Humans are putting the brakes on the next ice age, according to the most extensive study to date on Arctic climate change.
Previously, researchers had looked at Arctic temperature data that went back just 400 years. (See photos of how climate change is transforming the Arctic.)
That research showed a temperature spike in the 20th century, but it was unclear whether human-caused greenhouse gas emissions or natural variability was the culprit, noted study co-author Gifford Miller of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
By looking even farther back in time, Miller and colleagues' newest study reveals that the 20th century's abrupt warming in fact interrupted millennia of steady cooling.
This suggests that the Fallen Angels idea of Pournelle,Niven and Flynn may not be that inaccurate, after all. (In the novel, extreme efforts at stopping global warming results in an Ice Age instead). However, I think we've gone so far into global warming that even if we stopped pumping CO2 into the atmosphere today (impossible, unless we all were transported off the planet en masse), the climate change we have wrought would still take decades, if not a century, to still run.
This report is NOT an excuse and a justification to stop doing anything about global climate change. It DOES give me, though, yet again, another SF novel idea...
Posted by Jvstin at September 6, 2009 9:20 AM