The greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history is
now unfolding. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has
announced that the North Atlantic Oscillation is failing, and,
along with it, the Gulf Stream. The Institute has
observed "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever
measured in the era of modern instruments," in an analysis of
Atlantic ocean currents from pole to pole. Woods Hole has
found that salinity levels are changing in ways that they have
changed in the past leading to periods of abrupt climate
change. Polar waters are becoming far less saline, meaning
that the "heat pump" effect that draws warm water north is
failing.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the
potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly
in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a
significant cooling."
The director of Woods Hole, Robert Gagosian, said: "We may
be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf
Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes."
Last summer, Unknowncountry.com reported an ominous sign
that the North Atlantic Current was weakening, when cold
northern water suddenly appeared along US coastlines as far
south as Florida. This suggested that the Gulf Stream had
moved farther offshore than normal, which would happen if it
weakened and was not flowing north normally.
The extremes of heat and cold that the northern hemisphere
has experienced over the past twelve months may be further
signs of this effect. Extraordinary heat killed at least 20,000
people in Europe last summer, and extreme cold in north
America this winter has been responsible for at least 35
deaths. World weather patterns have become extremely
bizarre recently, exemplified by blocks of ice falling from the
sky in regions as diverse as New Zealand, Spain and the
American South and, within the past few months, tornadoes
in Wales and, just yesterday, on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.
From now on, there is an immediate potential for abrupt
climate change. The key factor in the sudden climate change
scenario described in the Coming Global Superstorm and many
other places is the collapse of the system of currents that
equalizes heat and cold over the surface of the earth.
It is likely that climate change will take place over a single
season, as the fossil record tells us. It will not be a
protracted process, unfolding over hundreds or even tens of
years. It will begin with an outburst of violent weather unlike
anything recorded in the historical era, and then be followed
by years of climactic turmoil. At some point, the climate will
either return to the interglacial state it is in now, or we will
slip into another ice age, but this is likely to be hundreds of
years into the period of turmoil.
Mankind, for the foreseeable future, will experience the full
effects of the turmoil and disaster caused by sudden climate
change.
This process is going to devastate the northern hemisphere,
dramatically altering growing seasons in the United States,
Canada and Europe, shortening them, making them entirely
unviable in northern areas, and crippling many regions such as
the central-western US, with drought so intractable that it
will likely result in large scale population movement out of
these areas.
This unfortunate situation is in part the result of natural
climactic cycling, but it has been sped up by human emissions
of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and the process
could have been controlled by considered worldwide attention
to controlling those emissions. Proper leadership in the
developed countries could have prevented this catastrophe,
and without significant disruption to business activities or the
lives of individuals.
Instead, nothing useful has been done, and now we will go
through a significant stage of climatic upheaval that will be
accompanied by the death and impoverishment of millions of
the best educated and most productive people on earth. This
will result in a vast diminishment of mankind and the likely
collapse of many of the structures of government, business
and finance that we depend upon to insure our safety,
prosperity and freedom.
Even if a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gas emissions
were achieved within a year, the process would still continue.
What we will be able to do, if human society remains
organized at a high enough level to achieve this, is to make a
slide into another ice age somewhat less likely, and hasten
the return of a more acceptable climate.
Questions will be asked: why has this happened? Who is
responsible? Among Americans, the answer is clear: political
leaders and media personalities have, at the behest of
corporate sponsors who feel threatened by environmental
controls, lied to the public about the problem, promoting the
fallacy that the situation was a matter for debate when, in
fact, nature had already cast the die.
Worldwide, various governmental and private entities have
misused the threat of environmental disaster as a means of
imposing a level of planning on all human activities that many
found unacceptable.
In fact, government, the corporate world and environmental
groups should all have faced the real and imminent problems
in a clear-headed and practical manner, instead of viewing
them through the crazy lens of ideology, be it left or right.
Instead, ideology has been placed above need in virtually
every case, with the result that the worst possible situation
has become true: human activities in the form of greenhouse
gas emissions have been allowed to exacerbate a natural
cycle, with results that promise to be devastating beyond
imagination.
It is ironic indeed that the Day After Tomorrow, the film
related to the Coming Global Superstorm, will be released in
May of 2004, which is likely to be the first month in the past
ten thousand years at least that the extreme weather
conditions described in that book could actually occur.
At present, only a few paleoclimatologists will admit to the
actual violence that the fossil record reveals, and there
remain questions about the degree to which the debris from
these extremely violent weather events of the distant past
actually relates to sudden climate change.
For example, there have been questions surrounding the
cause of the quick-freezing of mammoths, whose remains
have been periodically found in Alaska and Siberia, often with
still undigested food in their mouths and stomachs. It has
been claimed that no weather-related mechanism could
possibly cause this, and therefore that the mammoths must
have fallen into sinkholes and frozen there.
Recently, however, the discovery of quick-frozen plants
embedded in glaciers in Peru has revealed the fact that very
extreme weather changes to take place on this earth, and
result in long-term effects. For example, plants that froze in
the Peruvian Andes in a matter of minute ten thousand years
ago are only just now being disgorged by glaciers. In other
words, plants that were living in a moderate climate were
plunged, over what appears to have been the course of just
a few hours or even minutes, into extreme cold that held
them in its grip for ten thousand years.
All mankind is now threatened by such a danger. Where and
when it will strike, or if it will unfold with such super-violence
at all is unknown. But the greedy and the foolish among our
leadership have released the bull from the paddock, and we
are not likely to see it returned anytime soon.
Two questions remain: what can we do and what are the
warning signs of sudden climate change?
The primary warning sign has always been the failure of
ocean currents, and Woods Hole is telling us that this is
happening now. On a more detailed, day-to-day basis, any
excursion of warm tropical air into far northern latitudes, from
now on, is apt to trigger ferocious storms, and the farther
that air penetrates, and the warmer and more humid it is, the
more violent the consequences will be.
We will be making certain changes to our
Quickwa
tch on this website to reflect the changing situation. For
example, we are going to expand the number of points from
which we pick up air temperature measurements and drop the
ocean current measures and observations, except for the Gulf
Stream, as they have already been triggered and will not
change anytime soon. We will be watching for the dissolution
of the Gulf Stream. If this should happen between May and
October, the immediate weather effects will stun the world.
No matter when it takes place, and it is now certain that it
will, it will lead in a single season to an entirely new climate
of a kind that is far less viable for us than the one we have
known.
Also on our Quickwatch page is an article that contains a
series of simple steps that world leaders should have been
aggressively asking individuals to take for the past ten years.
Instead, they remained mired down in their various political
and ideological issues, either claiming that there was no
significant environmental problem or that there was a huge
problem that could only be solved by massive government
intervention, imposing draconian new levels of planning on
society at every level, with special emphasis on corporate
enterprise and economic development.
However, the fact remains that a great deal can be done:
To reduce individual emissions dramatically, only a few minor
lifestyle changes are needed: Replace the 20-year-old fridge
with an energy-saver model. CO2 savings = 3,000 pounds.
Send out one fewer 30-gallon bags of garbage per week.
CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Leave the car at home two days
per week. CO2 savings = 1,590 pounds. Recycle cans,
bottles, plastic, cardboard and newspapers. CO2 savings =
850 pounds. Switch from standard light bulbs to fluorescents.
CO2 savings = 1,000 pounds. Replace the current shower
head with a low-flow model. CO2 savings = 300 pounds.
Turn the thermostat down two degrees for one year. CO2
savings = 500 pounds. Cut vehicle fuel use by 10 gallons in
2003. CO2 savings = 200 pounds. Switch from hot to warm or
cold water for laundry. CO2 savings = 600 pounds.
If these steps were taken by just 20% of U.S., Japanese,
Canadian and European inhabitants, world CO2 emission levels
would drop to a point that the human factor would be vastly
reduced as a source of global warming, and the upheaval that
we now face would be reduced in its duration and effect,
perhaps to the point that the world as we know it might be
restored, not in our lifetimes, but with luck in those of our
children.
