- The climate could change radically, and fast. That would
be the mother of all national security issues.
-
- Global warming may be bad news for future generations,
but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as
we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly
remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined.
In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic
planners are grappling with it.
-
- The threat that has riveted their attention is this:
Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change,
may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests
the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch
from one state to another in less than a decadeólike a canoe that's
gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how
close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change
may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly
adapt may overwhelm many societiesóthereby upsetting the geopolitical
balance of power.
-
- Though triggered by warming, such change would probably
cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters
in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts,
turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's
California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing
nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russiaóit's easy to see why the
Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
-
- Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned
about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in
ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts
in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speedóin
some cases, just a few years.
-
- The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded
as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S.
and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current
that flows north from the tropicsóthat's why Britain, at Labrador's
latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great
conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes
the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in
the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south,
keeping the roughly circular current on the go.
-
- But when the climate warms, according to the theory,
fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic,
lowering the current's salinityóand its density and tendency to
sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current,
further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main
motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and
altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
-
- Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered
such collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it wasn't humans and their
factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest the
atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were dismayingly similar
to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began drawing to a close about
13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels
near those of recent decades. Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor
apparently shut down, ushering in the "Younger Dryas" period,
a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions. (A dryas is an Arctic flower
that flourished in Europe at the time.)
-
- Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes,
the one that may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us. In
2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is
increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over
the past 50 years is attributable to human activitiesómainly the
burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping
carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice,
melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes.
A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids
or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently
wait until we're history.
-
- Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting
from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences
issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change.
Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session
at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible
abrupt climate change within two decades.
-
- Such jeremiads are beginning to reverberate more widely.
Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate
change as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issueónext
summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow,
a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying
to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global warming.
-
- Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying.
But what would abrupt climate change really be like?
-
- http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,582584-1,00.html
-
-
-
- Comment
- From Starfleethighcom@aol.com
- 2-9-4
-
- Shalom,
-
- Your article reminds me of this article, perhaps it is
better to take a look at it and use the information in ways to help better
understand the situation if it happens. But then, according to the LaRouche's
report, the Ice Age and Global Warming are just natural phenomenas. Whatever
might happen can either be caused by nature on Earth or beyond Earth as
a Solar phenomena. At the bottom is an article that might have some parallel
situation to what the Pentagon's report is saying. It might be of great
help as a guide to create guidelines and policies to help cope with either
a gradual or abrupt climate change.
-
- LaRouche's massive engineering proposal to change Terra's
terrain inorder to cope with these climatological disruptions is one of
the several solutions he has been proposing and must be done while there
is still time. Did Noah built the Ark on the day it started flooding? No,
he built it a hundred years before it started to flood. If we want to have
sufficient time to build such massive engineering infrastructures-technostructures
that will help us survive, then the time to do it is NOW!
-
- Russia's Bilbino nuclear power and heating plant is one
good example of allowing people to cope and survive in the Arctic and we
will need hundreds, thousands of such nuclear plants to help cope with
the coming Ice Age.
-
- Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant
-
- Bilibino is Russia's only nuclear power heating plant.
It has four small graphite-moderated reactors in operation. The power plant's
purpose is heating of water for Bilibino city's central heating installation,
together with electricity production.The power plant is situated on the
Tsjukotpeninsula, in the northeastern parts of Siberia, not far from the
Bering-Strait.
-
- Reactors
-
- The four reactors are of the EGP-6 type, which is an
earlier model of the Soviet graphite-moderated reactors. The reactors have
each an effect of 12 MW. Reactor no. 1 and 2 was put in operation in January
1974, reactor no. 3 in December 1975, and no. 4, in December 1976. The
reactor-core of the EPG-6, is 3 metres tall and 4.1 metres in diameter.
Each of the four reactors has 273 fuel-assemblies with an enrichment of
3 - 3.6 % 235U. All of the four reactors are situated inside the same reactor-hall.
Each reactor is connected to one heating-turbine and one power-turbine.
The steam from the turbines heats the water in an external cooling-circuit,
which transports this water through a 3.5 kilometres long pipe with several
heat- exchangers surrounding Bilibino City. The walls in the reactor-hall
are all covered in aluminium .The spent fuel-assemblies are stored in containers.
-
- LaRouche's proposal to use High-Temperature Reactors
is even much better.
-
- If those illogical oppositionists keeps on whining about
the false dangers of nuclear power, then my answer to them is this: Freeze
In The Dark!
-
- http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/redir?src=websearch&requestId=2e3aace4f7cca6f1&clicked
ItemRank=1&userQuery=535AD+and+catastrophe+and+david+keys&clickedItemURN
=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hbci.com%2F%7Ewenonah%2Fhistory%2F535ad.htm
- 535 AD - Volcano Krakatoa Explodes - The Dark Ages Start
- Science ... - ... Part II NARRATOR 535AD has come and gone- the world
has been hit by a catastrophe. ... www.oneworld.org According to historian
David Keys, the last time global ...
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