Posted by
Playful Walrus on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:28:59 PM
But it still isn’t a good thing?
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 Wednesday.
They cautioned, though, that this news is not an argument in favour of global warming, which is driving imminent and potentially far-reaching damage to the climate system.
Huh?
"Hey, if you don’t sit over by the fire, you’re going to freeze to death. But don’t take this to mean that you should sit by the fire!"
Earth has experienced long periods of extreme cold over the billions of years of its history.
That would mean... that the temperature has, in the past, gone up, and gone back down.
These climate swings have natural causes, believed to be rooted particularly in changes in Earth's orbit and axis that, while minute, have a powerful effect on how much solar heat falls on the planet.
Natural causes, eh?
They found dramatic swings in climate, including changes when Earth flipped from one state to the other in a relatively short time, said one of the authors, geoscientist Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Climate change. Long before Bush.
According to the model, published in the British journal Nature by Crowley and physicist William Hyde of Toronto University, Canada, the next "bifurcation" would normally be due between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now.
The chill would induce a long, stable period of glaciation in the mid-latitudes, smothering Europe, Asia and North America to about 45-50 degrees latitude with a thick sheet of ice.
However, there is now so much CO2 in the air, as a result of fossil-fuel burning and deforestation, that this adds a heat-trapping greenhouse effect that will offset the cooling impacts of orbital shift, said Crowley.
Yay for us!
In September, a scientific research consortium called the Global Carbon Project (GCP) said that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 reached 383 parts per million (ppm) in 2007, or 37 percent above pre-industrial levels.
Present concentrations are "the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years," the report said.
Wait a second. How many SUVs were there 650,000 years ago?
Crowley cautioned those who would seize on the new study to say "'carbon dioxide is now good, it prevents us from walking the plank into this deep glaciation'."
"We don't want to give people that impression," he said. "(...) You can't use this argument to justify [man-made] global warming."
No, no, of course not! That would threaten funding for all of those studies funded in fear of global warming.
Left unchecked, climate change could inflict widespread drought and flooding by the end of the century, translating into hunger, homelessness and other stresses for millions of people.
Not if we build reservoirs and channels to direct the floodwaters to the drought areas.