Rapid Global Climate Shift and its socio-economic effects

Is this rate outside of historical analogues Boston?
Or is the resolution not available in the ice record?

One of the interesting rate issues I picked up from the ice record is the precipitous falls and accents viewed by researchers in historical periods:


Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary
by Jonathan Adams (1.), Mark Maslin (2.) & Ellen Thomas (3.)

"The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries."

"Various mechanisms, involving changes in ocean circulation, changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or haze particles, and changes in snow and ice cover, have been invoked to explain these sudden regional and global transitions. We do not know whether such changes could occur in the near future as a result of human effects on climate. Phenomena such as the Younger Dryas and Heinrich events might only occur in a 'glacial' world with much larger ice sheets and more extensive sea ice cover. However, a major sudden cold event did probably occur under global climate conditions similar to those of the present, during the Eemian interglacial, around 122,000 years ago. Less intensive, but significant rapid climate changes also occurred during the present (Holocene) interglacial, with cold and dry phases occurring on a 1500-year cycle, and with climate transitions on a decade-to-century timescale. In the past few centuries, smaller transitions (such as the ending of the Little Ice Age at about 1650 AD) probably occurred over only a few decades at most. All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental changes."

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

 

another issue is distinguishing local weather events recorded in some medium in some locations and overall global climate shift. One degree on average actually makes a big difference. But its when events trigger say 6~10 degree shifts that it really starts getting interesting. We only have those every few million years and then accompanied by extinction events as well.

the deal with the present situation is its headed for that multi degree threshold where lots of stuff starts dying, typically from the largest on down. We might be considered a rather large species if you consider that in the high Permian extinction everything down to about 2lbs died off.

 

Given that we seem to be setting at near the historic lows (in terms of the long record), do you believe that these extinction events are useful as a corollary to what is occurring now?

These glacial/interglacial romps in temperatures while dramatic to seem to promote growth in the current crop of mega-fauna:



Hoyte- where are you?

Aren't we about due for another ice age?

 

actually the current crop of mega fauna pretty much all died out with the advent of man the hunter. Even the north american horse fell victim to the dinner plate.

giant ground sloths, sabor tooth cats, mastodons, all went the way of the Dodo very recently. But there's no climate event big enough to suggest it was climate related.

I notice Hoyt doesn't really participate in the discussions much other than to try and disrupt the scene. Maybe the occasional blind refusal to accept something thats pretty well set in stone but other than that. Not much constructive conversation. I've often wondered how some folks can read something like a fact, say, CO2 was discovered to be a greenhouse gas hundreds of years ago. Yet then insist CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.

 

Yes- and this is my point.

Do you believe that the AGW issue is sufficient to draw the global temperatures out of the range we have been bound in for the last few million years?

 

absolutely. If you send the CO2 out of its normal boundaries then you send temp out as well. We are in big trouble here very shortly unless something is done and fast. Temp will eventually catch up to the CO2 and now CH4 increases. The simple fact that CH4 has begun to release should set off huge warning bells, it can't and won't go unnoticed for long.


oh and in terms of historic lows there's that tricky little issue of the ocean circulation system that seems to have helped so much in stabilizing our temps or relatively so over the last say million years. Previously there was one big continent and it had its own unique effects on world temps

 

How much cold can a sloth bear?

 

Set in stone? Are you stoned? I'm just watching my thermometer as the temperature goes down.

 

All this alarmist crap doesn't stop whiny libs from complaining when their heat won't work. Just wait til coal and oil fired electric utilities go off-line because of stupid green politics. Things will really heat up then and not in a good way, and not the way your stupid predictions say. The heat will be the peasants holding their pitchforks and torches.

 

The only problem ( for the energy giants ) with alternative energy development is its not easily meter-able. Kinda puts a damper on big oil and gas profits if people are heating there homes with wind and solar.

if you look at the numbers, and I'm sure you won't Hoyt but just in case anyone else is interested you can see the increasing trend in the rise in temps, extrapolate that out and you find we're due for about another degree rise in temps by about 2037. likely another before 2050 as well.

Thats 4000 times the rate of change from the 1 million years it took the Siberian trap event to alter the temp that same 4°. Its also something our kids will most definitely not be thanking us for.

stoned eh, nope but I could go for a beer right about now.

so are you saying that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas ??????????? now who's stoned there Homer

 

?Boston?

Do you have any data on the atmospheric concentration possible if all known petroleum reserves (crude/coal/tar sands etc) are released into the atmosphere?

Is not the greater quantity of available CO2 sequestered in rock formations?

Set in stone as it were?

 

How do you support this statement given this research and others of its ilk?:

"the ice cores showed that while it took nearly 10,000 years for the Earth to totally emerge from the last ice age and warm to today’s balmy climate, one-third to one-half of the warming—about 15 degrees Fahrenheit—occurred in about 10 years, at least in Greenland. A closer look at marine sediments confirmed this finding."
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/paleoclimatology_evidence_2.php

I have settled on Sam Adams Lager of late- not too dramatic but a good wholesome brew.

 

ya I just ran across that info a few weeks ago. I'll try and look it up for you. It was in a study on the tar sands. Basically it measured the CO2 potential of all usable sources presently being exploited. The conclusion was based on the question of if the pipeline from the tar sands is built and it opens up a lot of area to development and since the tar sands release such huge volumes of CO2 as well as other pollutants if it did open up would we be able to keep the CO2 concentration bellow 500ppm. Answer was no. Pretty sure they killed the project.

in that study was an analysis of CO2 sources

 

So the population shrinks back to a few hundreds of millions, demand for
fossil fuels goes down, and eventually so does the temperature.

Then populations increase again, demand for resources increases, and
the climate-change debate starts all over again in a few hundred years.

 

polar forcing.

The climate is far more sensitive at the poles and in dryer climates than at the equator. So larger temp swings are more likely than less if over all temps are fluctuating. Also again there's that tricky difference between local weather and climate. If you showed a global shift of 8°C you'd have all of my attention. However I'm just not seeing any 8°C jumps in temp in any of the average global temp records. So I think its safe to say your talking about a local event. And yes local weather was all over the place at any of the glacial extremes.