The Day After - Global Warming

[Tormod]

Originally posted by: shintashi

In a worst case scenario... well, You've seen the big cold ice age movie, but many of you might have forgotten that other doomsday movie " CORE". only one problem: there is no such thing as "unobtanium".

 

Now THAT was a FUNNY movie...and completely unassuming, as far as I could tell. Pure "science" fiction without a single shred of scientific value. Loved it!

 

Tormod

[Tormod]

I forgot to add

 

11) The movie does show some scenes from India and Japan. Otherwise, it is 100% USA-focused. So not only is USA the worst offender in the climate game, it is also the only country of interest when the world as we know it comes to an end. (But it didn't, of course).

 

I think someone should make the movie "The year after the day after tomorrow" about how the new climate in Northern Africa causes a surge in productivity and health care and how in fact most of the world's 6 billion people actually survived the sudden ice age and there is no longer a developing world (apart from 125 million US ex-citizens struggling to build big heaters to thaw their homeland). And it should be written by Ben Elton.

 

Tormod

[FrankM]

The movie fits a few agendas, political and religious. I have a relative that quotes Biblical

prophecy and when something like that movie comes along it conveniently fits into the

warnings about catastrophies. It doesn't make any difference to point out that we already

know about the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) that proceeded it.

 

Scientists are still sorting through the precusors stored in ancient ice in an attempt to identify

the factors that preceded or accompany a warming or cooling period. There are many sites

that discussed the LIA and MWP, some quite technical. A good general one is at,

 

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html

[FrankM]

Two days ago I ran across the July 2004 issue of Natl Geographic and its article about the Sun. They

noted that what we really know about the Sun has been obtained in just the last 20 years. The most

notable feature of the Sun has been its sunspots and their 11 year cycle but I found this is actually

half of the cycle. The following from the UOregon page.

 

"The number of sunspots reaches a maximum about every 11 years, but successive maxima have

spots with reversed magnetic polarity. Thus the whole cycle is 22 years long."

 

The Natl Geographic article mentioned that the Sun puts out slightly more heat during sunspot activity,

but there seem to be longer cycles where there are very few sunspots; this also was mentioned in the

UOregon page. The Natl Geographic article noted that the "Little Ice Age" (LIA) was associated with a

period where there were almost no sunspots. Little is known about the Sun's activity during the Medieval

Warming Period which proceded the LIA.

 

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Sun/cycle.htm

[Freethinker]

Originally posted by: FrankM

Two days ago I ran across the July 2004 issue of Natl Geographic and its article about the Sun. They noted that what we really know about the Sun has been obtained in just the last 20 years. The most notable feature of the Sun has been its sunspots and their 11 year cycle

Thanks for the great info. But I want to make sure one part is not confused.

 

Yes we have learned more about the sun in the last 20 years than the entire time before that.

 

But we have been aware of the sunspot cycle long before that. I was dealing with it 40 years ago myself because of involvement with RF transmissions. They can be dramatically affected by solar flairs and certain parts of the solar cycle allows for much better distance of the transmission.

[FrankM]

The material from the UOregon page indicates that the Sun's internal processes have very low cyclic

rates, at least to our lifespans. Looking at the intensity plots from 1600 on, it appears there are

cycles within cycles. The dramatic intensity drop centered around 1675 could be a natural cyclic

minimum, but since we don't have enough data we don't know when this will appear again.

 

It is known there was a Medieval Warming Period (MWP), but nobody was monitoring polar ice or

ocean temperatures or sunspot cycles. We have no way of knowing the current global conditions

also happened in the MWP period (800 to 1200 AD). If you consider 1000 A.D. the center of the

MWP and 1675 about the middle of the Little Ice Age (LIA) you have almost a 7 century cycle, and

we don't know if that is a complete cycle or a half cycle.

 

I suspect global warming maybe occur periodically, but not because of human activity. If we were

experiencing "global cooling", I would expect the same type of unscientific scare tactics to be used

by politicians to influence public response.