Onder die titel vond ik in mijn mailbox een bericht over klimaatverandering (mailinglist van het chaostheorie-forum). Er wordt gemeldt dat juist de laatste maanden extra tekenen zijn voor een op handen zijnde extreme verandering. Ik heb nog geen tijd gehad om het helemaal te lezen, maar het past wel op dit forum denk ik.
Komt ie:
History's greatest disaster has begun!
The greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history is now
unfolding. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has announced that
the North Atlantic Oscillation is failing, and, along with it, the
Gulf Stream. The Institute has observed "the largest and most
dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern
instruments," in an analysis of Atlantic ocean currents from pole to
pole. Woods Hole has found that salinity levels are changing in ways
that they have changed in the past leading to periods of abrupt
climate change. Polar waters are becoming far less saline, meaning
that the "heat pump" effect that draws warm water north is failing.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the
potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our
lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant
cooling."
The director of Woods Hole, Robert Gagosian, said: "We may be
approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and
cause abrupt climate changes."
Last summer, Unknowncountry.com reported an ominous sign that the
North Atlantic Current was weakening, when cold northern water
suddenly appeared along US coastlines as far south as Florida. This
suggested that the Gulf Stream had moved farther offshore than
normal, which would happen if it weakened and was not flowing north
normally.
The extremes of heat and cold that the northern hemisphere has
experienced over the past twelve months may be further signs of this
effect. Extraordinary heat killed at least 20,000 people in Europe
last summer, and extreme cold in north America this winter has been
responsible for at least 35 deaths. World weather patterns have
become extremely bizarre recently, exemplified by blocks of ice
falling from the sky in regions as diverse as New Zealand, Spain and
the American South and, within the past few months, tornadoes in
Wales and, just yesterday, on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.
From now on, there is an immediate potential for abrupt climate
change. The key factor in the sudden climate change scenario
described in the Coming Global Superstorm and many other places is
the collapse of the system of currents that equalizes heat and cold
over the surface of the earth.
It is likely that climate change will take place over a single
season, as the fossil record tells us. It will not be a protracted
process, unfolding over hundreds or even tens of years. It will begin
with an outburst of violent weather unlike anything recorded in the
historical era, and then be followed by years of climactic turmoil.
At some point, the climate will either return to the interglacial
state it is in now, or we will slip into another ice age, but this is
likely to be hundreds of years into the period of turmoil.
Mankind, for the foreseeable future, will experience the full effects
of the turmoil and disaster caused by sudden climate change.
This process is going to devastate the northern hemisphere,
dramatically altering growing seasons in the United States, Canada
and Europe, shortening them, making them entirely unviable in
northern areas, and crippling many regions such as the central-
western US, with drought so intractable that it will likely result in
large scale population movement out of these areas.
This unfortunate situation is in part the result of natural climactic
cycling, but it has been sped up by human emissions of greenhouse
gasses into the atmosphere, and the process could have been
controlled by considered worldwide attention to controlling those
emissions. Proper leadership in the developed countries could have
prevented this catastrophe, and without significant disruption to
business activities or the lives of individuals.
Instead, nothing useful has been done, and now we will go through a
significant stage of climatic upheaval that will be accompanied by
the death and impoverishment of millions of the best educated and
most productive people on earth. This will result in a vast
diminishment of mankind and the likely collapse of many of the
structures of government, business and finance that we depend upon to
insure our safety, prosperity and freedom.
Even if a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gas emissions were
achieved within a year, the process would still continue. What we
will be able to do, if human society remains organized at a high
enough level to achieve this, is to make a slide into another ice age
somewhat less likely, and hasten the return of a more acceptable
climate.
Questions will be asked: why has this happened? Who is responsible?
Among Americans, the answer is clear: political leaders and media
personalities have, at the behest of corporate sponsors who feel
threatened by environmental controls, lied to the public about the
problem, promoting the fallacy that the situation was a matter for
debate when, in fact, nature had already cast the die.
Worldwide, various governmental and private entities have misused the
threat of environmental disaster as a means of imposing a level of
planning on all human activities that many found unacceptable.
In fact, government, the corporate world and environmental groups
should all have faced the real and imminent problems in a clear-
headed and practical manner, instead of viewing them through the
crazy lens of ideology, be it left or right. Instead, ideology has
been placed above need in virtually every case, with the result that
the worst possible situation has become true: human activities in the
form of greenhouse gas emissions have been allowed to exacerbate a
natural cycle, with results that promise to be devastating beyond
imagination.
It is ironic indeed that the Day After Tomorrow, the film related to
the Coming Global Superstorm, will be released in May of 2004, which
is likely to be the first month in the past ten thousand years at
least that the extreme weather conditions described in that book
could actually occur.
At present, only a few paleoclimatologists will admit to the actual
violence that the fossil record reveals, and there remain questions
about the degree to which the debris from these extremely violent
weather events of the distant past actually relates to sudden climate
change.
For example, there have been questions surrounding the cause of the
quick-freezing of mammoths, whose remains have been periodically
found in Alaska and Siberia, often with still undigested food in
their mouths and stomachs. It has been claimed that no weather-
related mechanism could possibly cause this, and therefore that the
mammoths must have fallen into sinkholes and frozen there.
Recently, however, the discovery of quick-frozen plants embedded in
glaciers in Peru has revealed the fact that very extreme weather
changes to take place on this earth, and result in long-term effects.
For example, plants that froze in the Peruvian Andes in a matter of
minute ten thousand years ago are only just now being disgorged by
glaciers. In other words, plants that were living in a moderate
climate were plunged, over what appears to have been the course of
just a few hours or even minutes, into extreme cold that held them in
its grip for ten thousand years.
All mankind is now threatened by such a danger. Where and when it
will strike, or if it will unfold with such super-violence at all is
unknown. But the greedy and the foolish among our leadership have
released the bull from the paddock, and we are not likely to see it
returned anytime soon.
Two questions remain: what can we do and what are the warning signs
of sudden climate change?
The primary warning sign has always been the failure of ocean
currents, and Woods Hole is telling us that this is happening now. On
a more detailed, day-to-day basis, any excursion of warm tropical air
into far northern latitudes, from now on, is apt to trigger ferocious
storms, and the farther that air penetrates, and the warmer and more
humid it is, the more violent the consequences will be.
We will be making certain changes to our Quickwa tch on this website
to reflect the changing situation. For example, we are going to
expand the number of points from which we pick up air temperature
measurements and drop the ocean current measures and observations,
except for the Gulf Stream, as they have already been triggered and
will not change anytime soon. We will be watching for the dissolution
of the Gulf Stream. If this should happen between May and October,
the immediate weather effects will stun the world. No matter when it
takes place, and it is now certain that it will, it will lead in a
single season to an entirely new climate of a kind that is far less
viable for us than the one we have known.
Also on our Quickwatch page is an article that contains a series of
simple steps that world leaders should have been aggressively asking
individuals to take for the past ten years. Instead, they remained
mired down in their various political and ideological issues, either
claiming that there was no significant environmental problem or that
there was a huge problem that could only be solved by massive
government intervention, imposing draconian new levels of planning on
society at every level, with special emphasis on corporate enterprise
and economic development.
However, the fact remains that a great deal can be done:
To reduce individual emissions dramatically, only a few minor
lifestyle changes are needed: Replace the 20-year-old fridge with an
energy-saver model. CO2 savings = 3,000 pounds. Send out one fewer
30-
gallon bags of garbage per week. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Leave the
car at home two days per week. CO2 savings = 1,590 pounds. Recycle
cans, bottles, plastic, cardboard and newspapers. CO2 savings = 850
pounds. Switch from standard light bulbs to fluorescents. CO2 savings
= 1,000 pounds. Replace the current shower head with a low-flow
model. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Turn the thermostat down two degrees
for one year. CO2 savings = 500 pounds. Cut vehicle fuel use by 10
gallons in 2003. CO2 savings = 200 pounds. Switch from hot to warm or
cold water for laundry. CO2 savings = 600 pounds.
If these steps were taken by just 20% of U.S., Japanese, Canadian and
European inhabitants, world CO2 emission levels would drop to a point
that the human factor would be vastly reduced as a source of global
warming, and the upheaval that we now face would be reduced in its
duration and effect, perhaps to the point that the world as we know
it might be restored, not in our lifetimes, but with luck in those of
our children.
27-Jan-2004
by Whitley Strieber
Komt ie:
History's greatest disaster has begun!
The greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history is now
unfolding. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has announced that
the North Atlantic Oscillation is failing, and, along with it, the
Gulf Stream. The Institute has observed "the largest and most
dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern
instruments," in an analysis of Atlantic ocean currents from pole to
pole. Woods Hole has found that salinity levels are changing in ways
that they have changed in the past leading to periods of abrupt
climate change. Polar waters are becoming far less saline, meaning
that the "heat pump" effect that draws warm water north is failing.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the
potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our
lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant
cooling."
The director of Woods Hole, Robert Gagosian, said: "We may be
approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and
cause abrupt climate changes."
Last summer, Unknowncountry.com reported an ominous sign that the
North Atlantic Current was weakening, when cold northern water
suddenly appeared along US coastlines as far south as Florida. This
suggested that the Gulf Stream had moved farther offshore than
normal, which would happen if it weakened and was not flowing north
normally.
The extremes of heat and cold that the northern hemisphere has
experienced over the past twelve months may be further signs of this
effect. Extraordinary heat killed at least 20,000 people in Europe
last summer, and extreme cold in north America this winter has been
responsible for at least 35 deaths. World weather patterns have
become extremely bizarre recently, exemplified by blocks of ice
falling from the sky in regions as diverse as New Zealand, Spain and
the American South and, within the past few months, tornadoes in
Wales and, just yesterday, on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.
From now on, there is an immediate potential for abrupt climate
change. The key factor in the sudden climate change scenario
described in the Coming Global Superstorm and many other places is
the collapse of the system of currents that equalizes heat and cold
over the surface of the earth.
It is likely that climate change will take place over a single
season, as the fossil record tells us. It will not be a protracted
process, unfolding over hundreds or even tens of years. It will begin
with an outburst of violent weather unlike anything recorded in the
historical era, and then be followed by years of climactic turmoil.
At some point, the climate will either return to the interglacial
state it is in now, or we will slip into another ice age, but this is
likely to be hundreds of years into the period of turmoil.
Mankind, for the foreseeable future, will experience the full effects
of the turmoil and disaster caused by sudden climate change.
This process is going to devastate the northern hemisphere,
dramatically altering growing seasons in the United States, Canada
and Europe, shortening them, making them entirely unviable in
northern areas, and crippling many regions such as the central-
western US, with drought so intractable that it will likely result in
large scale population movement out of these areas.
This unfortunate situation is in part the result of natural climactic
cycling, but it has been sped up by human emissions of greenhouse
gasses into the atmosphere, and the process could have been
controlled by considered worldwide attention to controlling those
emissions. Proper leadership in the developed countries could have
prevented this catastrophe, and without significant disruption to
business activities or the lives of individuals.
Instead, nothing useful has been done, and now we will go through a
significant stage of climatic upheaval that will be accompanied by
the death and impoverishment of millions of the best educated and
most productive people on earth. This will result in a vast
diminishment of mankind and the likely collapse of many of the
structures of government, business and finance that we depend upon to
insure our safety, prosperity and freedom.
Even if a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gas emissions were
achieved within a year, the process would still continue. What we
will be able to do, if human society remains organized at a high
enough level to achieve this, is to make a slide into another ice age
somewhat less likely, and hasten the return of a more acceptable
climate.
Questions will be asked: why has this happened? Who is responsible?
Among Americans, the answer is clear: political leaders and media
personalities have, at the behest of corporate sponsors who feel
threatened by environmental controls, lied to the public about the
problem, promoting the fallacy that the situation was a matter for
debate when, in fact, nature had already cast the die.
Worldwide, various governmental and private entities have misused the
threat of environmental disaster as a means of imposing a level of
planning on all human activities that many found unacceptable.
In fact, government, the corporate world and environmental groups
should all have faced the real and imminent problems in a clear-
headed and practical manner, instead of viewing them through the
crazy lens of ideology, be it left or right. Instead, ideology has
been placed above need in virtually every case, with the result that
the worst possible situation has become true: human activities in the
form of greenhouse gas emissions have been allowed to exacerbate a
natural cycle, with results that promise to be devastating beyond
imagination.
It is ironic indeed that the Day After Tomorrow, the film related to
the Coming Global Superstorm, will be released in May of 2004, which
is likely to be the first month in the past ten thousand years at
least that the extreme weather conditions described in that book
could actually occur.
At present, only a few paleoclimatologists will admit to the actual
violence that the fossil record reveals, and there remain questions
about the degree to which the debris from these extremely violent
weather events of the distant past actually relates to sudden climate
change.
For example, there have been questions surrounding the cause of the
quick-freezing of mammoths, whose remains have been periodically
found in Alaska and Siberia, often with still undigested food in
their mouths and stomachs. It has been claimed that no weather-
related mechanism could possibly cause this, and therefore that the
mammoths must have fallen into sinkholes and frozen there.
Recently, however, the discovery of quick-frozen plants embedded in
glaciers in Peru has revealed the fact that very extreme weather
changes to take place on this earth, and result in long-term effects.
For example, plants that froze in the Peruvian Andes in a matter of
minute ten thousand years ago are only just now being disgorged by
glaciers. In other words, plants that were living in a moderate
climate were plunged, over what appears to have been the course of
just a few hours or even minutes, into extreme cold that held them in
its grip for ten thousand years.
All mankind is now threatened by such a danger. Where and when it
will strike, or if it will unfold with such super-violence at all is
unknown. But the greedy and the foolish among our leadership have
released the bull from the paddock, and we are not likely to see it
returned anytime soon.
Two questions remain: what can we do and what are the warning signs
of sudden climate change?
The primary warning sign has always been the failure of ocean
currents, and Woods Hole is telling us that this is happening now. On
a more detailed, day-to-day basis, any excursion of warm tropical air
into far northern latitudes, from now on, is apt to trigger ferocious
storms, and the farther that air penetrates, and the warmer and more
humid it is, the more violent the consequences will be.
We will be making certain changes to our Quickwa tch on this website
to reflect the changing situation. For example, we are going to
expand the number of points from which we pick up air temperature
measurements and drop the ocean current measures and observations,
except for the Gulf Stream, as they have already been triggered and
will not change anytime soon. We will be watching for the dissolution
of the Gulf Stream. If this should happen between May and October,
the immediate weather effects will stun the world. No matter when it
takes place, and it is now certain that it will, it will lead in a
single season to an entirely new climate of a kind that is far less
viable for us than the one we have known.
Also on our Quickwatch page is an article that contains a series of
simple steps that world leaders should have been aggressively asking
individuals to take for the past ten years. Instead, they remained
mired down in their various political and ideological issues, either
claiming that there was no significant environmental problem or that
there was a huge problem that could only be solved by massive
government intervention, imposing draconian new levels of planning on
society at every level, with special emphasis on corporate enterprise
and economic development.
However, the fact remains that a great deal can be done:
To reduce individual emissions dramatically, only a few minor
lifestyle changes are needed: Replace the 20-year-old fridge with an
energy-saver model. CO2 savings = 3,000 pounds. Send out one fewer
30-
gallon bags of garbage per week. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Leave the
car at home two days per week. CO2 savings = 1,590 pounds. Recycle
cans, bottles, plastic, cardboard and newspapers. CO2 savings = 850
pounds. Switch from standard light bulbs to fluorescents. CO2 savings
= 1,000 pounds. Replace the current shower head with a low-flow
model. CO2 savings = 300 pounds. Turn the thermostat down two degrees
for one year. CO2 savings = 500 pounds. Cut vehicle fuel use by 10
gallons in 2003. CO2 savings = 200 pounds. Switch from hot to warm or
cold water for laundry. CO2 savings = 600 pounds.
If these steps were taken by just 20% of U.S., Japanese, Canadian and
European inhabitants, world CO2 emission levels would drop to a point
that the human factor would be vastly reduced as a source of global
warming, and the upheaval that we now face would be reduced in its
duration and effect, perhaps to the point that the world as we know
it might be restored, not in our lifetimes, but with luck in those of
our children.
27-Jan-2004
by Whitley Strieber