Al Gore was right - the Pentagon and scientists say so

Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.

Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as 'likely'. But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.

The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.

The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become 'very much' saltier in the tropics and subtropics and 'very much' fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years. This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.

Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.

The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as 'the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light'. Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute - Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth's climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries.

In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.

Our current speculations about future climate and its impacts have focused on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has forecast gradual global warming of 1.4 to 5.8 Celsius over the next century.

It is prudent to superimpose on this forecast the potential for abrupt climate change induced by thermohaline shutdown. Such a change could cool down selective areas of the globe by 3 to 5 Celsius, while simultaneously causing drought in many parts of the world. These climate changes would occur quickly, even as other regions continue to warm slowly. It is critical to consider the economic and political ramifications of this geographically selective climate change. Specifically, the region most affected by a shutdown 'the countries bordering the North Atlantic' is also one of the world's most developed.

The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare

The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.

In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.

Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.

Recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda" a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild.

Global Chilling

The ice-core records demonstrate that the North Atlantic can freshen to a point where the deep-water pump fails, warm water stops coming north, and the northern ocean suddenly freezes, as it did in the last Ice Age. No one can say if that is what will happen next. But since the 1950's, the best documented deep-water pump, between Iceland and Scotland, has slowed 20 percent.

Thom Hartmann - The Ice Age Cometh

Most scientists involved in research on this topic agree that the culprit is global warming, melting the icebergs on Greenland and the Arctic icepack and thus flushing cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north. When a critical threshold is reached, the climate will suddenly switch to an ice age that could last minimally 700 or so years, and maximally over 100,000 years.

And when might that threshold be reached? Nobody knows, the action of the Great Conveyor Belt in defining ice ages was discovered only in the last decade. Preliminary computer models and scientists willing to speculate suggest the switch could flip as early as next year, or it may be generations from now. It may be wobbling right now, producing the extremes of weather we've seen in the past few years.

Predictably the paid corporate mouthpiece Tech Central Station is pooh-pahing the scientists.

From the opposite side Tom Paine has a much better analysis of this - Climate Change Alert.

First Paul O'Neill, now Andrew Marshall. Marshall has just blown the lid off another Bush administration can of worms - namely, its unwillingness to acknowledge and address the massive threat posed by global climate change.

Marshall is the founding director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, a quiet but powerful think tank within the Pentagon. In 2001, Marshall was tapped by George W. Bush to lead the Pentagon's military review that largely defined the scope of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's 'transformation' agenda. Marshall, whose ONA has served every president since Nixon, introduced the term "revolution in military affairs."

In an article published Jan. 26 in Fortune magazine, Marshall released the findings of an unclassified report written by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security."

The ONA-commissioned report, using the well-established scenario-planning techniques developed at Shell's planning unit, generated a plausible future scenario in which the thermohaline conveyor collapses in 2010. What follows that oceanic shut-down sounds apocalyptic and yet the authors contend, is quite plausible.

By 2020, average rainfall in Europe drops 30 percent; "megadroughts" affect Southern China and Northern Europe; massive boatlifts of people from the Caribbean attempt to enter the United States and Mexico; China is unable to feed its population due to the combination of droughts and violent monsoons and flooding; Eastern European countries invade a weakened Russia to seek minerals and energy; nuclear India, Pakistan, and China go to war over water, land, and refugees. In all 400 million people could be forced to migrate from uninhabitable regions. In the United States, the East Coast population areas experience severe shortages of freshwater; flooding creates an inland sea in California's Central Valley and disrupts freshwater supplies for Southern California; and energy disruptions are commonplace due to storms, ice and conflict. The authors make the point clear: this is not a prediction, this is a plausible scenario given what we know now.

For a man of Marshall's long legacy of discretion to directly challenge the current administration's line on global warming at the beginning of a presidential election year speaks volumes. That he chose to do so by releasing a report by respected business consultants in Fortune seems to say he wants the business world, Bush's most important constituency, to understand clearly that the status quo is untenable.

This extraordinary act by a senior Defense Department official implies high-level recognition that the Bush administration's resistance to the near global consensus on climate change - a consensus that includes the vast majority of the scientific community, many corporations including General Motors, Alcoa, IBM, Dupont, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, and all the remaining governments of the OECD - is a threat to national security itself. Indeed, last month in the journal Science, the United Kingdom's Chief Scientific Advisor declared that "climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today - more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

According to The New York Times, the Bush administration acted to distort and omit EPA findings on global warming. The group notes that the administration has dismissed the findings of the International Panel on Climate Change set up by the first President Bush and the findings of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that Bush himself requested. They document how administration has tried to mislead the public by substituting the absolute indicator of total emissions with emissions per unit of GDP, which can go down while total U.S. emissions continue to rise, and then asking emitters (unsuccessfully) to voluntarily commit to reducing emission intensity. And they highlight how the administration has stalled the debate by calling for a research agenda which The New York Times described as a "redundant examination of issues that had largely been settled, bereft of vision, executable goals and timetables - in short, little more than a cover-up for inaction."

Terrorism is still a real threat and Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and HIV/AIDS must be stabilized and resolved. The larger threat of abrupt climate change, however, means we must comprehensively transform our emissions-ridden economy.

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