Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years
By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press – 5 hrs ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new study looking at 11,000 years of climate temperatures shows the world in the middle of a dramatic U-turn, lurching from near-record cooling to a heat spike.
Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures back to the end of the last ice age. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an unprecedented reversal in the 20th century.
Scientists say it is further evidence that modern-day global warming isn't natural, but the result of rising carbon dioxide emissions that have rapidly grown since the Industrial Revolution began roughly 250 years ago.
The decade of 1900 to 1910 was one of the coolest in the past 11,300 years — cooler than 95 percent of the other years, the marine fossil data suggest. Yet 100 years later, the decade of 2000 to 2010 was one of the warmest, said study lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University. Global thermometer records only go back to 1880, and those show the last decade was the hottest for this more recent time period.
"In 100 years, we've gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum," Marcott said. "We've never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly."
Using fossils from all over the world, Marcott presents the longest continuous record of Earth's average temperature. One of his co-authors last year used the same method to look even farther back. This study fills in the crucial post-ice age time during early human civilization.
Marcott's data indicates that it took 4,000 years for the world to warm about 1.25 degrees from the end of the ice age to about 7,000 years ago. The same fossil-based data suggest a similar level of warming occurring in just one generation: from the 1920s to the 1940s. Actual thermometer records don't show the rise from the 1920s to the 1940s was quite that big and Marcott said for such recent time periods it is better to use actual thermometer readings than his proxies.
Before this study, continuous temperature record reconstruction only went back about 2,000 years. The temperature trend produces a line shaped like a "hockey stick" with a sudden spike after what had been a fairly steady line. That data came from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments.
Marcott wanted to go farther back, to the end of the last ice age in more detail by using the same marine fossil method his colleague used. That period also coincides with a "really important time for the history of our planet," said Smithsonian Institution research anthropologist Torben Rick. That's the time when people started to first domesticate animals and start agriculture, which is connected to the end of the ice age.
Marcott's research finds the climate had been gently warming out of the ice age with a slow cooling that started about 6,000 years ago.
Then the cooling reversed with a vengeance.
The study shows the recent heat spike "has no precedent as far back as we can go with any confidence, 11,000 years arguably," said Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann, who wrote the original hockey stick study but wasn't part of this research. He said scientists may have to go back 125,000 years to find warmer temperatures potentially rivaling today's.
However, another outside scientist, Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography thinks temperatures may have been notably warmer just 12,000 years ago, at least in Greenland based on research by some of his colleagues.
Several outside scientists praised the methods Marcott used, but said it might be a bit too oriented toward the Northern Hemisphere.
Marcott said the general downward trend of temperatures that reversed 100 years ago seemed to indicate the Earth was heading either toward another ice age or little ice age from about 1550 to 1850. Or it was continuing to cool naturally until greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels changed everything.
The reason the globe warmed after the ice age and then started cooling about 6,000 years ago has to do with the tilt of the Earth and its distance from the sun, said Marcott and Severinghaus. Distance and angle in the summer matter because of heat absorption and reflection and ground cover.
"We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age and are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet," said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, responding in an email.
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Online:
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears
To fix it I'd suggest the following
Short term
Increase power generation for the 3rd world. Preferring more wind and solar but also more nukes, natural gas and even coal
Increase access to water, food and education.
Continue improving efficiency of our different power sources
As people become more educated and healthy they have less kids reducing world population and reducing demand for power.
Turn off greenhouse gas producing power sources as demand drops from efficiency increases and lower population.
Monitor the environment and begin using more greenhouse emitting power sources if it looks like we're headed back towards another ice age
And that's just the US - other countries that are developing are a threat as well.
It's not that hard to imagine that, like cigarettes, the US might come around on the issue only to find that other countries refuse to do so.
The problem is that you can't continue to improve efficiency of coal and natural gas. There is a physical limit to the efficiency, and we're about as close (afaik) as we are going to get. Cars aren't necessarily getting more efficient because we're making better motors - the efficiency gains in vehicles are because we're using regenerative braking systems (don't lose that energy), and decreasing the power output (shutting down cylinders) when the vehicle is at highway cruising speeds, making vehicles lighter, etc. But, vehicles are quite a bit different - we're changing the power requirements - that's the gain in efficiency. With power plants, they have to produce x-amount of power, and they really can't do much to increase the efficiency of doing so.
Increasing access to water and food in 3rd world nations is going to have an effect of greatly increasing their rate of population growth, far before their population growth levels off. While this is a solution, it's a long term solution - a very long term solution. Earth is already arguably over-populated. I'm not sure it's even possible to provide the entire population the same "quality of life" that the typical person in the U.S. enjoys, due to a scarcity of resources. I do agree that education is one of the most important aspects.
The U.S. is educated. Our population is not declining. The majority of the educated world doesn't have a declining population, though there are a few countries that are declining. It's important to note that in many of the counties on this (short) list, that education isn't the primary reason for the declining population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline At today's rate of fossil fuel dependence, it's too much (allegedly, and I agree.) To get back down to today's population, after the population increases for a few more decades? You're projecting out at least 100 years.
This is the biggest problem of them all. There is no way we are going to get developing nations to agree to stop using the fuel source we used to bootstrap our way to a first world nation. The energy density of oil is just to high. We are not likely to find a solution that is both cheaper and just as effective as oil.
So, while America might be able to eventually convince it's citizens to accept the added cost of going to alternative, more 'green' power sources, we will never convince China or India to do so.
And if they are not on board, then we have done very little to solve the problem.
I agree that global warming is real. I don't know or care whether it's man made. It's a real problem, therefore we should try our best to efficiently deal with the problem. There will be mistakes made, but we have to do something to keep our climate the way we like it.
Let me know what you think, and how can we go about doing so efficiently?
Youtube:“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.
Birth control, or family planning for the religious, is the only cure.
With current technology we can't support the number of people on Earth.
With half the population we could all live much better lives and provide a sustainable ecosystem.
Birth control, or family planning for the religious, is the only cure.
With current technology we can't support the number of people on Earth.
With half the population we could all live much better lives and provide a sustainable ecosystem.
The problem with your solution is that it's just not realistic when applied worldwide unless there is a major shift in global culture by some kind of catastrophe.
Sorry, but if one's proxies are accurate except for everywhere they can be verified, one's proxies are not accurate, period. The very most one can say and be consistent with the scientific method is that one's proxies are inline with other proxies. In fact, we know not only from historic measurements but also from the freezing point of water that the Earth has been significantly warmer during human civilization, most clearly in Europe and Greenland but also in the New World.Marcott's data indicates that it took 4,000 years for the world to warm about 1.25 degrees from the end of the ice age to about 7,000 years ago. The same fossil-based data suggest a similar level of warming occurring in just one generation: from the 1920s to the 1940s. Actual thermometer records don't show the rise from the 1920s to the 1940s was quite that big and Marcott said for such recent time periods it is better to use actual thermometer readings than his proxies.
Before this study, continuous temperature record reconstruction only went back about 2,000 years. The temperature trend produces a line shaped like a "hockey stick" with a sudden spike after what had been a fairly steady line. That data came from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments.
I suspect that the world's population will force us to sacrifice both lives and living standards as the "catastrophe" to get us to rethink immigration and reproductive rights.