Ice Ages Linked to Plate Tectonics 59
CorSci81 writes "A study by scientists at Ohio State University indicates the possibility that ice ages may be triggered by plate tectonics. Scientists speculate that the current ice age may have been triggered 40 million years ago by the uplift of the Himalayas, and this study provides further support by linking a much earlier ice age 450 million years ago with the uplift of the Appalachian mountain range. Additionally, this study reinforces the notion that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate."
Then the solution to global warming is clear (Score:1, Funny)
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But this does make me a little sad. I was hoping to win a Nobel prize by showing that global warming could be easily halted with a nuclear winter.
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Better yet, move the Earth. (Score:1, Insightful)
Or we could just move the Earth a bit farther from the sun. That's how they solved global warming in Futurama.
Not just in that cartoon either. As teenagers we've all read about awesome feats of planet-moving in Greg Bear's Moving Mars [amazon.com] or Larry Niven's Ringworld [amazon.com] . But now that I'm older and more pessimistic, I suspect we'll all drive ourselves extinct through some screwup or another before reaching such a level of technology. Slashdot is partly to blame for my becoming bitter and crotchety because of all
What would Wild E Coyote do? (Score:1)
Hmmm...What would Wild E Coyote do?
How about we get a bunch of Acme freezers with icemakers and dispense the ice into a series of meat grinders. The meat grinders can be belt driven at the axle by a fleet of gas powered tractors. Another belt can run from the grinder to a wheel with a bunch of snow shovel
That's Wile E Coyote (Score:2)
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Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
We're doomed, I tell you, DOOMED!
Re:Well.. or why Pirate Fish are needed (Score:2, Funny)
Interesting theory, but there's a far more plausible explanation, as every believer of Pastafarianism knows. It's a severe lack of Pirates that's causi
The other way around? (Score:2)
No, pirates are triggered by Ice Age [thepiratebay.org].
Finally (Score:4, Funny)
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Maybe modern extraction techniques aren't such a bright idea in some areas.
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There may be a link (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There may be a link (Score:5, Informative)
This study actually contradicts nothing. This idea had been around for sometime, this is just the latest study to offer for evidence in support. What has become clear to climate scientists (and was impressed upon me during my graduate studies in that field) is that climate is a very complicated, non-linear, multivariate system. The Milankovich cycles were one proposed theory for ice ages, linking natural cycles in Earth's orbit to ice ages, but it quickly became clear that wasn't the entire story. One of the questions scientists struggled with for a long time is "How do you start an ice age?" For long periods in Earth's history there have been intermittent ice ages, but they seemed to have no periodicity or pattern. Milankovich cycles definitely control whether the climate is glacial or inter-glacial during a long term ice age, but if the climate is already in a "warm" state they lack the oomph to trigger an ice age. This research provides one clue to the answer. Other proposed solutions have to do with the arrangement of the land masses on Earth's surface, and ultimately they are all probable factors.
Regarding green house gases, one of the things this study does is reinforce the link between CO2 and climate state. Weathering is one way of removing a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere over long periods of time, and is part of the reason why Earth isn't more like Venus. Geologic forces removed a huge fraction of Earth's primordial CO2 from the atmosphere, more than we could ever hope to release by burning all of the fossil fuels on the planet.
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yes it does contradict something. It is this idea that humans are the sole cause of global warming and that humans need to sacrifice everything, pay more for newer technology coming out because it is said to help cure global warming and the worst idea of we have to pay other countries because we emit more green house gases then they do.
Now, I'm not going to claim humans don't have an influence on global warming. I'm not even going to try and minimize it. I am going
Re:There may be a link (Score:4, Insightful)
Two points. One: no one ever said humans are the sole cause. That said, it's clear we are part of what's going on. Two: the implication of the full article is that CO2 has a very large effect on climate. In turn, this implies that the rapid increase in CO2 due to humans may have a very large impact on our climate in a very short time.
And in a sense you have hit the nail on the head. Global warming is very much a political/economic issue and much less a science issue. Even if science can say what will happen, the simple fact is we can't easily reverse what we have already done, which could have consequences for a few centuries.
Now I'll pose a different question to you... what is the cost of doing nothing vs. taking what actions we can to mitigate the risk? The simple fact is we're rolling the dice and there will be winners and there will be losers, and we don't know which will be which. Even if only the least severe scenarios prove to be true, rising sea levels alone present us with an economic burden that far outweighs the costs of doing something now. So we don't understand everything well enough to know the exact outcome; but do we really want to roll those dice? I know I'm not a gambling man.
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Humans being the sole cause is the overriding tone of the political pro=global warming crowd who cite study after study as proof. Ironically, the most verbal people saying "global warming is your fault" and "we are all going to die because of you" are the same one who told us to stop doing things they considered in excess and enjoying ourselves, come out against conglomerate power companies in favor of alternative but more expensive energy production that s
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From the site: Effectively, the Earth's regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand - people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.
CC.
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- Swamps becoming frozen which is a kind is a big reserve of metane and CO2 which might is "held in store" once th
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Well, as the guy who submitted the article, I thought the title I chose was fairly innocuous since ice ages != global warming. It's just the sad fact that when you bring up climate change of any kind people who are not climate scientists immediately start going off about global warming. It's one of those cases where everyone is an expert and few people bother to listen to what those of us who actually study this field are saying. It was a big issue in my graduate program as we constantly have to deal wit
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Whilst the minor ice ages are likely generated by concidental seismic events (major earthquakes and volcanoes occuring at virtually the same time geologically speaking) th
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The difference between science and speculation (Score:2)
>> Scientists speculate that the current ice age may have been triggered 40 million years ago by the uplift of the Himalayas
Speculate is the most important word in the whole writeup. To infer any more would be incorrect.
If you spend a few months examining the theory and implementation of the various types of Global Climate Model, you cannot fail to become aware of the incredible number of assumptions and inherent limits and intentionally narrowed scope and couplings in the models.
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
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Not sure about that, but it is a more than a remote possibility that the industrial revolution has already killed off a large chunk of life [wikinews.org].
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Re:Did I miss a memo? (Score:5, Informative)
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Thank you for repeating a classic anti-science myth [realclimate.org], please come again.
We're having a special on "Teh scientists wur all claiming global cooling in the 1970s" if you'd like to try it.
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Medieval wine in the UK [realclimate.org]
story correction (Score:4, Funny)
that should read:
"A study by scientists at THE Ohio State University..."
Mod Parent UP (Score:2, Informative)
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Homecoming weekend coming up!
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Yes, and take your g0dd@mn fans with you!
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So, the problem is that my SUV is too HEAVY? (Score:4, Funny)
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The current Ice Age? (Score:3, Interesting)
For what it is worth, these fluctuations have usually been attributed to fluctuations in the earth's tilt. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a fairly good explanation.
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Could it be? (Score:2)
Re:Could it be? (Score:5, Informative)
Over millions of years certainly, over a couple of hundred years the long term "causes" (orbit, tilt, tectonics, ect) simply drop out of the equation as irrelevant.
How not to attribute climate change [realclimate.org], (nice graph). It's also interesting to note that 20th century warming would actually be a slight cooling if human CO2 emissions were removed from the models.
Re:The current Ice Age? (Score:4, Informative)
Saw a talk about this (Score:3, Interesting)
A researcher who I believe is on this project was at RIT (where I'm a student) and gave a talk on this. It was quite interesting. Unfortunately I had to leave partway through, but the indications were very interesting. Also very cool was a plot of amplitude of temperature variation against period (time). There were spikes at 1 day (24-hour temperature variations) and 1 year (seasonal variations). But the most interesting were spikes at millions of years, indicating there were large scale temperature cycles with periods of millions of years, consistent with global warming being a natural phenomenon. (I'm not saying we aren't affecting though). It was a very interesting plot. (I'm not sure where they got the data from, or how they verified it actually is periodic. My guess is that they took temperature differences though the ages and used the amplitudes of the various instances to infer which were corresponding to the same "cycle")