Why is this something to bring up? I ask because a standard practice in climate warming denialism is to argue that scientists are undecided about the issue, or change their minds frequently, and point to the handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age.
In this case, research after the intriguing hypothesis of Ewing and Donn shows that it's not what happened.
> Pollen analysis of radiocarbon-dated samples from the arctic coastal plain of Alaska shows that vegetation of 14,000 years ago reflected a climate colder than the present, and that there has been a progressive warming, culminating in the present cold arctic climate. The record indicates that the Arctic Ocean has been covered with ice since the time of the Wisconsin glacial maximum, suggesting that the essential condition of the Ewing and Donn hypothesis for the origin of ice ages, that the Arctic Ocean be ice-free up to 11,000 years ago, cannot be met.
Ewing and Donn write (quoting from Harpers):
> “The answer, we believe, is chat [sic] until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold.
Remember, this is shortly after we realized that the continents could move. They based their conclusions on the magnetic record, but the magnetic pole also wanders and flips. The actual movement is nowhere near what's required for their hypothesis to be true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander for some background. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/a... for a paper which says that paleontological records show about 1 degree of shift per million years for the last 7 million years.
From what I understand, global warming entered the popular awareness in the 1970s-1980s. This aricle from the 1950s shows awareness even then:
> Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland; annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to. It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded by such a warming of climate.
It's interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is it shows how the popular press gets science badly wrong, packaging it as a "just so" story that seems to a) explain everything and b) leave very few loose ends.
Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified. We didn't know that people would be still burning coal in forty years time, much less such vast quantities, because nuclear was still a politically viable option despite various hysterical claims against it. And we had even less clue then as to how the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do today, and we have relatively little clue today.
But a huge number of people think "the science is settled" with regard to climate change because the popular press tells them so. With regard to the existence of anthropogentic climate change that's reasonably correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense, and this article from the '50's suggests why that is so: because popular accounts just don't convey the messy uncertainty of the real science. They pull a coherent thread out and make it sound as if we understand far more than we actually do.
This is not to say we shouldn't be building new nuclear capacity, and ignoring all the "green" groups who are protesting solar, wind, geothermal and biomass development (search for "environmentalists against $X" where $X is any industrial-scale green power and you'll see what I mean). We should be doing all those things, and we should be shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions. But we should remember that the science is a lot messier than it gets portrayed in Harpers and the like, and we shouldn't be so afraid of Denialists as to want to avoid acknowledging that.
There are any number of articles which give examples of how the popular press got it wrong on a scientific topic. If your conjecture is correct, then the submitter did a grave disservice by dropping a link to a 1950s article without any context. How do you conclude it wasn't an example of climate change denialism, meant to muddy the waters and instill confusion, or a case of simple trolling?
"Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified"
Concern by whom? Among the scientific papers of the 1960s and 1970s, the majority view was for global warming. Quoting from http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf , "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; "The survey [of papers from 1965 through 1979] identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations." This is why I mentioned there were only a 'handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age'. Thus, that stance in the scientific literature was uncommon.
Among some of the popular press, there certainly were articles by Newsweek and Time on the possibility of a new ice age. (Or in SF, Larry Niven wrote "Fallen Angels" (1991) on the premise that anthropogenic warming was actually preventing an ice age from coming.) Then again, some of the recent popular press also had a lot of articles about the 2012 phenomenon, based on reaching the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - "The Crazy Years" of Heinlein. On the gripping hand, science popularizers like Issac Asimov understood the global warming topic correctly back in the 1970s.
Regarding 'the messy uncertainty of the real science', what you've said applies to everything the popular press reports. When the NY reports on the situation in Ukraine, they leave out a lot of the messy details. The same when Sports Illustrated reports on a doping scandal, or the WSJ about a recent merger, or the latest weather prediction in the local paper. It's odd that you think people treat science reporting as the final, conclusive word on a topic. I don't agree.
I believe the rest of your comment pivots into your views on nuclear power. This is not related to the Harpers piece or the presumed reasons for why this link was posted on HN, and I decline to follow up on it.
You're paranoid. I posted the article because it seemed interesting; in particular I had no idea a global-cooling hypothesis was part of the landscape in the 50s.
What do you think about tjradcliffe's comments "...we had even less clue then as to how the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do today, and we have relatively little clue today...With regard to the existence of anthropogentic climate change ["the science is settled" is] reasonably correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense"?
I think that statement about less clue/relatively little clue is true about nearly every field of active research, including nuclear fusion power, hurricane path and strength prediction, understanding the brain, designing new drugs, and the life of pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas. In 20 years we'll look back and comment about how little we knew of the human genome, or how wildly wrong we were in predicting the effect of autonomous vehicles on daily life.
Also, "relatively little clue" can still enough to make useful decisions. Therefore I ignored it.
Without knowing which consequences, what am I supposed to say? I see no reason to think the Dutch are misspending their money in building up their sea defenses against likely sea level rise.
Careful, you'll fall foul of fashionable thought and the marauding thoughtcrime enforcers. Questioning that perhaps modelled climate sensitivity to co2 has been well overstated will get you branded a heretic, a denier and earns bucket full of down votes. [1]. Even obliquely hinting that past history of scientific theorems have proven themselves to be wrong despite widespread support is dangerous territory, lest one question the 'consensus' of our times.
I don't care about up-votes or down votes. I hope 1 person reads my comments and thinks.
Look at the parent comment - it uses name calling and labels to advance the argument. That is not science. The entire topic was raised as possibly heretical in case someone might suspect this pointed to anything but a complete and utter belief in co2 as the planetary thermostat.
People need to back away from the political bandwagon on this and start using their heads again.
Brc's assessment is 100% correct. The bombastic tone of the "climate change" cult is disturbing hostile. That is because climate change proponents use propaganda to advance their self-interests. This is no different then the other disturbingly condensending and deliberately polarizing tactics then use to advance other left wing fictions. This is politics, not science.
This was a really interesting read. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any followup information about the underlying theory.
In the grip of record snows in Boston, and an extra long winter here in NY its easy to imagine being on the cusp of another ice age, but at the same time the theory seems at odds with the idea of global warming. On the one hand we have global warming as a one way operation of sorts accelerated by mankind, on the other hand we have temporary warming followed by a super ice age, powered by the Arctic Ocean.
I really want to know if this fascinating theory has been investigated further for confirmation or if it has been debunked in the 50+ years since this article was published.
The key thing to remember is 'global': while the East Coast of the US has had one of the colder, snowier winters in recent history, the West Coast has just come out of a hot, dry winter. Local weather is a terrible guide to global climate.
Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a brutal winter and leaving California dry.
Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.
> Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.
Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.
Well, being skeptical of an entire field of study is different than being skeptical of the predicted outcome. One often sounds like the other, and it is 99.99% likely that something is happening, even if we don't do a good job understanding it.
For example, regardless of "warming", we'll still have to deal with ocean acidification and all of the fallout from that.
Something is happening, its called weather. And before weather was co-opted by political agents with an agenda to control people to enrich themselves, that's all it was.
Well, you have to be careful where you place your skepticism. Some science is complex, but some science is simple.
So when most people -- including most experts -- say "global warming", they're referring to the observed and predicted increase in the average temperature measured at the surface of the Earth. The observed trend, both the direct measurements and the inferences made about historical temperatures, is pretty solid science.
But there's another way to think about global warming, and that is the heat content of the Earth. The Earth generates a little bit of heat itself, from its radioactive core, receives a boatload more from the sun, and then radiates most of it off into space. And we're also pretty confident that a little surplus is left over. That little surplus of heat goes to heat the oceans, melt the ice caps, and also towards the atmospheric heating that we commonly refer to as "global warming".
Now, this underlying change in heat content is relatively simple. It's a lot of work to measure -- you need to keep track of how much ice there is, measure the temperature of the oceans at various places and times and depths, track atmospheric temperatures. It's also not guaranteed to be constant -- if the albedo of the Earth changes (like through there being more or less ice, or lots of dust going into the air) or the composition of the atmosphere dramatically changes, Earth will gain or lose heat at a different rate than it is now. But it's still relatively simple.
Where it gets complex is how this change in the heat content of the Earth relates to climate. There, you've got a million variables. If the oceans heat faster or slower, the atmosphere will heat faster or slower. If it affects wind currents, you can get warmer or or colder air pushed into places it doesn't normally go. If it affects the ocean currents, the climate in some parts of the world could get dramatically colder, even as the heat content of the Earth continues creep up. If it somehow magically melted all the ice first, without changing the surface or ocean temperatures, you'd have no climate change at all for about a thousand years, but the oceans would rise dozens of feet over that same time. If the atmosphere heats first, the climate would get dramatically worse but the ocean levels would stay the same.
So I think it's quite reasonable to be skeptical about any specific predictions of how the climate or the conditions on Earth will change as the Earth continues to warm -- that is complex. But I hope you aren't terribly skeptical that the Earth is warming, that its total heat content is going up -- that is much simply, much more definite. It may not be certain how this will affect the climate, but so far none of the options look good.
Incredible that this research from 60 years ago explains much of our current weather events. The Article ice shrinks, northern North America gets more snow.
It also explains why both global warming and impending ice age are linked.
This doesn't deny, of course, that mankind hasn't done his bit to accelerate the natural ebbs and flows of the global climate and the pace at which they are occurring.
A related belief which is found in both Greek and Asian cultures that proovs cycle of ice and warm ages purports that world goes through cyclical but not linear progress.
The ice age is typically considered an age of golden times. In the Timaeus, Plato talks of the mythical island of Atlantis, which was swallowed up by the sea in a “single day and night of misfortune” in c about 11000 years ago which matches with the time ice age is considered to have ended.
Following article goes in length on this cyclical theory, most concretely defined in Hindu's yugas cycle and provides several geological, archaeological and historical evidence to back the research presented.
If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple of years, it would not have been implausible.
The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much warmer weather around the arctic circle is certainly fascinating.
The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to the current alignment.
If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the Earth.
True enough. But I am not a geophysicist or a geologist or anything even remotely close to that.
Is the article talking about the geographic poles (the rotational axis of earth) or the magnetic poles? Because I think I remember reading that the magnetic poles of earth have been moving around quite a bit over time, that the magnetic poles are (slowly) moving today at a speed that scientists can measure, and that at some point, the magnetic north pole was rather close to the rotational south pole. (Although I do not know if the location of the magnetic poles has any impact on climate.)
The hypothesis is that the geographical North Pole was in the Atlantic 1 million years ago, and rapidly shifted to where it is now.
The problem with the hypothesis is it doesn't answer the question (quoting from page 7):
> What started off the first Ice Age cycle?
> “We know that during the past million years, the world has swung back and forth between ice ages and weather like today’s,” Ewing and Donn told me. “Before then, the whole earth was much warmer. There were no zones of extreme heat or cold; palms and magnolias grew in Greenland, and coral around Iceland; subtropical plants thrived within eleven degrees of the North Pole. Why didn’t the Arctic Ocean-glacier ‘thermostat’ work then? What suddenly turned it on one million years ago?
(We now know there have been multiple periods of glaciation. We are now in the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which started 2.5 million years ago. The previous, the Karoo Ice Age, was 360–260 million years ago.)
It only explains why there are cycles, but if the planetary conditions were the same 3 million years ago, and there were no cycles, then the hypothesis would be in error.
Remember, in the 1950s the new theory of plate tectonics was only just coming into wide acceptance. The quote from the Harper's piece assumes that the crust moves a lot faster than the evidence found though the successive decades of research.
I vaguely remember reading this article before. It's clear our planet is changing, I don't see how anyone can deny that. We can argue all day long about how much CO2 produced since the industrial revolution is affecting it, but the melt's happening either way. Even partially wrong, I think there were a lot of interesting points in that article. Thanks for posting it.
In this case, research after the intriguing hypothesis of Ewing and Donn shows that it's not what happened.
For example, from Science (1964), http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707 :
> Pollen analysis of radiocarbon-dated samples from the arctic coastal plain of Alaska shows that vegetation of 14,000 years ago reflected a climate colder than the present, and that there has been a progressive warming, culminating in the present cold arctic climate. The record indicates that the Arctic Ocean has been covered with ice since the time of the Wisconsin glacial maximum, suggesting that the essential condition of the Ewing and Donn hypothesis for the origin of ice ages, that the Arctic Ocean be ice-free up to 11,000 years ago, cannot be met.
Ewing and Donn write (quoting from Harpers):
> “The answer, we believe, is chat [sic] until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold.
Remember, this is shortly after we realized that the continents could move. They based their conclusions on the magnetic record, but the magnetic pole also wanders and flips. The actual movement is nowhere near what's required for their hypothesis to be true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander for some background. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/a... for a paper which says that paleontological records show about 1 degree of shift per million years for the last 7 million years.
From what I understand, global warming entered the popular awareness in the 1970s-1980s. This aricle from the 1950s shows awareness even then:
> Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland; annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to. It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded by such a warming of climate.