Global warming news

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/scienc

e/11/08/globalwarming.reut/index.html

[belgareth]

A while back I read an article

that suggested one of the possible reasons for the faster than expected rate of melt was soot from the coal and wood

burning in Europe. The dark grey ash reflects less of the sun's heat causing the ice to melt more rapidly. If this

is true, part of the solution would be cleaner forms of energy. It also makes me wonder about the relationship of

volcanic activity. I'm not trying to minimize the impact of greenhouse gasses, which is significant, but feel we

need to understand why the rate of temp increase is so much greater in order to figure out how to control it.

[DrSmellThis]

Agreed. It is a very bad

problem, regardless. People need to wake up to how fragile the balance of the Earth's climate is regarding being

friendly to human life.

[belgareth]

How Global Warming Can Lead to a Big Chill

Science - Reuters





WASHINGTON

(Reuters) - Global warming could lead to a big chill in the North Atlantic, at least if history is anything to go

by, researchers reported on Friday.

They published evidence to

support a popular theory that rising temperatures caused a big melt of polar ice 8,200 years ago, causing a

freshwater flood into the salty North Atlantic.

This would have

changed the flow of the balmy Gulf Stream and in just a few years, average temperatures plummeted, ushering in a

deep freeze that lasted a century or more, researchers have proposed.

Writing in the Dec. 11 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Torbjorn Tornqvist, an assistant professor of

earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says he has evidence that this happened.



"Few would argue it's the most dramatic climate change in the last

10,000 years," Tornqvist said in a statement. "We're now able to show the first sea-level record that corresponds

to that event."

Tornqvist and some graduate students found the

evidence along the Gulf of Mexico off the southern U.S. coast.

They

found peat deposits that would have been formed under rising sea levels. Working with researchers in the

Netherlands, they dated the material to 8,200 years ago.

Their

composition suggested they were made when a saltwater marsh was abruptly flooded and turned into a lagoon.



"Climatologists urgently need this type of information to run their

climate models in order to understand the conditions that can produce such an abrupt climate change," Tonrqvist

said.