluralization (per dictionary.reference.com), but it makes the writer sound like an idiot.
The current glaciation started in Antarctica about 35 million years ago. The arctic did not glaciate until around 2.5 million years ago. Prior to this time, the average global temperature was 23degC, a full 10degC above what it is now. The atmospheric CO2 has declined over the millions of year, prior to the glaciation, it was around 3,000ppm. Today, its a paltry 350ppm. Global warming my arse.
I am not bothered by concept of Ice Ages per se. We survived the last Ice Age with considerably less technology than we have available today.
I am more concerned with mass extinction events. Meteor impacts are one but several people suspect there are more.
An ice age in the next few dozen milleniums. Wonder what global warming’s going to do in this century…
Rand can claim either comedy, nihilism or total lack of reading skills.
Maybe Revkin’s writing is too complex, people are clearly struggling with the concept of time.
Tired recycling of same old false talking points.
So try harder next time and maybe you’ll be more interesting.
Try reading the article.
Only an idiot would deduce “fire up the SUV:s to prevent the next ice age” from reading that.
But “fire up the SUV:s to prevent the next ice age” is a tired and wrong old meme, completely ignoring the time and temperature scale magnitude differences between human induced CO2 global warming and solar / orbital influences.
Only an idiot would deduce “fire up the SUV:s to prevent the next ice age” from reading that.
I think someone needs a little looser underwear. Warm Mongers seem to be particularly humorless.
I have what most likely is a really dumb question but here goes:
Is there indeed a land mass under the Antarctic ice? If so, how far below the ice?
Commence laughter at my ignorance…
I might be misremembering, but I think there’s actually quite a bit of the Antarctic landmass that’s below sea level because of the ice sheets. So theoretically if all of the ice were to melt, not only would that raise the oceans from increased overall water content, but the eventual rebound of the landmass would further deepen the oceans by pushing the Antarctic shoreline back out to sea.
That would be a slow process; I saw on one of those edutainment shows where I learned everything I know, that the formerly glaciated portion of North America is still rebounding after the last major glacial advance-and-retreat.
There’s also a lot of Antarctica that’s above sea level now, of course; those penguin rookeries in the nature documentaries tend to be on exposed gravel.
Much of the CO2 being emitted now will be removed from the atmosphere in the next few thousand years (dissolved and mixed into the deep oceans). If we want to avoid an ice age thousands of years hence, it’s going to require additional action. Our descendants could, for example, deliberately release fluorinated gases with much higher warming potential than CO2.
Lovelock (I believe it was) proposed releasing a mix of such gases on Mars as part of a terraforming effort.
Yes. It’s a continent.
Well there we go then! I knew it was going to be a rather silly question.
McGehee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
Rand,
Many researchers believe the cause of the Ice Age was the rising Himalayas scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2320crac.html
Humans are just restoring the balance 🙂
If you really want to end Ice Ages, eliminate Panama and restore the old ocean currents. Break apart N and S America.
It is the connection of North and South america that started the ice ages because ti altered ocean currents.
SOME species of Australian birds are shrinking and the trend will likely continue because of global warming, a scientist said.
Janet Gardner, an Australian National University biologist, led a team of scientists who measured museum specimens to plot the decline in size of eight species of Australian birds over the past century.
The research, published last week in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, found the birds in Australia’s southeast had become between 2 per cent to 4 per cent smaller.
Over the same century, Australia’s average daily temperature rose 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.7 deg C), with the sharpest increase since the 1950s.
Source:- http://lifeofearth.org/2009/08/global-warming-shrinks-birds.html
Even if there were a perfect greenhouse atmosphere which allowed 100% of the light through and absorbed 100% of the heat going out, the atmosphere itself would heat and emissivity would go up as the fourth power of temperature. It just wouldn’t heat that much. E.g., 10 degrees C is 3% hotter so we would emit 12% more heat. That would cool us quick.
In contrast, if there’s a lower albedo and less light simply being reflected into space, that’s not going to heat the atmosphere so the heat balance can continue with a warmer atmosphere. Going from concrete to asphalt pavement and white to black paint might work. Blackening high albedo parts of the world might also do it–black plastic in the desert?
All this works in reverse if we think the world is getting too hot.
Yeah, that’s the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Ie, in a crude black body first approximation, if the power received by the surface is increased 12% (say, the sun increases its power), the temperature will rise 3% to reach equilibrium. Ie 10 C on Earth. (That would be devastating to civilization.)
If we have a single layer atmosphere “box” model, even a perfectly IR absorbing greenhouse would always radiate half away. Of course, with greenhouse gases, the “reflected” radiation is proportional to the from-surface radiation – and thus increases the radiation the surface reaches yet again – and the cycle repeats, though with exponentially diminishing increases (reflected power halves each time) so it is finite.
Say, the sun increases by 1 W (/m^2). Now the surface emits 1 W more by heating up. The perfect greenhouse reflects 0.5 W into space and 0.5 W back down. The surface emits this to by heating up even more. The greenhouse now emits half of this, 0.25 downwards… etc etc, and it approaches 2 W in total increase.
…all of the above If I did the accounting correctly. Shooting from the hip here.
This means if you turn up the sun when you have a system that already has a greenhouse effect, the temperature effects might be different than with plain black bodies.
And then you can go to multiple layers, spectral properties, etc etc…
Spencer Weart has a history of simple climate models here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm