Could Global Warming Trigger Another Ice Age Any Day Now?
October 11, 2002
An eminent marine scientist says global warming may not be the worst of our planetary worries. He says warming could melt too much ice into fresh water, overwhelm the ocean currents and suddenly bring on another Little Ice Age! He warns this could happen any moment now, and the icy climate could last for hundreds of years.
Wow! The disaster menu expands to include both frying and freezing! What a wonderful piece of “grant-standing.” With billions of dollars going into atmospheric climate research, why shouldn’t the oceanic researchers get some billions too?
The author of this brilliant whiz-bang is Dr. Robert Gagosian, Director of the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He says the two big factors in world climate are the atmospheric currents that distribute half the sun’s energy and ocean currents that distribute the other half. He says we’re not learning enough about the ocean currents.
Gagosian says, “Global warming may be melting glaciers, or Arctic sea ice.” One of his Woods Hole colleagues, Terry Joyce, says, “I’m in the dark as to how close to an edge or transition to a new ocean and climate regime we might be, but I know which way we are walking. We are walking toward the cliff.”
Gagosian says we need more strategically placed measuring instruments in the oceans.
The First World public has made it abundantly clear that it will lavishly reward anyone who can deliciously disturb its comfortable affluence with a good rousing scare. We turned Rachel Carson into a goddess after she told us that DDT would give us all cancer. Never mind that our cancer risks keep declining in the pesticide era.
Paul Ehrlich made himself a household word in the 1970s by predicting that overpopulation was about to bring on mass starvation, even in the United States. Never mind that we found ourselves with surplus grain piled in the streets rather than famine corpses. Dr. Ehrlich titillated our tedium.
Hannibal Lecter, the beloved serial murderer and gourmet cannibal introduced in the movie “Silence of the Lambs” has become an industry all by himself, making movie after movie, and grossing perhaps a billion dollars. We get that wonderful tingle of fear when we watch him on the screen, even though we are safe in the theatre.
Dr. Gagosian has written a scientific version of Hannibal Lecter. Gagosian has a wonderfully sophisticated horror scenario in which the world as we know it can be erased at any moment by dramatic changes already lurking in the depths of the ocean.
We can afford a few billions for oceanographic research. It will probably reveal some interesting and useful things over the years. But let’s be careful about taking the scientific scare scenarios too seriously.
If we had abandoned all pesticides, as Rachel Carson wanted, we would have doubled our cancer risk. (Pesticides protect the fruits and vegetables that are our strongest weapon against cancer.) And, Dr. Ehrlich’s mission was apparently billions of inhumane forced abortions and/or mass sterilizations.
Greenpeace and other activists take to the streets for the Kyoto Protocol. Bjorn Lomborg, Denmark’s famous Skeptical Environmentalist, reminded me at a meeting last week that the money spent on one year’s higher energy costs under the Kyoto treaty could provide clean drinking water for all of the world’s poor. Since unclean drinking water is the world’s biggest health problem, that would save tens of millions of lives. The next year, we could use the “saved” money to tackle, perhaps, malaria.
And that would all be net benefit because the Kyoto treaty would delay global warming by no more than six years even if it’s human-driven, a theory that gets less and less likely. (Today’s temperatures are not significantly higher than in 1940)
Even Dr. Gagosian points out that the world’s climate history is a long series of dramatic ups and downs that have occurred with no human causal factor whatever. It’s Nature. We have to live with it, and adapt to it. (Buy utility stocks; we’ll either be running the A/C or the furnace.)
It’s fine to be entertained by the horrifying Hannibal Lecter. But when you come out of the movie house, there are still real problems for real people. It’s actually more satisfying to help deal with those real problems than to see the most titillating horror movie ever made.
Posted in Commentary |