16 thoughts on “The Ice Sheets”

  1. Sure, but think about all that new coastal property that will be available in Socal and Baja California.

  2. I’m not sure about Chicago or Montreal, but both Toronto and Boston could be improved by being under a quarter mile of ice.

    2. While I do prefer cooler weather, I would find this to be a trifle unacceptable as I live 11 miles North of Boston and happen to like it here.

  4. No need to worry (about another ice age anyway)…worse case scenario, all we have to do is start producing copious amounts of a super greenhouse gas, like nitrogen trifluoride (NF3). Just better make sure warming is what you want, cause it persists in the atmosphere for centuries.
    http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/08/nation/na-climate8

    “..synthetic chemical widely used in the manufacture of computers and flat-screen televisions is a potent greenhouse gas, with 17,000 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide..”

  6. It would take hundreds of years to accumulate that much ice, but what I find surprising is that there’s sooooo much climate discussion about the tiniest nuances of a one degree rise (how it will affect the mating season of a spotted salamander, for example), and virtually nothing on how a major city will either cope or get buried when the climate shifts back to the normal glaciation period.

    With global warming, it’s not like millions of residents risk getting cut off for weeks without food and power. Most of the effects would occur at night, in temperate latitudes, so at most they would suffer a summer night like people have suffered an hour’s drive to the South, by putting a lime in their Corona and watching late night TV with the A/C turned up.

    In contrast, some of the extremely heavy snowfalls and cold snaps shut Russian and central European cities down for weeks. Even in this country such blizzards can be accompanied by major power outages as trees snap, and if the snow is ten feet deep, power trucks can’t easily travel the rural roads to fix the damage. In major cities there is no way to clear the roads except to shove the snow on top of everybody’s parked cars. The lost work hours and inconvenience in northern cities will start to become a serious economic burden, the snow emergencies will get longer and longer, and businesses that can’t afford the downtime will leave, taking the jobs with them. And it will keep getting worse until the struggle is lost, because by the time glaciers start advancing on the snow bound urban centers virtually nobody will still be living in their path, except for all the people filming buildings getting toppled and crushed.

    1. With global warming, it’s not like millions of residents risk getting cut off for weeks without food and power.

      The 2003 European heat wave is estimated to have killed 70,000. If you add enough heat to bump up the global average temperature by a degree or two, that sort of thing becomes more common.

      Our civilization is optimized for a fairly narrow band of climate, and we’re headed into conditions that no human has ever experienced.

      1. The heatwave of 1980 killed 200 people in KC. The virtually identical heatwave of 2012 killed fewer than 20. Climate change catastrophism cannot explain such trends. Relying on it to predict the future is, quite simply, insane.

      2. You know what statistic is more difficult to find? The number of people who die from cold. Now why would that be?

        1. Not impossible to find, however.

          “As of February 11, 2012 at least 590 people died during a cold snap with temperatures falling below −35 °C (−31 °F) in some regions.[3] Ukraine is the worst hit, with over 100 deaths related to the cold.” (Wikipedia)

          I would much rather live in a very hot climate than a very, very cold one. And I’ve lived in both. Southern California routinely reached 115 F during the summer, while Indiana sometimes reached -30 F. I could bask in 115 F weather, and get a nice tan. It was dangerous to go outside in -30 F weather, particularly if there was any wind at all. In fact, I was at Purdue the first time they ever closed the school for weather, and it was due to a wind chill of – 50F.

      3. Let’s not forget that people tend to like to eat, and a temperature reduction means a reduction of food output (the same is not true for an equivalent heat rise). The famine resulting from a reduction of two or three degrees would kill vastly more than any heat wave.

      4. The 2003 European heat wave is estimated to have killed 70,000.

        And if Europe was prepared, it would have a couple orders of magnitude less. Don’t mistaken the effects of AGW or other “climate change” for human unpreparedness for disaster and other activities that make such problems and body counts even in the absence of AGW.

      5. “The 2003 European heat wave is estimated to have killed 70,000.”

        So that fact that European socialist governments were unprepared for a weather event common in many other parts of the world is evidence of global warming. And to deal with global warming we need….more socialist governments.

        Amazing!

    2. Spain hit 113 F and only 141 people died. France hit 104 F for a week and 15,000+ people died – because everybody was on vacation, including the doctors and politicians, so the government wasn’t there to remind people to drink water and not leave elderly people in rooms whose windows don’t even open before they go on vacation. The 2006 heatwave, which was almost as bad as 2003, only killed about 40 French because it struck in July instead of August, so everyone wasn’t on vacation.

      The 2003 heatwave was said to have been the hottest temperatures in a century or two, which means it was hotter prior to the little ice age, contradicting the idea that modern temperatures are unprecedented. We’re still quite low by the long term record, and well below the averages prior to the modern ice age.

      And of course most of the 2003 records haven’t been broken despite 10 years of increasing carbon dioxide. In fact, we’re coming up on 17 to 20 years without any statistically significant change in temperature, and it may be dropping precipitously very soon due to solar effects. The European winter of 2012 was so severe that it killed about a thousand people.

      When the glaciers descend again, which is pretty much a scientific certainty, nobody currently living in their path will still be there. If you look at modern population densities on or underneath glaciers, you’ll find that it’s zero. If you look at the population densities of the hottest countries on Earth, like Mexico, Libya, India, and Iraq, you’ll find that it is definitely non-zero.

Comments are closed.