Glaciers: Changing at a Less Than Glacial Pace (emphasis added):
Glaciers are thought to change at, well, a glacial pace. Certainly that has been true throughout the planet’s history. The current ice age – known as the [Pliocene]-Quatenary glaciation, which began 2.6 million years ago – has witnessed some 20 cycles of glacial (freezing) and interglacial (thawing) periods, with ice sheets advancing and retreating completely on roughly 100,000-year time scales. But scientists are unsure exactly what prompts the shifts in cycles.
In glacial periods, vast ice sheets cover much of the planet, and sea levels are as much as 130 meters lower than they are today (all that extra water is locked up in ice). During interglacial periods – we are enjoying one now, East Coast blizzards notwithstanding – the ice sheets retreat, the glaciers melt and sea level rises. The expansive but quickly melting ice sheets of Greenland, the North Pole and Antarctica are all that is left of our last glacial period, which reached its peak about 20,000 years ago.
Now a new study published in the Feb. 12 issue of Science indicates that the balance of the world’s ice may be shifting faster than scientists thought, which may have consequences in a warming world. A team of scientists traveled to the Spanish island of Mallorca, where they visited a coastal cave that has been submerged off and on by the Mediterranean Sea for hundreds of thousand of years, as glacial periods have waxed and waned. They dated the layers of the mineral calcite, which were deposited by the seawater in rings on the cave walls, as on a bathtub.
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But one of the biggest gaps in climate science is our understanding of how the major ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica will respond to warming temperatures. The science is so foggy that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which recently came under attack for hyping the impacts of global warming – has refrained from estimating how fast those ice sheets could melt and contribute to sea level rise. Dorale’s paper suggests the possibility that ice sheets may respond much more dynamically to changes in temperature, forming and melting at rates that are quicker than previously thought. “There might be a feedback with regards to ice melting,” says Dorale. “This is speculation, but it might point at some sort of catastrophic ice sheet dynamic.”
In other words, it could mean the world’s seas will rise even more quickly than we expect – bad news for those who think there’s plenty of time to adapt to a warmer world.
Just what we needed–yet another result that says the Earth system might be twitchier than we thought, and that we’re taking an even bigger chance by continuing to emit tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
One of the maddening and fascinating aspects of how we respond to climate change news involves issue like the one raised in the above article. Does this level of new uncertainty argue for doing less–”Golly, we don’t know diddly squat about how the big ol’ planet works! Best not to spend even a single penny until we’re Absolutely Sure And Not A Single Expert, Anywhere, In Any Field, Has Any Doubts!”–or should it be a more urgent call to action–”Yikes! We keep getting bad news that makes this situation even scarier! If we don’t mitigate and adapt and (gulp!) geoengineer our ass out of this fix in a hurry we’re toast!”?
I think it’s clear that the evidence is piling up and it’s getting ever harder to avoid reaching the second conclusion above.
Sea Levels Erratic During Latest Ice Age – Science News
Sea Caves Reveal Rapid Rise in Ancient Ocean Levels: Scientific American
“I think it’s clear that the evidence is piling up and it’s getting ever harder to avoid reaching the second conclusion above.”
Yes and no. For the types of people who read this blog, it’s surely clear that believing anything other than the second conclusion (probably minus the geo-engineering) is insane – to follow Derrick Jensen’s definition of insanity as a failure to believe the stories reality tells you. But most of the world is clearly not made up of the types of people who read blogs like this. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to draw the immediately obvious conclusion that things ain’t working out too well for industrialism and it’s probably a pretty damn good idea to change course from the even more obvious facts of environmental degradation but I increasingly think that it’s not just a lack of information or that the information is being presented badly. Whenever I have arguments with denialists – and, to be honest, it’s so futile that I can’t really be bothered these days – it’s always very clear that they’re not just suffering from a lack of the right bits of knowledge; it’s an active, intended act, which is why you never win an argument with a committed denialist – logic, reason and facts are subordinated to something else but what that something else is, I don’t really know. Fear of change? Fear of the unknown? Guilt? Stupidity? I don’t know. All of us suffer from a huge number of cognitive biases which twist and distort our reason and maybe denialists just have one extra, or one that we all have expresses itself in denialists in a slightly different way. Whatever it is, I’m not sure that better communication is the way to change attitudes, in the way that racism and homophobia are never going to be eradicated by research studies on the IQ of Asian Americans or by gay men’s superior abilities in choosing nice sofas. They’re changed by society making the public declaration of these beliefs unacceptable. Of course, if this is true, the outlook for the world doesn’t look particularly great right now. And in fact, it’s probably getting worse – the denialists don’t seem to be going away and, if anything, their voices are getting stronger.
Dan:
If you’re right about the nature of the hardcore deniers (and you probably are), then they’re clearly unreachable.
The one source of hope in this mess is that the hard core deniers are a small minority of the public overall. The issue is not changing the set-in-stone minds of the deniers but reaching all those not yet infected with the deniers’ bizarre world views.
Exactly right, Lou. The few hardcore deniers I know are completely beyond hope. However, there are still plenty out there with some semblance of an IQ (especially among the younger generation) who base their science on science rather than radio talk show or Fox News commentary. Blogs like yours serve to inform this critical group. It’s too late now to stop the heat already in the pipeline but we shouldn’t give up on those who will face our epic climate screw-up a generation or two down the road.
hear hear.
I’m not sure if this is directly relevant to my earlier post but I came across a paper, via The Situationist, which might be of interest to those concerned with educating the public on climate change. I haven’t had time to read it yet but the abstract sounds very enticing:
“Why do members of the public disagree – sharply and persistently – about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.”
The paper is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1549444