Monday, January 19, 2009

Classic Gauze: East to West Winds

Originally published February 1, 2007





karnala said...

At first I thought the wind changes could just be the normal pattern of ENSO until I read this article "The Great Climate Flip-flop" by WILLIAM H. CALVIN, which also bring into question the "natural equilibrium".

ONE of the most shocking scientific realizations of all time has slowly been dawning on us: the earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, and with breathtaking speed. We could go back to ice-age temperatures within a decade ˜ and judging from recent discoveries, an abrupt cooling could be triggered by our current global-warming trend....


For a quarter century global-warming theorists have predicted that climate creep was going to occur and that we needed to prevent greenhouse gases from warming things up, thereby raising the sea level, destroying habitats, intensifying storms, and forcing agricultural rearrangements. Now we know ˜ and from an entirely different group of scientists exploring separate lines of reasoning and data ˜ that the most catastrophic result of global warming could be an abrupt cooling.

We are in a warm period now. Scientists have known for some time that the previous warm period started 130,000 years ago and ended, 117,000 years ago, with the return of cold temperatures that led to an ice age. But the ice ages aren't what they used to be. They were formerly thought to be very gradual, with both air temperature and ice sheets changing in a slow, 100,000-year cycle tied to changes in the earth's orbit around the sun. But our current warm-up, which started about 15,000 years ago, began abruptly, with the temperature rising sharply while most of the ice was still present. We now know that there's nothing 'glacially slow' about temperature change: superimposed on the gradual, long-term cycle have been dozens of abrupt warmings and coolings that lasted only centuries.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I do love this post. But a question, when do scientists think the winds switched west to east (like now) and how did the east to west winds affects climate in the middle of America. "The Mom"