Monday, May 09, 2005

Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows

"Wadhams and his colleagues believe, however, that just such changes could be well under way. They predict that the slowing of the Gulf Stream is likely to be accompanied by other effects, such as the complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020 and almost certainly by 2080."
Posted by Mac at 7:59 PM

7 comments:

JohnFen said...

And it begins.

12:08 AM
Mac said...

What gets me is that people will probably act shocked and surprised when this stuff starts going down.

11:59 AM
W.M. Bear said...

What gets me is that people will probably act shocked and surprised when this stuff starts going down.

Conservative politicians especially. The very ones who now are paying their house scientists to "debunk" global warming, will no doubt proclaim when it happens, "We warned you about this all along." (After expressing the requisite shock and surprise, of course.)

2:08 PM
Anonymous said...

Some time ago I read a theory connected with global warming that I thought I would now share with you to cheer you all up. This is that the Earth is not only heated from the outside by radiation from the Sun, but also from the inside by the process of decay of radioactive elements. At the moment, the solid core of the Earth acts like a nuclear reactor, with the radioactive elements mixed within it amongst non-radioactive elements merely generating heat. Because of global warming, however, this heat can no longer escape from the Earth, and so the core is getting hotter and hotter and will eventually (and possibly within our lifetimes) melt. (This is an exact parallel of what happened at the Chernobil nuclear reactor when they disastrously experimented with its cooling systems.) According to this theory, the twist that makes this situation far more dangerous than the meltdown of a man-made nuclear reactor is that the Earth, because of its spin, is a huge natural centrifuge, and, as you may all know, man-made centrifuges are used to purify and concentrate particular radioctive elements for use in nuclear weapons. When sufficient mass of these elements are brought together, a nuclear chain reaction starts that converts the mass into explosive energy. There is, of course, far more than the required amount of mass of fissionable elements in the Earth's core to initiate and sustain a chain reaction, so what happens when the core melts and these elements start to be separated out and concentrated by the centrifugal effect of the Earth's spin? Answer: the solar system gets a second asteroid belt.

Maybe the only bright side to this possibility for me is that I might get to travel to the stars after all - only in a billion separate pieces.

12:13 AM
Mac said...

Hmmm. This theory has "Tom Van Flandern" written all over it.

9:53 AM
JohnFen said...

The problem with any Earth-centric theory as to what's causing global warming is that it also appears to be happening on all the other planets out to and including Pluto. We know for a fact that it's happening on Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, anyhow. I'm speculating on the rest.

6:39 PM
Anonymous said...

Possibly I should point out, in case I didn't succeed in making it obvious enough, that my previous comment on this topic was actually somewhat tongue in cheek and intended as ironic "entertainment", as the theory that I described in it was advanced by one of those maverick scientists who sometimes publish on the Web and who's views do not appear to be in any way supported by the scientific establishment. (I have now hunted down the reference, if anyone is interested, which is http://nujournal.net/core.pdf). My expertise in geophysics is, unfortunately, not up to the job of assessing whether any of it should actually be taken seriously or not. One counter argument that did occur to me is the fact that it seems that the Earth has been considerably hotter than it is now in the geological past and without it blowing up. So, perhaps (and hopefully) he really is just another crackpot.

[johnfen: The idea is not that global warming is caused by the heat emanating from the Earth's interior, but rather that man-made global warming is now preventing this heat from excaping and thus causing it to build up - with the possible consequences as outlined.]

Incidentally, there is a very informative article on the original subject of this topic at Earthfiles.com (http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=910&category;=Environment). It seems that the picture for those of us living in Britain may not be quite as black as it has been painted in reports elsewhere. While the champion contributor to the problem, i.e., the US, is being reduced to an uninhabitable desert by global warming, it may be that the slowing of the Atlantic Drift will actually keep us here in relatively temperate climatic conditions (albeit with more violent weather). So, maybe there is some justice in the world after all. ;)

4:08 PM