Re:Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
by dredmorbius on Saturday September 21, 2013 @06:48PM
(#6424928)
he only change will be which areas
That's not even wrong.
What's changing is the total energy within the biosphere. That's going to have profound effects throughout the ecosystem. Modeling just what those will be is very difficult.
One trend that's already emerged has been an increasing variability and range to the jet stream, especially in how it increasingly "wanders" north to south. This means that regions might see very rapid and wide temperature swings from summer to winter or back over the course of a few hours to a day. For crops and ecosystems which rely on more predictable and stable conditions, this could prove deadly.
Glacial melting and rising seawaters don't just mean floods, but salt-water intrusion, disturbances of ocean current systems (themselves responsible for transporting vast quantities of heat around the globe, etc.
Some breakdowns in systems seem to have been very rapid. During and toward the end of the last glaciation period, vast ice dams and lakes would form, some over what's now Utah (historic Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt Lake is among the last remnants), as well as in eastern Canada. The formation and bursting of ice dams in the pacific northwest lead to the formation of what are now known as the Washington Badlands by way of the Missoula Floods -- as many as 25 major inundation events which created waterfalls, gravel banks, sandbars, and other features, over what's now dry land. Flow speeds exceeded 80 MPH and consisted of cubic _miles_ of water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
Both circumstances involved warming, though from lower temperatures than today's baseline. The point is that secondary and tertiary climate change effects can be difficult to predict, but also exhibit very great nonlinearity. That is: we don't know what might happen, and it could happen very quickly, even in hours, or days. Certainly massive changes in less than a year's time are possible.
That's not even wrong.
What's changing is the total energy within the biosphere. That's going to have profound effects throughout the ecosystem. Modeling just what those will be is very difficult.
One trend that's already emerged has been an increasing variability and range to the jet stream, especially in how it increasingly "wanders" north to south. This means that regions might see very rapid and wide temperature swings from summer to winter or back over the course of a few hours to a day. For crops and ecosystems which rely on more predictable and stable conditions, this could prove deadly.
Glacial melting and rising seawaters don't just mean floods, but salt-water intrusion, disturbances of ocean current systems (themselves responsible for transporting vast quantities of heat around the globe, etc.
Some breakdowns in systems seem to have been very rapid. During and toward the end of the last glaciation period, vast ice dams and lakes would form, some over what's now Utah (historic Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt Lake is among the last remnants), as well as in eastern Canada. The formation and bursting of ice dams in the pacific northwest lead to the formation of what are now known as the Washington Badlands by way of the Missoula Floods -- as many as 25 major inundation events which created waterfalls, gravel banks, sandbars, and other features, over what's now dry land. Flow speeds exceeded 80 MPH and consisted of cubic _miles_ of water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
In what's now Eastern Canada, bursting of an ice dam shut is thought to have shut down the Gulf Stream at least once, in a period of one year or less: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090914-north...
Both circumstances involved warming, though from lower temperatures than today's baseline. The point is that secondary and tertiary climate change effects can be difficult to predict, but also exhibit very great nonlinearity. That is: we don't know what might happen, and it could happen very quickly, even in hours, or days. Certainly massive changes in less than a year's time are possible.