Rapid
Climate Change
By the 20th century, scientists had rejected old tales of world
catastrophe, and were convinced that global climate could change only
gradually over many tens of thousands of years. But in the 1950s, a few
scientists found evidence that some changes in the past had taken only
a few thousand years. During the 1960s and 1970s other data, supported
by new theories and new attitudes about human influences, reduced the
time a change might require to hundreds of years. Many doubted that such
a rapid shift could have befallen the planet as a whole. The 1980s and
1990s brought proof (chiefly from studies of ancient ice) that the global
climate could indeed shift, radically and catastrophically, within a century
perhaps even within a decade.
This essay covers large one-way jumps of climate. For short-term
cyclical changes, see the essay on Changing Sun, Changing
Climate. For the main discussion of rapid changes in ice sheets,
see the essay on Ice Sheets and Rising Seas,
and for changes in ocean circulation, see the essay on Ocean
Currents and Climate. Keywords: abrupt climate
change, sudden, global warming, greenhouse effect, sea level rise, ice
sheet collapse
"A small forcing can cause a small
[climate] change or a huge one."
National Academy of Sciences, 2002.(1)
|
Climate, if it changes
at all, evolves so slowly that the difference cannot be seen in a
human lifetime. That was the opinion of most people, and nearly all
scientists, through the first half of the 20th century. To be sure,
there were regional excursions, such as long spells of drought in
one place or another. But people expected that after a few years "the
weather" would automatically drift back to its "normal" state, the
conditions they were used to. The planet's atmosphere was surely so
vast and stable that outside forces, ranging from human activity to
volcanic eruptions, could have no more than a local and temporary
effect. |
- LINKS -
Full discussion in
<=Public
opinion
<=Simple models |
Looking to times long past, scientists recognized that massive
ice sheets had once covered a good part of the Northern Hemisphere.
The Ice Age was tens of thousands of years in the past, however, and
it had been an aberration. During most of the geological record, the
Earth had been bathed in uniform warmth — such was the fixed
opinion of geologists. As one meteorologist complained as late as 1991, geology textbooks
just copied down from their predecessors the venerable
tradition that the age of the dinosaurs (and nearly all other past
ages) had enjoyed an "equable climate."(2)
The glacial epoch itself seemed to have been a relatively stable condition
that lasted millions of years. It was a surprise when evidence turned
up during the 19th century that the recent glacial epoch had been
made up of several cycles of advance and retreat of ice sheets
not a uniform Ice Age but a series of ice ages. |
|
Some geologists denied the whole idea, arguing
that every glaciation had been regional, a mere local variation while
"the mean climate of the world has been fairly constant."(3)
But most accepted the evidence that the Earth's northern latitudes,
at least, had repeatedly cooled and warmed as a whole. The global
climate could change rapidly that is, over the course of only
a few tens of thousands of years. Probably the ice could come again.
That gave no cause to worry, for it surely lay many thousands of years
in the future. |
<=Climate cycles
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Assuming Stability
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OF PAGE |
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A very few meteorologists
speculated about possibilities for more rapid change, perhaps even
the sudden onset of an ice age. The Earth's climate system might be
in an unstable equilibrium, W.J. Humphreys warned in 1932. Although
another ice age might not happen for millions of years, "we are not
wholly safe from such a world catastrophe."(4)
The respected climate expert C.E.P. Brooks offered the worst scenario.
He suggested that a slight change of conditions might set off a self-sustaining
shift between climate states. Suppose, he said, some random decrease
of snow cover in northern latitudes exposed dark ground. Then the
ground would absorb more sunlight, which would warm the air, which
would melt still more snow: a vicious feedback cycle. An abrupt and
catastrophic rise of tens of degrees was conceivable, "perhaps in
the course of a single season."(5) Run the cycle backward, and an ice age might suddenly descend.
|
<=Simple models
=>Chaos
theory
|
Most scientists dismissed Brooks's speculations
as preposterous. Talk of sudden change was liable to remind them of
notions popularized by religious fundamentalists, who had confronted
the scientific community in open conflict for generations. Believers
in the literal truth of the Bible insisted that the Earth was only
a few thousand years old, and defended their faith by claiming that
ice sheets could form and disintegrate in mere decades. Hadn't mammoths
been discovered as intact mummies with grass in their stomachs, evidently
frozen in a shockingly abrupt change of climate? Scientists scorned
such notions. Among other arguments, they pointed out that ice sheets
kilometers thick must require at least several thousand years to build
up or melt away. The physics of ice, at least, was simple and undeniable.
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<=Public opinion |
The conviction that climate changed only slowly was not affected
by the detailed climate records that oceanographers recovered, with
increasing frequency from the 1920s through the 1950s, from layers
of silt and clay pulled up from the ocean floor. Analysis showed no
changes in less than several thousand years. The scientists failed
to notice that most cores drilled from the seabed could not in fact
record a rapid change. For in many places the mud was constantly stirred
by burrowing worms, or by sea floor currents and slumping, which blurred
any abrupt differences between layers. |
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Lakes and peat bogs
retained a more detailed record. Most telling were studies in the
1930s and 1940s of Scandinavian lakes and bogs, using ancient pollen
to find what plants had lived in the region when the layers of clay
("varves") were laid down. Major changes in the mix of plants suggested
that the last ice age had not ended with a uniformly steady warming,
but with some peculiar oscillations of temperature.(6)
The most prominent oscillation already noticed in glacial moraines
in Scandinavia around the turn of the century had begun with
a rise in temperature, named the Allerød warm period. This
was followed by a spell of bitterly cold weather, first identified
in the 1930s using Swedish data. It was dubbed the "Younger Dryas"
period after Dryas octopetala, a graceful but hardy Arctic
flower whose pollen gave witness to frigid tundra. (The glacial period
that preceded the Allerød was the "Older Dryas.") The Younger
Dryas cold spell was followed by a more gradual warming, ending at
temperatures even higher than the present. In 1955 the timing was
pinned down in a study that used a new technique for dating, measuring
the radioactive isotope carbon-14 ("radicarbon"). The study revealed that the chief
oscillation of temperatures had come around 12,000 years ago. The
changes had been rapid where "rapid," for climate scientists
at mid-century, meant a change that progressed over as little as one
or two thousand years. Most scientists believed such a shift had to
be a local circumstance, not a world-wide phenomenon. There were no
data to drive them to any other conclusion, for it was impossible
to correlate sequences of varves (or anything else) between different
continents. |
<=>Climate cycles

The tundra
flower Dryas
CLICK FOR FULL IMAGE
<=Carbon
dates |
Even swifter changes could show up in the varves in the clay derived from
the layers in the mud of lake beds laid down each year by the spring
runoff. But there were countless ways that the spring floods and even
the vegetation recorded in the layers could have changed in ways that
had nothing to do with climate a shift of stream drainages,
a forest fire, the arrival of a tribe of farmers who cleared the land.
Abrupt changes in varves, peat beds, and other geological records
were easily attributed to such circumstances. Scientists could win
a reputation by unraveling causes of kinks in the data, but for climatology
it all looked like nothing but local "noise."(8)
|
|
Thus it was easy to dismiss the large climate
swings that an Arizona astronomer, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, reported
from his studies of tree rings recovered from ancient buildings and
Sequoias. Other scientists supposed these were at most regional occurrences.
Even regional climate changes scarcely seemed to affect the trees
that most scientists looked at (the American Southwest was exceptional
in its radically varying climate and precariously surviving trees).
It didn't help that Douglass tried to correlate his weather patterns
with sunspots, an approach most meteorologists thought hopelessly
speculative. |
<=Solar variation |
If researchers had found simultaneous changes at widely different
locations, they might have detected a broad climate shift. Carbon-14
dating remained fraught with uncertainties, however, and matching
up the chronologies of different places was difficult and controversial.
Morevover, even a massive and global climate change could bring rains
in one locale, cold in another, and little shift at all of vegetation
in a third. So each study remained isolated from the others.(9) |
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In any case it appeared that the rate of
advance and retreat of the great ice sheets, at its fastest, had been no faster than
present-day mountain glaciers were seen to move.(10) That was compatible with "the uniformitarian
principle." This geological tenet held that the fundamental forces
that molded ice, rock, sea, and air did not vary over time. Some further
insisted that nothing could change otherwise than the way things are
seen to change in the present. Geologists cherished the uniformitarian
principle as the very foundation of their science, for how could you
study anything scientifically unless the rules stayed the same? The
idea had become central to their training and theories during a century
of disputes. Scientists had painfully given up traditions that explained
certain geological features by Noah's Flood or other one-time supernatural
interventions. Although many of the theories of catastrophic geological
change were argued on fully scientific grounds, by the end of the
nineteenth century scientists had come to lump all such theories with
religious dogmatism. The passionate debates between "uniformitarian"
and "catastrophist" viewpoints had only partly brought science into
conflict with religion, however. Many pious scientists and rational
preachers could agree that everything happened by gradual natural
processes in a world governed by a reliable God-given order.(11) |
=>Public opinion
|
Historically, temperatures apparently had not
risen or fallen radically in less than millennia, so the uniformitarian
principle declared that such changes could not have happened in the
past. The principle thus went hand-in-glove with a prevailing "gradualist"
approach to all things geological. Alongside physical arguments that
the great masses of ice, rock and water could not change quickly,
paleontologists subscribed to a neo-Darwinian model of the evolution
of species which argued that here too change must be continuous and
gradual. All that seemed to apply to climate. Textbooks pointed out,
for example, that there were plausible reasons to believe that tropical
rain forests had scarcely changed over millions of years, so the climates
that sustained the orchids and parrots must have been equally stable.
There was no reason to worry about the fact that old carbon-14 dates
were accurate only within about a thousand years plus or minus, so
that a faster change could hardly have been detected. As for
unmistakable fluctuations like the Younger Dryas, presumably those
were restricted to the vicinity
of the North Atlantic or an even narrower area (few studies had been
done anywhere else). |
<=>Climatologists
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Changes Over Millennia? (1950s)
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In 1956
the carbon-14 expert Hans Suess, studying the shells of plankton
embedded in cores of clay pulled from the seabed by Columbia University’s
Lamont Geological Observatory, discovered a change at the fastest
speed that anyone expected. Suess reported that the last glacial
period had ended with a "relatively rapid" rise of temperature
about 1°C (roughly 2°F) per thousand years.(12)
The rise looked even more abrupt when David Ericson and collaborators
inspected the way fossil foraminifera shells varied from layer to
layer in the Lamont cores. They reported a "rather sudden change
from more or less stable glacial conditions" about 11,000 years
ago, a change from fully glacial conditions to modern warmth within
as little as a thousand years. They acknowledged this was "opposed
to the usual view of a gradual change."(13) Indeed Cesare Emiliani, who often disagreed with Lamont
scientists, published an argument that the temperature rise of some
8°C had been the expected gradual kind, stretching over some
8,000 years.(14)
|
<=Uses of shells
<=Climate cycles
=>Simple
models
|
More was at stake than simple dating. A graduate student in the
Lamont group, Wallace Broecker, put a bold idea in his doctoral
thesis. Looking at Ericson's work and other data, Broecker saw severe changes around
the world all dated to about the same time — "a far different
picture of glacial oscillations than the usual sinusoidal pattern."
Like Brooks, he suggested that "two stable states exist, the glacial
state and the interglacial state, and that the system changes quite
rapidly from one to the other." This was only one passage in a thick
doctoral thesis that few people read, and to those few it must have
sounded much like Brooks's speculations on cataclysmic changes,
long since dismissed by scientists as altogether implausible. They
were right to be cautious, for later studies found that the coincidence
of changes that Broecker saw at different locations was an artifact
of inaccurate dating. (This was not the last time he would glean
a valuable idea from foggy data.)(15) |
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After considerable debate,
Emiliani won his point. The rapid shift that Ericson had reported
was not really to be found in the data. Like some other sudden changes
reported in natural records, it reflected peculiarities in the method
of analyzing samples, not the real world itself. Yet mistakes can
be valuable, if they set someone like Broecker to thinking about overlooked
possibilities. Sometimes the mistake even turns out to reflect a valid
understanding, when, as Broecker later remarked, "...you go back around
and actually the discovery itself was valid, even though the thing
that led to it was wrong."(16)
By 1960, three Lamont scientists Broecker, Maurice Ewing, and
Bruce Heezen were reporting a variety of evidence, from deep-sea
and lake deposits, that a radical global climate shift of as much
as 5-10°C had in fact taken place in less than a thousand years.(17) While it would necessarily take many
thousands of years to melt the great ice sheets, they had realized
that meanwhile the atmosphere and the ocean surface waters, which
were less massive, could be fluctuating on their own. Broecker speculated
that the climate shifts might reflect some kind of rapid turnover
of North Atlantic ocean waters a natural place for an oceanographer
to look. |
=>Chaos theory
=>The
oceans |
A few scientists responded
with more specific models. Most important was a widely noted paper
by Ewing and William Donn, who were "stimulated by the observation
that the change in climate which occurred at the close of the [most
recent] glacial period was extremely abrupt." Their model proposed
ways that feedbacks involving Arctic ice could promote change
on a surprisingly rapid scale.(18) Following up, J.D. Ives drew on his detailed field studies
of Labrador to assert that the topography there could support what
he called "instantaneous glacierization of a large area." By "instantaneous"
he meant an advance of ice sheets over the course of a mere few thousand
years, which was roughly ten times faster than most scientists had
imagined.(19) However, the Ewing-Donn theory
turned out to have fatal errors, and most scientists continued to
doubt that such swift changes were possible. |
<=>Simple models
=>Sea
rise & ice |
Further information came from studies of fossil pollen recovered
from layers of peat laid down in bogs. The scientists who undertook
such work had not set out to study the speed of climate change. Their
inquiry was mostly a routine, plodding counting of hundreds of specks
under the microscope, assembling data on vegetation shifts to catalog
the way ice sheets came and went. But the carbon-14 dates offered
surprises for an attentive eye. For example, a 1961 study mentioned
in passing that at one location in Wisconsin, the transition from
glacial-period pines to oak trees had taken at most 200 years.(20) |
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Earth scientists had to be careful in describing such results, for rapid change
remained a touchy question. During the 1950s, Immanuel Velikovsky
and others had excited the public with popular books describing
abrupt and marvelous upheavals in the Earth's history. Frozen mammoths
were brought forth again as proof that the world’s climate
could change catastrophically overnight (although every arctic hiker
knows how swiftly a freeze can come even in summer, or how a misstep
in a shifting riverbed could bury the careless in permafrost). Experts
grew weary of explaining to students and newspaper reporters that
the scenarios were sheer fantasy. The battle against Velikovsky
and his ilk only reinforced geologists' insistence on the uniformitarian
principle, which they took as a denial of any change radically unlike
changes seen in the present. Ideas of catastrophic change were also
tainted by the way zealots used the ideas, persistently and increasingly,
as they sought "scientific" proof for their fundamentalist interpretation
of passages in the Bible. (Typical was the complaint of a paleontologist
who prefaced his 1992 book with a disclaimer: "in view of the misuse
that my words have been put to in the past, I wish to say that nothing
in this book should be taken out of context and thought in any way
to support the views of the 'creationists'...")(21) There seemed to be no good evidence, nor
plausible physical cause, for any swift global upset.
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<=Public opinion
=>Simple models |
Hints of Instability
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Hints that the climate system could change abruptly came unexpectedly from fields far from traditional climatology. In
the late 1950s, a group in Chicago carried out tabletop "dishpan"
experiments using a rotating fluid to simulate the circulation of
the atmosphere. They found that a circulation pattern could flip between
distinct modes. If the actual atmospheric circulation did that, weather
patterns in many regions would change almost instantly. On a still
larger scale, in the early 1960s a few scientists created crude but
robust mathematical models that suggested that global climate really
could change to an enormous extent in a relatively short time, thanks
to feedbacks in the amount of snow cover and the like.(22)
|
<=Simple models
<=Simple
models
<=Sea rise & ice |
Probably it was no coincidence that this
new readiness of scientists to consider rapid and disastrous global
change spread in the early 1960s. That was exactly when the world
public was becoming anxious over the possibility of sudden global
catastrophe. Alongside the fantasies of Velikovsky and warnings from increasingly prominent Bible fundamentalists, there were sober possibilities
of disaster brought on by nuclear war, not to mention threats to the
entire planet from chemical pollution and other human industrial ills. |
<=Public opinion
|
Now that theoretical ideas and the general trend of opinion alike made
it easier for climate scientists to envision sharp change, they were
increasingly able to notice it in their data. Broecker in particular,
looking at deep-sea cores, in 1966 pointed to an "abrupt transition
between two stable modes of operation of the ocean-atmosphere system,"
especially a "sharp unidirectional change" around 11,000 years ago.(23) It proved possible to build simple fluid-flow models that
showed how a switch in the pattern of ocean currents could promote
such a change. Improved deep-sea records, going back hundreds of millennia,
brought additional information. By comparing the irregular curves
from a number of cores, Broecker noticed that the general pattern
of glacial cycles was not a simple symmetric wave. It looked more
like a sawtooth where "gradual glacial buildups over periods averaging
90,000 years in length are terminated by deglaciations completed in
less than one tenth this time."(24) |
<=The oceans
<=>Climate cycles
=>Sea rise & ice
<=Chaos
theory
<=Climatologists
=>Climate cycles |
The view was supported
by data gathered independently at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
where Reid Bryson was already interested in rapid climate changes.
In the late 1950s, supported by an Air Force contract to study weather
anomalies, he had been struck by the wide variability of climates
as recorded in the varying width of tree rings. And he was familiar
with the Chicago "dishpan" experiments that showed how a circulation
pattern might change almost instantaneously. Bryson brought together
a group to take a new, interdisciplinary look at climate, including
even an anthropologist who studied the ancient native American cultures
of the Midwest. From bones and pollen they deduced that a disastrous
drought had struck the region in the 1200s the very period
when the flourishing towns of the Mound Builders had gone into decline.
It was already known that around that time a great drought had ravaged
the Anasazi culture in the Southwest (the evidence was constricted
tree rings in ancient logs from their dwellings). Compared with this
drought of the 1200s, the ruinous Dust Bowl of the 1930s had been
mild and temporary. A variety of historical evidence hinted that the
climate shift had been world-wide. And there seemed to have been distinct
starting and ending points. By the mid 1960s, Bryson concluded that
"climatic changes do not come about by slow, gradual change, but rather
by apparently discrete 'jumps' from one [atmospheric] circulation
regime to another."(25*) |
<=Government
<=Climatologists |
Next the Wisconsin team reviewed carbon-14 dates of pollen from
around the end of the last ice age. In 1968, they reported evidence
for a rapid shift around 10,500 years ago, and by "rapid" they meant
a change in the mix of tree species within less than a century (they
quoted a "half-life" as short as 55 years). Perhaps the Younger Dryas was not just a local Scandinavian
anomaly. |
|
Bryson and
his collaborators were developing a systematic technique for translating
their counts of different kinds of pollens into a record of rainfall
and temperature. It was a technique "built on a foundation of debatable
assumptions," as one reviewer observed, yet still "a major step forward."
They produced for the American Midwest the most accurate, detailed,
and comprehensive climate record available anywhere.(26)
Looking at hundreds of carbon-14 dates spanning the past dozen millennia
dates that improvements had made accurate enough to give a
reasonable correlation among widely dispersed sites they believed
they could confirm Bryson's disturbing conclusion. Climate change
generally did not come smoothly, but in a steplike pattern; periods
of "quasi-stable" climate ended in swift transitions.(27)
In a 1974 followup, they spoke more boldly of stable periods interrupted
by catastrophic "discontinuities," when "dramatic climate change occurred
in a century or two at most."(28) The "at most" was a confession that
the power of pollen studies was limited. For even if the climate changed
overnight, it could take a century or more for the mix of trees in
a forest to evolve until it accurately reflected the new conditions.
|
=>Simple models
=>Aerosols
<=>Chaos
theory |
To be sure, it did not take a global climate change to transform
any particular forest. Strictly local events could do that. There
was no way to correlate climate changes in different parts of the
world down to the exact century, since carbon-14 measurements still had a wide range of
error and other dating techniques were worse. This limitation
of the data did not worry most experts, for they felt it was sheer
speculation to propose any physical mechanism that could change the
entire world's climate in less than a thousand years or so. |
|
Yet confirmation of
changes at that rate, at least, was coming from a variety of other
work. An example was George Kukla's study of snail shells and pollen
in layers of loess (wind-blown dust) in Czechoslovakia another
study that was designed to investigate gradual shifts, but in which
a close look at the data revealed unexpectedly
abrupt transitions.(29) The emerging picture of severe instability was reinforced
by studies of cores drilled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps,
and by deep-sea cores that covered much longer times. Evidently the
hundred-thousand-year glacial cycles did follow a sawtooth pattern:
each cycle showed a slow descent into a long-lasting cold state that
ended with a mysteriously abrupt rise of temperature. As Emiliani
put it in 1974, "We used to think intervals as warm as the present
lasted 100,000 years or so. Instead, they appear to be short, infrequent
episodes."(30) Another respected
climatologist explained that the old view of "a grand, rhythmic cycle"
must be replaced by a "much more rapid and irregular succession,"
in which the Earth "can swing between glacial and interglacial conditions
in a surprisingly short span of millennia (some would say centuries)."(31) |
<=Climate cycles
<=Climate
cycles
|
Within these larger transitions, even quicker secondary oscillations
showed up in various data, such as carbon-14 studies of ancient glacier
moraines and lake levels.(32*) Above all there was the Younger Dryas.
Evidence from shells in a few excellent deep-sea cores showed a geographically
widespread temperature oscillation. Many scientists found this evidence
of little interest, however. Sea-floor slumping or various chemical
and biological effects effects could easily have confused the data.(33*) Up through the early 1970s, few of
the scientists who studied ancient climates paid much attention to
putative short-term changes. Their energies continued to focus on
pinning down the grand multi-millennial rhythm of the ice ages and
the famous puzzle of its causes. |
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Changes within a Century? (Early 1970s)
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It was the pursuit of
these long cycles, more than any expectation of finding abrupt changes,
that attracted scientists to a high-altitude frozen plateau. A Danish
group headed by Willi Dansgaard drilled a long core of ice at Camp
Century, Greenland in cooperation with Americans led by Chester Langway,
Jr. The proportions of different oxygen isotopes in the layers of
ice gave a fairly direct record of temperature. But mixed in with
the expected gradual cycles, the group was surprised to notice what
they called "spectacular" shorter-term shifts including, once
again, an oscillation around 12,000 years ago. Some of the shifts
seemed to have taken as little as a century or two. Nobody could
be sure of that, however, for the odd wiggles in the data might represent
not a world climate shift, but only local accidents in the ice.(34) |

Camp Century
graph of temperatures
<=Solar variation
=>Public
opinion |
A group
of glacial-epoch experts, meeting at Brown University in 1972, reached
something close to a consensus. Reviewing the Camp Century ice cores,
new foraminifera studies by Emiliani, and other field evidence, the
scientists agreed that interglacial periods tended to be short, not
more than ten thousand years, and to end more abruptly than had been
supposed. The present interglacial had already lasted ten thousand
years. In view of the cooling reported in the Arctic since the 1940s,
they suspected our interglacial might be approaching its end. The
majority concluded that the current warm period might possibly end
in rapid cooling within the next few hundred years "a first
order environmental hazard."(35) |
<=>Climate cycles
=>Government
= Milestone
|
Bryson, Stephen Schneider, and a few others
took the concern to the public. They insisted that the climate we
had experienced in the past century or so, mild and equable, was not
the only sort of climate the planet knew. For all anyone could say,
the next decade might start a plunge into a cataclysmic freeze, drought,
or other change unprecedented in recent memory, but not without precedent
in the archeological and geological record. (Link from below) While Bryson warned
that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere would shade the Earth
and bring rapid cooling, this was not the only possibility. The growing
realization that small perturbations could trigger sudden climate
change also impressed scientists who were growing concerned about
the rising level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide ( CO2).
Perhaps that might bring serious global warming and other weather
changes within as little as a century or two. |
=>Public opinion
|
As abrupt changes became more credible, scientists noticed them
in still more kinds of evidence. One example was the shells of beetles,
which are abundant in peat bogs, and so remarkably durable that they
can be identified even 50,000 years back. Beetles swiftly invade or
abandon a region as conditions shift, so the species you find give
a sensitive measure of the climate. Russell Coope, studying bog beetles
in England, turned up rapid fluctuations from cold to warm and back
again, a matter of perhaps 3°C, around 13,000 years ago. It all
happened within a thousand years at most, he reported (if the change
had been even faster his data could not have shown it).(36)
This singular approach got a skeptical response from other scientists
who pursued the well-established study of pollens, for they were accustomed
to seeing more gradual transformations of forests and grasslands.
They easily dismissed the fluctuations in Coope’s records as
local peculiarities of English beetles. |
|
The Camp Century cores, too, might tell little about change on
a global scale. The data might be sensitive to changes of ice cover
in the seas near Greenland, or to a local shift of the ice cap's glacial
flow. Other evidence, especially oxygen isotopes in shells from deep-sea
cores that reflected conditions in the entire North Atlantic, showed
changes only over several thousand years. |
|
Nevertheless, as pieces
of evidence accumulated, a growing number of scientists found it plausible
that the climate over large regions, if not the entire world, had
sometimes changed markedly in a thousand years or even less. Perhaps
one reason was that the early 1970s meanwhile saw further development
of global energy-balance models in which a few simple equations produced
radical instability. In particular, Mikhail Budyko
in Leningrad pursued calculations about feedbacks involving ice cover,
and suggested that at the rate we were pumping CO2
into the atmosphere, the ice covering the Arctic Ocean in summer might melt
entirely by 2050 (link from below). Conversely,
a buildup of snow and ice might reflect enough sunlight to flip the
Earth into a glaciated state.(37)
These ideas prompted George Kukla and his wife Helena to inspect satellite
photos of Arctic snow cover, and they found surprisingly large variations
from year to year. If the large buildup seen in 1971 were repeated
for only another seven years, the snow and ice would reflect as much
sunlight as during a glacial period. "The potential for fast changes
of climate," they warned, "evidently does exist on the Earth."(38)
|
<=Simple models
<=Simple
models |
Meanwhile glacier experts
developed ingenious models that suggested that global warming might
provoke the ice sheets of Antarctica to break up swiftly, shocking
the climate system with a huge surge of icewater.(39) (link from below) Bryson and other scientists worked harder
than ever to bring their concerns to the attention of the scientific
community and the public. As Broecker put it, any decade now a severe
"climatic surprise" could hit the world.(40) |
<=>Sea rise & ice
=>Public opinion
|
Most scientists
spoke more cautiously. When leading experts had to state a consensus
opinion they were circumspect, as in a 1975 National Academy of Sciences
report about plans for international cooperation in atmospheric research.
Evaluating past statistics, the panel concluded that predictable influences
on climate made for only relatively small changes. These changes,
they said, would take centuries or longer to develop. Any big jerks
that might matter for current human affairs were likely to be just
"noise," the usual irregularities of climate. The panel agreed that
there was a significant "likelihood of a major deterioration of global
climate in the years ahead," but they could not say how rapidly that
might happen. Scientists argued over whether the greatest
global risk was cooling by atmospheric pollution or greenhouse effect
warming. (Some journalists were writing lurid stories about the prospect
of a catastrophic global cooling, but among scientists this was never
more than a speculation offered by a minority.) No doubt the present
warm interglacial period would end eventually, but that might be thousands
of years away. About the only thing the scientists fully agreed on
was that they were largely ignorant.(41)
|
<=Government
<=Aerosols |
As a landscape that looks smooth
from a distance may display jagged gullies when seen through binoculars,
so sharper and sharper changes appeared as measuring techniques got
better. An example was an analysis that Emiliani published in 1975
of some deep-sea cores from the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks to unusually
clear and distinct layers of silt, he found evidence of a remarkable
event around 11,600 years ago: a rise of sea level at a rate of meters
per decade.(42) Another compelling
example was a 1981 study of a few sediment cores that had accumulated
very rapidly, giving excellent time resolution. They showed a startling
cooling around 11-12,000 years ago as much as 7-10°C in
less than a thousand years before the warming resumed. One
expert warned that temperatures in the past had sometimes jumped 5°C
in as little as 50 years.(43*)
|
=>Sea rise & ice
|
Mechanisms for Abrupt Change
TOP
OF PAGE |
|
Was there really any mechanism that could
have caused such leaps of temperature? The known cosmic causes, for
example a modulation of sunlight, seemed unlikely to be strong enough
to push truly rapid world-wide changes. An expert noted that most of
his colleagues "take the European late-glacial chronology as standard
for the whole world, in the belief that climatic changes must have
been broadly synchronous because they were cosmically caused."(44) A close look at the best evidence, however, found only
events affecting the North Atlantic region (where most of the experts
did their work). A local trigger for the Younger Dryas, in particular,
was suggested by the fossil shorelines of a gigantic lake of fresh
water that had been dammed up behind the North American ice sheet.
Evidence suggested that as the sheet melted back, an ice dam had suddenly
broken up and released the entire lake to flood down the St. Lawrence
River. By adding fresh water to the North Atlantic, that could have
shut down the "thermohaline" circulation in which warm water
from the tropics moves north, then sinks as it grows denser from cold
and salt. Without this injection of tropical heat, the region's temperature
would drop until the circulation resumed. (The cause of the Younger
Dryas is still in dispute, but a sudden release of fresh water from the North American ice
sheet remains the most plausible theory.)(45*)
|
<=>The oceans
|
Other mechanisms that scientists thought up
were more global in scope. Had an eruption of icebergs following the
sudden disintegration of Arctic Ocean ice sheets cooled the entire
North Atlantic Ocean? Or a catastrophic disintegration of
Antarctic ice sheets might have sent forth masses of ice to cool all
the Earth's oceans? (See above.) Or perhaps a cluster of volcanic eruptions had
affected the whole Northern Hemisphere?Or had changes been initiated in the tropics (a huge region often overlooked by the ice-core specialists), for example by some grand reorganization of the atmospheric circulation?(46) Then again, the changes
might be purely chaotic — autonomous and unpredictable stutterings
between different quasi-stable modes of the planet's climate system? |
<=>Chaos theory
|
There were all too
many feedback forces that might turn a slow local temperature change
into an abrupt global one. The more traditional candidates included
changes in ice and snow cover, ocean currents, or the pattern of wind
circulation and storms. During the 1980s, additional speculations
lengthened the list. Perhaps a rise in global temperature would cause
microbial life to burgeon in the vast expanses of peat bogs and tundra,
emitting more “marsh gas”? That was methane, a greenhouse
gas that traps heat radiation even more effectively than CO2,
so it could cause more warming still in a vicious feedback circle..
Or what about clathrates peculiar ices that locked up huge
volumes of methane in the muck of cold seabeds perhaps these
would disintegrate and release greenhouse gases? |
<=Other gases

Clathrate (MORE) |
It was getting easier for scientists to consider
such colossal transformations, for uniformitarian thinking was under
attack. By the early 1980s, some geologists were stressing the importance
of rare events like the enormous floods that had drained temporary
lakes during the melting of the continental ice sheets. In biology,
Stephen Jay Gould and a few others were arguing that some species
had evolved in "punctuated" bursts.(47)
Other scientists were offering plausible scenarios of cosmic catastrophes
that might happen only once in tens of millions of years. Had a stunning
climate change, following the fall of a giant asteroid, exterminated
the dinosaurs in a single frozen year? Could something like that befall
us? |
<=World winter
|
Many scientists continued to look on such speculations as little
better than science fiction. The evidence of abrupt shifts that turned
up in occasional studies may seem strong in retrospect, but at the
time it was not particularly convincing. Any single record could be
subject to all kinds of accidental errors. The best example was in
the best data on climate shifts, the wiggles in measurements from
the Camp Century core. These data came from near the bottom of the
hole, where the ice layers were squeezed tissue-thin and probably
folded and distorted as they flowed over the bedrock. |
|
Broecker later remarked that the relatively smooth temperature
record of oxygen isotopes in deep-sea sediments "tended to lull scientists
into concluding that the Earth's climate responds gradually when pushed."
Many continued to believe that the oceans could only vary gradually
over thousands of years, with a thermal inertia that must moderate
any climate changes. These scientists should have realized that the
top few meters of ocean exchange heat only slowly with the rest. And
they should have recalled that at most places in the deep sea, sediments
accumulate at only a few centimeters per thousand years. Churning
by burrowing worms and other creatures within the mud (“bioturbation”)
smears the layers, blurring any record of change.(48*)
Ice did not have these problems. Thus further progress would depend
on getting more and better ice cores. |
|
Surprises from the Ice (1980s)
TOP
OF PAGE |
|
Ice drilling was becoming a little world of its own,
inhabited by people of many nations (Dansgaard's "Danish" team spoke
eight different languages). Their divergent interests made for long
and occasionally painful negotiations. But the trouble of cooperation
was worth it for bringing in a variety of expertise, plus (what
was also essential) a variety of agencies that might grant funds.Drilling
teams hunted ancient ice in places barely possible to reach
eventually they penetrated not only the polar ice caps, but mountain
icefields from Peru to Tibet and the teams had to somehow
get there with tons of equipment and supplies. The outcome was a
series of engineering triumphs, which could turn into maddening
fiascos when a costly drill head got irretrievably stuck a mile
down. Engineers went back to their drawing-boards, team leaders
contrived to get more funds, and the work slowly pushed on.(49) There is a supplementary experimental site on the History of Greenland Ice Drilling,
with glimpses into the inner workings of the U.S. "GISP" projects
of the 1980s. |
<=>International

A drilling
team
<=>Climate cycles
<=>Models (GCMs)
<=>Modern temp's |
The first breakthrough came after the ice drillers went
to a second Greenland location, a military radar station named "Dye 3" some
1,400 kilometers distant from Camp Century. By 1981, after a decade
of tenacious labor and the invention of an ingenious new drill, they
had extracted gleaming cylinders of ice ten centimeters in diameter
and in total more than two kilometers long. Dansgaard's group cut
out 67,000 samples, and in each sample analyzed the ratios of oxygen
isotopes. The temperature record showed what they called "violent"
changes which corresponded closely to the jumps at Camp Century.
Moreover, the most prominent of the changes in their record corresponded
to the Younger Dryas oscillation seen in pollen shifts all over Europe.
It showed up in the ice as a swift warming interrupted by "a dramatic
cooling of rather short duration, perhaps only a few hundred years."(50*) |

Dye
3 leaders
|
A particularly good correlation came from
a group under Hans Oeschger. An ice drilling pioneer, Oeschger was
now measuring oxygen isotopes in glacial-era lake deposits near his
home in Bern, Switzerland. That was far from Greenland, but his group
found "drastic climatic changes" that neatly matched the ice record.
The severe cold spells became known as "Dansgaard-Oeschger events."
They seemed to be restricted to the North Atlantic and Europe.(51*)
|
= Milestone
|
As ice drillers improved
their techniques, making ever better measurements along their layered
cores, they found a variety of large steps not only in temperature
but also in the CO2 concentration.(52*) This was a great surprise to everyone. Since the gas circulates
through the atmosphere in a matter of months, the steps seemed to
reflect world-wide changes. Other scientists promptly pointed out
that the observations might be a mere artifact the amount of
gas absorbed might change with the local temperature in Greenland
because of the physical chemistry of ice. Yet clearly something
had made spectacular jumps. A variety of other evidence for very abrupt
climate changes was accumulating, and some began to entertain the
notion of such change on a global scale. |
=>Biosphere
=>Models
(GCMs)
|
Most of these scientists, after presenting
their data, could not resist adding a few suggestive words about possible
causes. Dansgaard's group was typical in speculating about "shifts
between two different quasi-stationary modes of atmospheric circulation."(53)
That was the most common idea about how climate might change rapidly,
harking back to the "dishpan" experiments of the 1950s. It implied
transient variations of wind patterns within broad limits, and mostly
concerned how weather might change in a particular region. The new
thinking about grand global shifts urged a broader view. It was hard
to see how the atmosphere could settle into an entirely new state
unless something drastic happened in the oceans. For it is sea water,
not air, that holds most of the heat energy and most of the moisture
and CO2 of the climate system. The question of
century-scale shifts, now a main topic in climatology, came to rest
on the desks of ocean scientists. |
=>The oceans
|
Their response was prompt. Experts mooted
various hypotheses about how changes in the surface waters might affect
CO2 levels. There were complex links among temperature,
sea water chemistry, biological activity, and the chemical nutrients
that currents brought to the surface. Oceanographers also increasingly found it plausible that the pattern of North Atlantic Ocean circulation could
change on a short timescale, as Broecker had proposed to explain the Younger Dryas. Since the circulating waters carry tremendous
quantities of heat northward from the tropics, if the circulation
ground to a halt, temperatures in many regions of the Northern Hemisphere
would immediately plunge. |
<=The oceans |
Broecker began to warn that the ocean-atmosphere climate system did not necessarily
respond smoothly when it was pushed it might jerk. In 1987,
he wrote that scientists had been "lulled into complacency." People
were increasingly taking their cue from elaborate supercomputer simulations
of the general circulation of the atmosphere. They failed to realize
that these models, in the very way they were constructed, allowed
only smooth and gradual changes. The authors of an "unstable" model
would rework it until it yielded more consistent results. Broecker
strongly suspected that "changes in climate come in leaps rather than
gradually" — posing a drastic threat to human society and the
natural world. As computer modelers labored to incorporate interactions
between air and sea, their new simulations hinted
that he was right.(54*) |
<=The oceans
=>Public
opinion
<=>Models (GCMs) |
Abrupt Global Change (1990s)
TOP
OF PAGE |
|
Early in the 1990s, further revelations startled climate scientists.
The quantity, variety, and accuracy of measurements of ancient climates
were increasing at a breakneck pace compared with the data
available in the 1970s, orders of magnitude more were now in hand.
The first shock came from the very summit of the Greenland ice plateau,
a white wasteland so high that altitude sickness was a problem. From
this location all ice flowed outward, so glacier experts hoped that
even at the bottom, three kilometers (two miles) down, the layers
would be relatively undisturbed by movement. Early hopes for a new
cooperative program joining Americans and Europeans had broken down,
and each team drilled its own hole. An ingenious decision transmuted
competition into cooperation. The two holes were drilled just far
enough apart (30 kilometers) so that anything that showed up in both
cores must represent a real climate effect, not an accident due to
bedrock conditions. The match turned out to be remarkably exact for
most of the way down. A comparison of variations in the cores showed
convincingly that climate could change more rapidly than almost any
scientist had imagined.(55) |
|
For more on ice drilling, see Joel Genuth's Greenland
Ice Sheet Project (GISP) site and the official
GISP Web site. |
|
Swings of temperature that in the 1950s scientists had believed would take
tens of thousands of years, in the 1970s thousands of years,
and in the 1980s hundreds of years, were now found to take
only decades. Ice core analysis by Dansgaard's group, confirmed by
the Americans' parallel hole, showed rapid oscillations of temperature
repeatedly at irregular intervals throughout the last glacial period.
Greenland had sometimes warmed a shocking 7°C within a span of
less than 50 years. For one group of American scientists on the ice
in Greenland, the "moment of truth” struck on a single
day in midsummer 1992 as they analyzed a cylinder of ice, recently
emerged from the drill hole, that came from the last years of the
Younger Dryas. They saw an obvious change in the ice, visible within
three snow layers, that is, scarcely three years! The team analyzing
the ice was first excited, then sobered — their view of how
climate could change had shifted irrevocably. The European team reported
seeing a similar step within at most five years (later studies found a big temperature jump within a single year). "The general
circulation [of the atmosphere] in the Northern Hemisphere must have
shifted dramatically," Dansgaard’s group eventually concluded.(56*)
|
|
Might the change have been restricted to parts of the world near Greenland?
The first hints of the answer came from oceanographers, who had been
hunting out seabed zones where bioturbation by burrowing worms did
not smear any record of rapid change. In some places the sediments
accumulated very rapidly, while in others, the sea water lacked enough
oxygen to sustain life. The first results, from the Norwegian Sea
in 1992, confirmed that the abrupt changes seen in Greenland ice cores
were not confined to Greenland alone. Later work on seabed cores from
the California coast to the Arabian Sea, and on chemical changes recorded
in cave stalagmites from Switzerland to China, confirmed that the
oscillations found in the Greenland ice had been felt throughout the
Northern Hemisphere. Changes in dustiness were meanwhile noted in the ice itself, indicating at least continental scope for the change; later, a hemisphere-wide Younger Dryas temperature step in less than a decade was confirmed by a step change in the methane gas in the ice.(57) |
|
Meanwhile, in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
improved carbon-14 techniques gave the first accurate dates for sediments
containing pollen and other carbon-bearing materials at locations
ranging from Japan to Tierra del Fuego. Good dates finally allowed
correlation of many geological records with the Greenland ice. The
results suggested that the Younger Dryas events had affected climates, one way or another,
around the world. The extent and nature of the perturbation was controversial.
But scientists were increasingly persuaded that abrupt climate shifts
could have global scope, even if they affected different places differently
— colder here and warmer there, wetter here and drier there.(57a) |
<=>The oceans |
Could such drastic variations happen not only during glacial times,
but also in warm interglacial periods like the present? That was the most interesting
question in 1992, as the European drillers penetrated clear through
the last glacial epoch to the preceding "Eemian" period,
more than 100,000 years back — a time similar to our own, or
even warmer. Ominously, in 1993 Dansgaard and his colleagues reported that rapid oscillations
had been common during the last interglacial warm period: enormous
spikes of cooling, like a 14-degree cold snap that had struck in the
span of a decade and lasted 70 years. The instability was unlike anything
the ice record showed for our current interglacial period. The announcement, Science magazine reported, "shattered" the standard picture
of benign, equable interglacials.(58) |
= Milestone
=>Simple models |
Comparison of the two groups' cores gave divergent results, however. Evidently Dansgaard's measurements,
made near the bottom of the core, were distorted by ice flow that
stirred together layers from warm and cold periods. Again scientists had benefitted
from drilling parallel cores. But this time the lesson, valuable if
unwelcome, was that they must do more work. Meanwhile it was reassuring that interglacial periods
were perhaps not so horrendously variable.(59) |
|
Yet in terms of how scientists thought about the present
climate system, one might say that the ice had been broken. Evidence
of swift and severe shifts at the height of the last ice age had also
been found recently in deep-sea cores, and scientists hesitated to
dismiss these discontinuities as some kind of accidental noise. People
recalled that the present climate system was certainly subject to
abrupt and harrowing droughts, like the one revealed by Bryson's group that
had devastated native North American cultures. Persuasive new geological
evidence blamed extreme prolonged droughts for the downfall of ancient
Mayan and Mesopotamian civilizations as well.(60) |
=>Public
opinion
|
Antarctic cores could not help. Little snow falls there, and the
layers of ice were too thin and squashed together to reveal rapid
variations. Certainly no climate variation of Younger Dryas magnitude
had been seen recently. So there was reason to hope that our present
climate was relatively stable, at least for the moment. The Europeans
and Americans nevertheless agreed that through most of the last
100,000 years the global climate had oscillated "on a scale that
human cultural and industrial activities have not yet faced."(61)
|
|
Scientists will
doubt even the best set of data if they have no theory to explain
it, but at least one plausible explanation was at hand. A flip-flop
of the entire North Atlantic Ocean’s circulation pattern might
have been involved in the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. People came
up with various proposals for things that might have triggered a
switch, such as the surge of an ice sheet that released a flotilla
of icebergs. |
<=The oceans |
That was not easy to swallow. As one scientist remarked, many of
his colleagues "do not believe that the small, energy-starved polar
'tail' can wag the large, energy-rich tropical 'dog'." But the evidence
of iceberg surges was strong, and computer models suggested that such
a surge could indeed have caused a drastic global circulation shift.
Oceanographers began to work out how the tropical oceans could take
part in a sudden global change. Or perhaps set it off — if the
system was so unstable, the trigger might not lie in the well-studied
North Atlantic. The tropical Pacific and Atlantic ocean and wind systems
seemed to have feedbacks that, once perturbed, might reorganize the
entire system of clouds, rainfall and currents. "Taken to a logical
extreme," one expert insisted in 2004, "a competing 'tropical
driver' hypothesis for abrupt climate changes could easily explain
the observed global synchronization." For example, a "permanent
El Niño" might move the Earth into a state not seen since
several million years ago, when so much ice had been melted that the
sea level stood roughly 25 meters above the present level.(62)
|
<=The oceans
|
Did the same instability exist today? There
was suggestive evidence that abrupt flips of circulation had in
fact happened in previous times
of warmth.(63) "There
is surely a possibility," Broecker wrote, "that the ongoing
buildup of greenhouse gases might trigger yet another of these ocean
reorganizations." The media picked up the dramatic image of
Europe returning to the frigid conditions of the Younger Dryas —
global warming could bring on a new Ice Age almost instantly! When
an international panel of experts made their best guess on the matter
in 2001, they concluded that a shutdown of the Atlantic circulation
in the coming century was "unlikely" but "cannot
be ruled out." If the shutdown did come, Broecker warned, it
could mean "widespread starvation" within decades. In
the next few years, scientists reported that the Atlantic waters
were indeed growing less salty, thanks to fresh water from increased
rainfall and the melting of ice. Still more troubling was a 2005
announcement that the amount of heat carried southward by the North
Atlantic circulation had decreased by as much as 30% since the 1950s.(64). |
<=> The oceans
=>Public
opinion
|
However, the observational record
was skimpy. Further measurements showed that the system was so variable
from year to year that it would take another decade of observation
to separate long-term changes from normal, temporary fluctuations.
In any case a replay of the catastrophic Younger Dryas glacial scenario
was not likely under the very different conditions of the present.
Computer modelers redoubled their attention to the question, and
their simulations showed only gradual, centuries-long changes in
the ocean circulation. In the best tradition of scientific self-correction, Broecker admitted that he had overestimated
the danger of a shutdown of ocean circulation. In 2004 he publicly cautioned against the "exaggerated
scenarios" that had recently appeared in a Hollywood summer
spectacle. By 2008 scientists were reporting confidently that it was very unlikely that the Atlantic circulation would collapse in the 21st century, and unlikely that it would collapse later, "although the possibility cannot be entirely excluded." |
<=> The oceans |
After all, as Broecker had pointed out, the computer models were deliberately constructed to
give stable solutions. Indeed modelers were unable to simulate the abrupt Younger Dryas shifts without arbitrary interventions. And they could never include all the complex
feedbacks that might conceivably cause a sudden shift. As one group
that studied the Younger Dryas remarked, "the geological understanding
of past abrupt climate changes is only preliminary. This does not
bode well for predicting future, abrupt climate changes."(64a). |
|
More Mechanisms for Catastrophe
TOP
OF PAGE |
|
Other mechanisms for drastic shifts also came under detailed scrutiny.
An example was the clathrate ices, frozen in layers spread through
sea floor muds. Clathrates might hold more carbon compounds than all
the world's coal and oil. New studies made it plausible that warming
of the oceans could cause some of the deposits to disintegrate in
a landslide-like chain reaction, which would vent enough methane and
CO2 into the atmosphere to redouble global warming.
The idea sounded like science fiction (indeed some science fiction
writers used it), and it seemed highly unlikely to happen anytime
soon.(65) |
|
In the 1990s, geologists
found that such titanic greenhouse gas outbursts had probably caused
a spectacular warming 55 million years ago (the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum," PETM). At any rate something
back then had radically changed climate, with global heating and
an abrupt change of the deep ocean circulation, bringing mass extinctions
so sweeping that geologists called it the start of a new geological
era. Clathrates were the leading suspect (although evidence was
offered in 2007 that the change might have been caused, or at least
set in motion, by massive volcanic releases of CO2).
Whatever caused it, the total carbon release that wrought such havoc
was roughly comparable to the amount of carbon that humanity would
emit if we burned all available coal and oil. Back then, the rise
in temperature had apparently stretched over tens of thousands of
years, "rapid" only to a geologist. But the past emissions
had come stepwise, and outbursts also showed up at other points
in the distant past. In some future century too, clathrates might
pump gases into the atmosphere at a rate fast enough to bring serious
change within a human lifetime—what one scientist called the
clathrate gun." |
= Milestone
<=>Other gases |
A close look found little risk of truly catastrophic eruptions from the
seabed within the time frame that nations planned for. It would
take thousands of years for heat to penetrate to the ocean depths and
then diffuse into the sediments where most of the clathrates rested.
However, the present global warming might commit the planet to abrupt
and cataclysmic outbursts in a distant future. As for the coming
century or two, even a modest release of methane from the seabed
could make global warming significantly more rapid and severe. And
there was another huge, possibly unstable reservoir of clathrates
and carbon in other forms: the world's permafrost. Some experts
suspected that emissions from permafrost had played a major role
in the abrupt warming that ended the Younger Dryas, and perhaps
also in climate catastrophes much farther in the past. A 2008 report concluded that while a dramatically sudden release of methane into the atmosphere seemed very unlikely, "acceleration of release from hydrate reservoirs is likely, but its magnitude is difficult to estimate." In short,
there were only too many ways to accelerate warming once it got underway.(66)
|
|
An altogether different type of evidence for
rapid change came from improved observations of Arctic and Antarctic
regions. New views from satellites, plus vigorous programs of precise
measurements from airplanes and on the ground, showed that enormous
glaciers could quickly change their speed of travel, while entire
ice sheets could break up within a matter of months. As one expert
remarked, this "ran counter to much of the accepted wisdom regarding
ice sheets." The accepted wisdom, he explained, "lacking
modern observational capabilities, was largely based on 'steady-state'
assumptions."(67) Now the
plausible possibility that a swift alteration of land or sea ice could
transform climate had to be added to all the other potential feedbacks
from global warming. |
<=Sea rise & ice
|
The new view of climate was reinforced by one of the last great
achievements of the Soviet Union, an ice core drilled with French
collaboration at Vostok in Antarctica. The record reached back through
nearly four complete glacial-interglacial cycles and drastic
temperature changes peppered almost every stretch of data. This Antarctic
record was too fuzzy to say whether any of these changes had come
and gone on the decade-size timescale of the Younger Dryas. But warm
interglacial periods had certainly been subject to big swings of temperature
lasting for centuries. Especially striking to the researchers, by
contrast, was our own era, the ten thousand years since the last glaciation.
It was, "by far, the longest stable warm period recorded in Antarctica
during the past 420 [thousand years]." When
Bryson, Schneider, and others had warned that the century or so of
stability in recent memory did not reflect "normal" long-term variations,
they had touched on an instability grander than they guessed (see
above). The entire rise of human civilization since the end of
the Younger Dryas had taken place during a period of warm, stable
climate that was unique in the long record. The climate known to history
seemed to be a lucky anomaly. (Paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman
suggested that this was no coincidence. Perhaps the rise of agriculture,
with its deforestation and rice paddies, had added enough methane
and CO2 to the atmosphere to dampen the normal
ice-age cycle?) The well-recorded history of the most recent century
or so happened to show even more unusual stability, compared with
what new evidence was revealing about severe variations in earlier
millennia.(68) |
|
A Paradigm Shift
TOP
OF PAGE |
|
The accumulation of evidence, reinforced by at least one reasonable
explanation (the reorganization of ocean circulation) destroyed long-held
assumptions. Most experts now accepted that abrupt climate change,
huge change, global change, was possible at any time. A report written
by a National Academy of Sciences committee in 2001 said that the
recognition, during the 1990s, of the possibility of abrupt global
climate change constituted a fundamental reorientation of thinking,
a "paradigm shift for the research community."(69) |
|
The first strong consensus
statement had come in 1995 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, representing the considered views of nearly all the world's
climate scientists. The report included a notice that climate "surprises"
were possible "Future unexpected, large, and rapid climate
system changes (as have occurred in the past)."(70) The report’s authors did not emphasize the point,
however, and the press seldom mentioned it. |
<=International
=>International
|
Despite the
profound implications of this new viewpoint, hardly anyone rose
to dispute it. Not only for climate but for many other complex systems,
scientists had come to accept that a small, even random, event could
trigger sweeping changes. Yet while they did not deny the facts
head-on, many denied them more subtly, by failing to revise their
accustomed ways of thinking about climate. For example, few of the
scientists studying pollen in bogs went back to their data and took
on the difficult task of looking for catastrophically rapid shifts
in the past. "Geoscientists are just beginning to accept and adapt
to the new paradigm of highly variable climate systems," said the
Academy committee in 2001. Beyond geoscientists, "this new paradigm
has not yet penetrated the impacts community," that is, the economists
and other specialists who tried to calculate the consequences of
climate change.(71) Policy-makers and the public lagged even farther behind
in grasping what the new scientific view could mean. |
<=Chaos
theory
= Milestone
<=>Public opinion
|
Within a
few years that changed. Scientists' attention focused on Antarctic
and Arctic ice changes. New evidence and theories suggested that
the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets might melt much faster
than had been suspected, bringing a serious sea level rise within
the next few centuries, and possibly sooner. Even more alarming,
to scientists and the public alike, were startling changes in "before
and after" satellite pictures of sea ice in the Arctic. The
ice pack was getting thinner and shrinking. "At the present
rate," one group of scientists reported, "a summer ice-free
Arctic Ocean within a century is a real possibility." That
had last been seen millions of years ago, an epoch with a sea level
roughly 25 meters above the present. As the
Arctic Ocean opened to the winds, it would have profound effects
on weather far to southward, and perhaps hasten global warming.
The changes foreseen by Budyko, a generation earlier, were underway
(see above). But the sea ice was seen to
be dwindling faster than modern computer models predicted. Reviewing
the familiar feedback where less ice and snow meant more sunlight
absorbed, one group commented dryly that "Thresholds may produce
unexpected system responses."(72*) |
<=Sea rise & ice
|
Media ranging
from science magazines to movies reflected the new science in their
distorted mirrors, offering scenarios of a climate that could change
within a few decades or even, according to Hollywood, a few weeks.
Around 2005 the phrase "tipping point" appeared in both
scientific and popular climate reports, an admission that change could
be not only rapid but irreversible. |
=>Public opinion
|
Another possible
“tipping point” that research could not dismiss came
from feedbacks in the carbon cycle. Although data were spotty (mostly
short-term studies of only a few of the countless biological systems),
results in the early 2000s were discouraging. More likely than not,
as soils got warmer they were releasing additional CO2,
methane and other greenhouse gases. Possibly the worst problem was
the vast Arctic tundra, where researchers from Canada to Siberia
saw greenhouse gases bubbling out of melting soil before their eyes.
A Russian researcher said it was an "ecological landslide that
is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic
warming."(73*) |
=>Other gases |
The good
news was, nobody had yet found a mechanism that, outside Ice Age conditions,
could plausibly bring a massive global climate change in a decade
or so. Unless scientists had completely overlooked something essential
(which was possible but far from likely), whatever changes happened
would be spread out over several decades or longer. The bad news was...
well, there were several items. For the planet as a whole, each ten-year
period since the 1970s had been noticeably warmer on average than
the preceding ten years, a rapid global warming unlike anything recorded
in human history. And the feedbacks long anticipated were kicking
in. As the oceans warmed, sea water was measurably slower at taking
up CO2. Uptake by plants and soils was also
lagging, even as humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases accelerated.
In 2007 experts and the public were alarmed to see the summer Arctic ice pack shrink more swiftly than ever before. In the next few years it recovered slightly, but the long-term trend still suggested that much of the ice pack could give way to open ocean in summer within just a few decades.(74)
|
<=Modern temp's
<=Biosphere
|
And scientists kept turning up more possible mechanisms for feedbacks
that could accelerate warming. For example, the system of carbon
uptake and release by forests was still so poorly understood
that scientists admitted there was a "potential for major abrupt
change."(75*) In any case the known
feedbacks were so strong that it seemed likely that — unless
human civilization rose to the challenge very soon — global
warming would become self-sustaining and irreversible. The world
at the end of the 21st century would be seriously different from
the world of the 20th, and changes would continue for centuries
more. |
|
See the summary of expected Impacts
of Climate Change. |
|
A lesson about
how science proceeds can be learned from this
history. Asked about the discovery of abrupt climate change, many
climate experts today would put their finger on one moment: the day
they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores.
Before that, nobody confidently believed that the climate could change
massively within a decade or two; after the report, nobody felt sure
that it could not. So wasn't the preceding half-century of research
a waste of effort? If only scientists had enough foresight, couldn't
we have waited until we were able to get good ice cores, and settle
the matter once and for all with a single unimpeachable study? |
<=>Reflections
|
The actual history shows that even the best scientific data are
never that definitive. People can see only what they find believable.
Over the decades, many scientists who looked at tree rings, varves,
ice layers, and so forth had held evidence of rapid climate shifts
before their eyes. They easily dismissed it. There were plausible
reasons to believe that global cataclysm was a fantasy of crackpots
and Bible fundamentalists. Records of the past were mostly too fuzzy
to show rapid changes, and where such a change did plainly appear,
scientists readily attributed it (usually correctly) to something
other than climate. Sometimes the scientists' assumptions were actually
built into their procedures. When pollen specialists routinely analyzed
their clay cores in 10-centimeter slices, they could not possibly
see changes that took place within a centimeter's worth
of layers.(76*) If the conventional beliefs had
been the same in 1993 as in 1953 namely, that significant climate
change always takes many thousands of years scientists would
have passed over the decade-scale fluctuations in ice cores as meaningless
noise. |
|
First scientists had to convince themselves, by shuttling back and
forth between historical data and studies of possible mechanisms,
that it made sense to propose shifts as "rapid" as a thousand years.
Only then could they come around to seeing that shifts as "rapid"
as a hundred years could be plausible. And only after that could they
credit still swifter changes. Without this gradual shift of understanding,
the Greenland cores would never have been drilled. The funds required
for these heroic projects came to hand only after scientists reported
that climate could change in damaging ways on a timescale meaningful
to governments. In an area as difficult as climate science, where
all is complex and befogged, it is hard to see what one is not prepared
to look for. |
|
|
RELATED:
Home
Impacts of Global Warming
Ocean Currents and Climate
Aerosol Hazes
Simple Models of Climate
Supplements:
Radiocarbon Dating
Ice Sheets & Rising Seas
1. National Academy of Sciences
(2002), p. 7. BACK
2. Crowley and North (1991),
pp. 234-35; steady climate was still a "paradigm" in various geosciences into the 1980s,
according to Schimel and Sulzman (1995).
BACK
3. Gregory (1908), p. 340.
BACK
4. Humphreys (1932).
BACK
5. Brooks (1925), pp. 90-91.
BACK
6. Work of Knud Jessen, Johannes Iversen (both Danes) and
others, reviewed in Manten (1966).
BACK
7. [note removed]
8. Classic work included that of Johannes Iversen on the arrival
of agriculture in Denmark and Leonard Wilson on forest fire and other rapid glacial-era changes
in Wisconsin.
BACK
9. For discussion on the above points I am grateful to Ken
Brown, Daniel A. Livingstone and other respondents from the QUATERNARY and PALEOLIM
listservs.
BACK
10. Carbon-14 dating of trees overridden by
the North American ice sheet showed the front had advanced and retreated by up to a kilometer a
year between 13,600 and 12,200 years ago, Flint (1955).
BACK
11. Palmer (1999); also Huggett (1990), pp. 119-21 and passim.
BACK
12. Suess (1956), p. 357; other
scientists called this an "abrupt increase:" Ewing and Donn
(1956), p. 1061.
BACK
13. Ericson et al. (1955); Ericson et al. (1956), quotes p. 388.
BACK
14. Emiliani (1957).
BACK
15. Broecker (1957), p. V-9;
see Broecker and Kunzig (2008), pp. 28-29.
A revision of Brooks's 1926 book on Climate through the Ages
was published in 1949, Brooks (1949) and it was
popular enough to be reprinted in 1970. BACK
16. Broecker, interview by Weart, Nov. 1977, AIP.
BACK
17. Broecker et al. (1960).
BACK
18. "Stimulated:" Broecker et al.
(1960), p. 442; Ewing with Heezen had collected some of the crucial cores and noticed the
rapid change, Ewing and Donn (1956).
BACK
19. Ives (1957), quote p. 87; see
also Ives (1958); Ives (1962).
BACK
20. West (1961); the abruptness
of the transition was noted later by Lamb (1977), p. 80.
BACK
21. Ager (1993), p. xi.
BACK
22. Budyko (1962); Wilson (1964).
BACK
23. Broecker (1966), pp. 299,
301.
BACK
24. Broecker and Donk (1970).
BACK
25. Bryson, personal communications, 2002. Anthropologist:
David Barreis. Barreis and Bryson (1965), p. 204; see Bryson and Barreis (1968), chs. 2, 3; Bryson (1968). The causes of the collapse of the great urban center
Cahokia and other elements of the Mississippian culture remain controversial today, with climate
change a strong contender.
BACK
26. Webb and Bryson (1972);
reviewer: Bradley (1985), pp. 322-329, quote p. 327; for a
general review of "transfer functions" for deducing temperature, see Sachs et al. (1977).
BACK
27. Bryson et al. (1970), p. 72.
BACK
28. Discontinuities: Wendland and
Bryson (1974); a century or two: Bryson (1974).
BACK
29. Kukla and Kocí
(1972), p. 383.
BACK
30. Quoted in Alexander
(1974), p. 94.
BACK
31. Mitchell (1972), pp.
437-38.
BACK
32. One author, speculating about the coming of a new ice age,
pointed to "evidence of (at least) five rapid hemispheric coolings of about 5°C... each
event spread over not more than about a century," Flohn (1974),
quote p. 385; one line of evidence was carbon-14 studies of tree stumps in glacial deposits: Denton and Karlén (1973). But their fluctuations lasted
several centuries, and the authors predicted not a new ice age but a shift to a mild climate.
BACK
33. Broecker and Donk (1970);
Ruddiman & McIntyre too found evidence in deep-sea cores of faunal
change (including one core where the warming was interrupted by a cold
spell). They called the change "abrupt" although they thought it was spread
over a few thousand years: Ruddiman and McIntyre (1973), p. 129; a few years later
they realized the spread was due to bioturbation, and the changes were
actually "very abrupt." See their review of relevant studies from 1941
to 1977, Ruddiman and McIntyre (1981), pp. 146-50.
BACK
34. Dansgaard et al. (1971);
"spectacular": Dansgaard et al. (1972), p. 396;
Dansgaard et al. (1973). The Camp Century and later work
is discussed in Dansgaard (2004) and interviews
on GISP tape-recorded 1992-1994, records of Study of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations, AIP. BACK
35. Kukla and Matthews
(1972).
BACK
36. Coope (1977); already in
1970 a cooling within a thousand years or so was seen, although not remarked upon, Coope et al. (1971).
BACK
37. Budyko (1972).
BACK
38. Kukla and Kukla (1974),
quote p. 713; this was brought to the public, e.g. in Time
(1974).
BACK
39. E.g., Flohn (1974), with
reference to work by Lorenz, Budyko, and Sellers on instability; Dansgaard et al. (1972), p. 396, speculating on cooling.
BACK
40. Broecker (1975).
BACK
41. GARP (1975), from App.
A (pp. 186-90) by J. Imbrie, W.S. Broecker, J.M. Mitchell, Jr., J.E. Kutzbach.
Speculation: see study by Peterson et al. (2008).
BACK
42. Emiliani et al. (1975),
for criticism, see Science 193 (24 Sept. 1976):
1268. BACK
43. Ruddiman and McIntyre
(1981); another example: century-scale changes in carbon-dated peat bog pollen, including
a clear oscillation 11,000-9,000 years ago, Woillard and Mook
(1982); in 50 years: Flohn (1979).
BACK
44. Mercer (1969), p. 227.
BACK
45. Diversion of glacial meltwater from the Mississippi
to the St. Lawrence was suggested by Kennett and
Shackleton (1975) and Johnson and McClure (1976);
Rooth (1982) suggested this disrupted the North
Atlantic circulation. Ruddiman and McIntyre (1981), p. 204, dismissed this since
they saw no decrease in North Atlantic biological productivity, but some
later data supported the idea; in 1985 Broecker suspected the meltwater
pulse was the entire cause of the Younger Dryas, but later he suggested
it was only the trigger that set the timing for a switch between thermohaline
circulation modes, Broecker et al. (1989) (whose
"synthesis of palaeoclimatic observations invigorated the community
over the next decade," according to Le Treut
et al. (2007), p. 106); Broecker et al. (1990). See "Ocean
currents" essay. A computer model by Bryan
(1986) supported this, but another model found that a cold North Atlantic
surface sufficed to bring a Younger Dryas-like climate, Rind
et al. (1986). In later years other triggers were proposed, see e.g.,
Broecker (2006), including an asteroid strike
on the North American ice sheet. In 2010 geologists found strong evidence for a Dryas trigger in a massive release of glacial meltwater, as Broecker had predicted, only by way of the Mackenzie River system of northern Canada rather than the St. Lawrence, Murton et al. (2010). BACK
46. Mercer (1969) considered
breakup of an Arctic Ocean ice sheet; this is cited as a likely explanation
by Ruddiman and McIntyre (1981), pp. 204ff.; see Ruddiman and McIntyre (1981). Eruptions: Flohn (1974). Tropics: see Steffensen et al. (2008). BACK
Clathrate image:
methane hydrate, a type of clathrate, exists in huge quantities beneath
the sea floor. When the pressure is removed and it warms, this ice-like
substance will emit the trapped gas. Photo: Gary Klinkhammer, Oregon State
University. More info: realclimate.org.
BACK
BACK to "Other Greenhouse Gases" essay
47. Gould (2002), pp.
1006-21 gives one version of the history, with his characteristically polemical approach.
BACK
48. Also, the sluggish response of the massive polar icecaps to
change smoothed the oxygen-isotope record. Broecker (1987);
for these issues in general, see Palmer (1999); Huggett (1990).
BACK
49. For Greenland drilling, see interviews on GISP tape-recorded
1992-1994, records of Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations, AIP;
Mayewski and White (2002); Alley
(2000). For this and especially Lonnie Thompson's high-altitude work
see Bowen (2005). BACK
50. Dye 3: Dansgaard et al.
(1982), "violent," "dramatic" (also "drastic"), p. 1273; see also
Oeschger et al. (1984); Camp Century CO2:
Neftel et al. (1982); note that they do not
discuss a jump that is evident in their data. BACK
51. Siegenthaler et al. (1984),
"drastic" p. 149. They found nothing similar in North American records; Barnola et al. (1987) found nothing like it in their Antarctic ice
core, but admitted their methods would not detect very rapid changes.
BACK
52. A century-scale shift closely correlated with temperature
change was found by Oeschger et al. (1984); see also Dansgaard et al. (1984); decade-scale shifts are visible in the data,
although not specially remarked upon, in Hammer et al. (1986).
BACK
53. Dansgaard et al. (1982), p.
1275.
BACK
54. "The basic architecture of the models denies the possibility
of key interactions that occur in the real system. The reason is that we do not yet know how to
incorporate such interactions into the models." Broecker (1987),
pp. 123, 126; new models: Bryan and Spelman (1985); Manabe and Stouffer (1988).
BACK
55. GISP interviews, records of Study of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations, AIP. Firsthand accounts are Mayewski
and White (2002); Alley (2000); Dansgaard
(2004) BACK
56. Dansgaard et al. (1989);
increasingly abrupt changes were seen on further study, Johnsen
et al. (1992); Grootes et al. (1993); jumps
of Greenland snow accumulation "possibly in one to three years" were reported
by Alley et al. (1993), see also Mayewski
(1993); five-year steps: Taylor et al. (1997); changes of 2-4°C at Greenland within a single year: Steffensen et al. (2008). changes in dust had been noted, indicating at least continental scope
for the change, and a Younger Dryas temperature step in less than a decade
was found to be hemisphere-wide since methane gas Good histories are Alley (2000)
and Cox, (2005), ch. 8. BACK
57. First ocean results: Karpuz
et al. (1992), Lehman and Keigwin (1992).
Changes in ice: Severinghaus
et al. (1998).
BACK
57a. For further references 1987-94 (including also Alaska, Ohio, New Zealand, etc.)
see Broecker (1995), pp. 306-08; for later
developments, National Academy of Sciences (2002)
and Lynch-Stieglitz (2004), also Cox
(2005), ch. 8. BACK
58. Dansgaard et al. (1993); Kerr (1993). BACK
59. Alley et al. (1995); Chappellaz et al. (1997), comparing with Vostok cores. BACK
60. Deep-sea cores: Heinrich (1988); Bond et al. (1992), see also this
note on Heinrich and this note on Bond in the essay on Ocean Currents and Climate. Maya: Hodell
et al. (1995); Mesopotamia: Weiss et al. (1993);
for global climate shifts throughout the postglacial period, see also deMenocal et al. (2000). BACK
61. Divergence in cores: Taylor
et al. (1993), Grootes et al. (1993). 2004
work: NGRIP (2004) (North Greenland Ice Core
Project members, K.K. Andersen et al.); see report by Cuffey
(2004) and also Cox (2005), ch. 8. Hammer
et al. (1997), Preface, "not yet faced," p. 26,315.
BACK
62. Wag the dog: Alley (1998);
"easily explain": Chiang and Koutavas
(2004). El Niños: Cane and Evans (2000);
Federov et al. (2006). BACK
63. Barber et al. (1999).
BACK
64. Broecker et al. (1992);
quotes: Broecker (1997), p. 1588; IPCC (2001), p. 420; Atlantic freshening: Hansen
et al. (2001); Dickson et al. (2002); Curry
et al.(2003); Curry and Mauritzen (2005);
slowed circulation: Bryden et al. (2005). BACK
64a. "Exaggerated:" Broecker
(2004); see Weaver and Hillaire-Marcel (2004);
system variable: Cunningham et al. (2007) and
Kanzow et al. (2007) ."Unlikely... cannot be excluded," Clark (2008), p. 9; models unable: Liu et al. (2009); "does not bode well":
Lowell et al. (2005). BACK
65. Science fiction: notably the award-winning Robinson (1994). BACK
66. Appenzeller (1991);
"gun": Kennett and Stott (1991),
updated with evidence from other epochs ("mounting geologic evidence
for past pervasive, massive CH4 releases from the
marine sediment reservoir") by Kennett et
al. (2000), see Kennett (2002); Koch et al. (1992); Dickens et
al. (1995); Norris and Röhl (1999);
Katz et al. (1999); Nunes
and Norris (2006); an overview is Kunzig (2004).
Harvey and Huang (1995) estimated clathrates
could bring at worst a 10-25% increase in warming. Outbursts: Dickens
(2003); Storey et al. (2007). Clathrate emissions would take thousands of years to be serious: Archer and Buffet (2005).Younger Dryas: Nisbet (1990b); Nisbet
(1992); far past (ending "snowball Earth" episodes): Kennedy
et al. (2008). Report: Clark et al. (2008), p. 10. BACK
67. Rignot and Thomas (2002),
p. 1505. BACK
68. "longest stable...": Petit
et al. (1999), p. 434. Ruddiman and Thomson
(2001); on Ruddiman see Kerr (2004a).
BACK
69. National Academy of Sciences
(2002), p. 16, see also pp. 1, 119, 121.
BACK
70. IPCC (1996), p. 7.
BACK
71. National Academy of Sciences
(2002), p. 121. BACK
72. Old data from submarines (some
of it released on the initiative of Vice President Gore) revealed thinning
of ice, Rothrock et al. (1999); for sea ice
extent, Overpeck et al. (2005), Lindsay
and Zhang (2005), Stroeve et al. (2005).
Weather effects: Francis and Hunter (2006).
Computer projection of an ice-free Arctic by Holland
et al. (2006) were widely publicized. Ice more sensitive to warming
than models predicted: Stroeve et al. (2007).
On the phrase "tipping point" see this
note in the essay on The Public and Climate. BACK
73. "Tipping point" suggested
i.a. by Foley (2005). Carbon cycle:
e.g., Bellamy et al. (2005), Heath
et al. (2005), Govindasamy et al. (2005);
ocean biological systems in general had instabilities, e.g., Hsieh
et al. (2005). Russian (Sergei Kirpotin) quoted by Pearce
(2005a), along with a report that "the permafrost of western
Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts,"
lakes were expanding on the North Slope of Alaska, Katey Walter had found
methane hotspots in eastern Siberia where the bubbling gas kept the surface
from freezing in winter, etc. See also Lawrence
and Slater (2005). Also, melting of permafrost allowed dark shrubs
to spread, which would increase local heating, Chapin
et al. (2005). A general review of possible abrupt changes in the climate system is Alley et al. (2003). BACK
74. Latest data are available from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. BACK
75. For example, Best
(2006) speculated that increased organic sediments sent down rivers
due to deforestation, factory farming, etc., once buried in the seabed,
will be converted to methane by bacteria, perhaps seriously adding to
greenhouse gas emissions. Another potential threat was a dieback of the
Amazon rain forest. It was the IPCC's conclusion that little was understood
about the "potential for major abrupt change... in the uptake and
storage of carbon by terrestrial systems,"
Randall et al. (2007), p. 642. BACK
76. There is a famous comparable case in another
field of science. In the 1930s, physicists used thin screens to block
extraneous large particles from their instruments as they measured the
tiny particles resulting from nuclear reactions. Since they never imagined
that an atom could split into two large chunks, they automatically prevented
themselves from discovering uranium fission. For discussion on the difficulties
of detecting rapid change, I am grateful to Ken Brown, Daniel A. Livingstone
and other respondents from the QUATERNARY and PALEOLIM listservs.
BACK
copyright
© 2003-2011 Spencer Weart & American Institute of Physics
|