Space Forum / Astronomy / January 2006

I just read an article that states that even though we are supposed to be on
the downside of the latest 11 year solar max, we are seeing some massive
flares from a very large sunspot. They have already caused some minor
trouble even though the sunspot is not aimed directly at us yet. It is being
predicted that we could see some major eruptions this coming week as it
rotates into alignment with the earth and they could damage satelites and
power grids.

Be ready to duck, or maybe to stick your head between your legs and kiss
your buns goodbye if it gets really serious.

Here is something else to think about. The Atlantic conveyer, the name for
the current, is a dynamic system. When it slows down it transfers heat less
efficiently.

That means that Europe should start seeing colder weather already and I
think I have already seen reports of that.

But another consideration is that the heat comes from the south Atlantic and
the Gulf of Mexico. That means that a reduction in efficiency in the
Atlantic conveyer will leave more of the heat in the south atlantic and gulf
areas.

Since excess heat is what causes more, and more severe, hurricanes that
could explain the record hurricane season we just have seen.

Now if this is just a short term cycle we don't really have anything more
than a few bad seasons to worry about.

But it is really a global warming and it is going to get much worse than it
is now we can expect some really wild weather in the near future.

Also, if you check one of my earlier posts, you will see that I already
commented on the slowing of the Atlantic conveyer system due to
de-salinaztion of the north Atlantic because of melting icebergs and the
effect it would have on weather patterns in both Europe and the south
Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico hurricane generating areas.

__________________
People don't care what you have done
They won't remember what you have said
But they will never forget how you made them feel

Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
By Mark Bowen
Henry Holt, 2005

"In Sanskrit, Himalaya means 'abode of snow,' but as crops and people die
from lack of water while watching the highest mountains on Earth turn from
white to black, that name may soon seem grotesquely inappropriate."
-- Mark Bowen, Thin Ice
Climate shock comes from the realization that climate change is not only
real, but huge; it is not only huge, but it is now; and it will affect your
life very shortly. Not your grandchildren's lives. Not your children's
lives. Your life. Soon - if it hasn't already.

If you have not experienced climate shock yet, you will when you read Thin
Ice by Mark Bowen. Thin Ice is the story of the scientific team from Ohio
State University, led by researcher Lonnie Thompson, that has spent the last
two decades drilling ice cores in tropical mountain glaciers. Their aim is
to retrieve information about climate history from the ice, but there has
been a race against time as these glaciers melt, making new history.

Thin Ice is an exciting adventure story. The logistics of transporting the
scientists and their drilling equipment into the most inaccessible places on
Earth bring hair-raising tales. The team members struggle with altitude
sickness, windstorms destroy the solar panels that power their drill,
crampons get stuck in ladders deployed over widening crevasses, and the crew
tries to float ice core samples off the mountain with a hot-air balloon.

The scientists are awed by their surroundings as they camp for weeks at a
time on the top of the world, absorbing "the brown earth and the blue sky
and the white ice..." until it seeps into their skins and they bond
emotionally with the mountains. Bowen quotes researcher Mary Davis saying
that she has a "soft spot" for the Dunde Ice Cap in China's Qilian Shan
mountain range. Drilling engineer and ice physicist Bruce Koci confesses to
Bowen that it is not just a job for him, it is about "being out there," and
he would do it even if he didn't get paid.

The scientific detective work is just as thrilling. Thompson's team has made
a number of surprising additions to climate theory and shaken some deeply
held establishment views. One surprise was the discovery that a few of the
mountain ice cores went as far back in time as any yet recovered from the
polar regions. Why? Because when ice gets thick enough, as it does at the
poles, pressure and temperature build up, and the ice actually starts to
melt from the bottom, destroying the sediment layers and air bubbles that
yield all the historical information. But tropical mountains have only scant
annual precipitation, so the ice layers are thin, making a longer
time-horizon possible. Hence the book's title, Thin Ice.

Another surprising result is some convincing evidence that the Gulf Stream
and African currents that help to warm northern Europe are a less powerful
influence on climate than previously thought. The climate change horror
flick, "The Day After Tomorrow," was based on this "thermohaline convection
theory" that says melting ice could disrupt the flow of the warming current
and actually cause Europe and New York City to freeze (though not nearly so
fast as in the movie).

Thompson's work shows that tropical influences, particularly the El Niсo and
monsoon cycles (which are related), are the bigger drivers of climate
change. This suggests that in the future, the Earth's climate may resemble
what we see in El Niсo years, but much more extreme. Depending on where you
are, your climate shock could show up as either flood or drought or both in
rapid succession - a permanent El Niсo from Hell.

My own climate shock came in 2002 when the 500,000-acre Biscuit Fire raged
through the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in southwest Oregon. I sat in my yard and
watched a huge mushroom cloud of smoke boil up out of the wilderness. A
freak wind was blowing from the east, full of dry, hot, desert air that
pumped up the fire like a bellows. The Kalmiopsis was a place that I deeply
loved and it will never be the same again - not just in my lifetime, but
forever. Climate change is likely to favor new growth of chaparral and brush
over the kind of deep fir and pine forests that got their start in a cooler
age.

Gulf Coast residents got their climate shock this past hurricane season as
warming oceans spawned the strongest storms on record. Alaska natives are
getting their climate shock as retreating sea ice ruins their hunting, and
melting permafrost topples their homes. Pacific Islanders are getting it too
as their atolls flood and they flee to higher ground. And this is just the
very beginning.

Trying to anticipate the climates of the future is impossible without
understanding those of the past, yet as Bowen conveys in this book, the past
is extremely complicated and hard for someone who is not a climate
researcher to fully understand. Given the difficulties, Bowen does a
remarkable job both of explaining it and keeping the story interesting and
fast-paced. But for a little help getting a better grasp on Earth's history
and the timescales involved, I turned to a 1991 book by scientist James
Lovelock called Healing Gaia.

Lovelock believes that the best way to think about the Earth is to see it as
an organism that goes through phases of sickness and health, or instability
followed by equilibrium. Earth's medical history is a long story, for she is
an older lady. Her life is now at least 3.5 billion years old.

Conditions change on Earth, and one is that the sun has grown hotter. For
most of the age of mammals (the age that followed the dinosaurs and their
asteroid demise) the Earth was warm and no ice formed at the poles. But as
the sun grew ever hotter, by about 2 million years ago, polar ice caps
formed and the Pleistocene began - the ice ages. This sounds odd, but
Lovelock explains it: the Earth began to pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere
and store it in rocks and plants. Less CO2 in the atmosphere lessened the
greenhouse effect and temperatures dropped. But because of cyclical changes
in Earth's orbit over time, the ice ages have see-sawed back and forth
between glacial and interglacial in a series of 100,000-year cycles. A
system with this much dynamism is prone to getting knocked off balance, and
there is little doubt that that is what is happening now: climate shock.

A funny thing happened 2 million years ago on the way to the ice ages. The
ice caps sucked moisture from the African forests, which withered and
withdrew from the plains. An arboreal ape came down from the trees and began
to make tools and lose its hair. When its descendants multiplied and started
to burn fossil fuels, they became a fever-inducing planetary infection. They
(we) are the cause of climate shock.

Thin Ice is really the story of the "planetary physicians," as Lovelock
calls them - the scientists like Lonnie Thompson who have devoted their
careers to taking the planet's temperature. And now the world is getting so
warm that anyone can hold a hand to the patient's forehead and get a sense
of what is happening.

Besides being a physics PhD from MIT, Thin Ice author Mark Bowen is also an
avid recreational climber. He was able to add to his story of scientific
discovery the eyewitness accounts from climbers all over the world of rapid
ice-melting over the last ten years. A glacier that was a stone's throw from
Sir Edmund Hilary's first camp on Mt. Everest has retreated three miles
since Hilary's 1953 historic ascent.

An international commission predicts that there is a high likelihood that
all of the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035. The Himalaya will turn
black, and the Ganges and other rivers that flow from it will dry to
seasonal streams. The 500 million people in India who depend on water from
these rivers will have no other source. As mountain glaciers and snow packs
melt everywhere, China, the Andes and California will face the same climate
shock - no water.

Meanwhile, the melting ice will raise the seas. Lonnie Thompson and other
researchers are discovering that once glaciers start to melt, they can melt
all the way to bedrock very rapidly. If all of the Earth's mountain glaciers
were to melt, it would raise the sea level by a foot and a half and that
would be the end of places like Bangladesh and Louisiana's bayou country.
But the polar ice caps are showing the same tendency for rapid melting, and
a mere two degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature could be enough to
cause a complete disintegration. Sea levels could start rising by 3 feet
every 20 years. We will have to act quickly and drastically to avert this
inundation.

Reading Thin Ice and exposing yourself to climate shock could help prepare
you for your new role in the greenhouse world. We will need more planetary
physicians to diagnose and prescribe, and there will also be a need for
planetary nurses, orderlies and volunteers to pitch in around the clock to
keep the dear old lady alive. What does this mean? Probably it will mean
changing everything about the way we live, starting by reducing our fossil
fuel consumption now.

But how on Earth can we train ourselves to change everything, all at once?

Let's face it: We are more like monkeys than like gods, and we learn best by
imitating whatever we think is admirable. For most of our evolutionary
history we were a prey species - a scruffy primate just recently evolved
from a rodent. And so, in our hominid phase we have fancied ourselves a
glorious predator, in the same league with the lion and the eagle. In the
future, if we want to survive, we will become symbionts - life forms that
live in partnership with others. We may become like the rhinoceros bird that
pecks parasitic ticks (and blood) from the rhino's back and warns it of
approaching danger.

As successful symbionts we will adapt to the warmer Earth by living modestly
and learning all the tricks and trades for storing carbon away in forests,
fields, soils and rocks. We'll blow sweet breezes on the lady's brow, soothe
her hot flashes, and cool the Earth again. In return, if luck and tides are
with us, she will continue to sustain us until our time on Earth is done.

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Interestingly, I used a laptop to acquire this information... more later

In response to our rememberance of Prophecy, there is a gnostic version of
the Apocolypse of John that dates from about 70ce.

I will paste just the relevent verses here:

And I opened the first seal.
And I saw, and beheld the Angel of the Air,
And between her lips flowed the breath of life,
And she knelt over the earth
And gave to man the winds of wisdom,
And man breathed in.
And when he breathed out, the sky darkened,
And the sweet air became fetid,
And clouds of evil smoke hung low over all the earth.
And I turned my face away in shame.

And I opened the second seal.
And I saw, and beheld the Angel of the Water.
And between her lips flowed the water of life,
And she knelt over the Earth
And gave to man an ocean of love.
And man entered the clear and shining waters.
And when he touched the water, the clear streams darkened,
And the crystal waters became thick with slime,
And the fish lay gasping in the foul blackness,
And all the creatures died of thirst.
And I turned my face away in shame.

And I opened the third seal.
And I saw and beheld the Angel of the Sun.
And between her lips flowed the light of life,
And she knelt over the earth
And gave to man the Fires of Power.
And the strength of the Sun entered the heart of man,
And he took the power, and made with it a false sun,
And he spread the fires of destruction,
Burning the forests,
Laying waste the green valleys,
Leaving only charred bones of his brothers.
And I turned away in shame.

As you read these verses, try to remember that they are two thousand years
old, if you can.

From the same poem:

And I spoke: "Then is there no hope, bright angel?"
And a blazing light streamed like a river from his hands
As he answered, "There is always hope,
O thou for whom Heaven and Earth were created."

So maybe we will survive it, after all.

__________________
3. Faith receives and Love gives. No one can receive without faith, and no
one can give without Love. We develop faith so that we can receive, but we
develop Love so that we can give what we have received through faith. If we
do not develop Love so that we can give, the gifts we receive through our
faith have no value.

Principles of the New Covenent 10:3