Nothing like a mis-leading-to-the-point-of-dishonest headline on a controversial issue to brighten my day.
MSNBC just posted this gem: Earth could plunge into sudden ice age
Between Hack-gate and the myth that in the '70s climate scientists were predicting a new Ice Age, you can bet the Climate Change deniers will jump on this.
Besides a lead paragraph devoted to "The Day After Tomorrow" there is nothing wrong with the article itself. The main point is new evidence that the Younger Dryas glaciation 12,800 years ago started even faster than previously thought.
A Recipe For An Ice Age.
We knew that temperatures fell very quickly at the start of the Younger Dryas. At that time a large portion of central Canada was submerged beneath a vast glacial lake called Lake Agassiz. It was larger than all the Great Lakes combined.
When the ice damn holding Lake Agassiz collapsed, all that fresh water flooded into the Atlantic. That was enough to disrupt the Thermohaline circulation which drives Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream carries heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where it releases that heat into the atmosphere. That makes Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, England and Western Europe warmer than they otherwise would be.
When the Gulf Stream slowed after the fresh water pulse, all those areas cooled rapidly, which started the Younger Dryas glaciation. Based on Greenland ice cores, we thought the cooling took a decade or more.
All this has been known for decades and it's one reason why Climate Change is a more accurate term than Global Warming. In this case, the warming that caused Lake Agassiz to collapse lead to a new glaciation.
Flash Freeze The Earth
New evidence, based on cores from Irish lakes, shows that the cooling was much faster than previously thought. A couple of years at most. Maybe even just a few weeks.
Lakes sediment records year to year variations the vegetation surrounding the lake. By comparing carbon and oxygen isotope ratios in annual sedimentation layers in the cores, scientists can estimate the tempurate that year. Since the sediment layers can be very distinct, this gives scientists an accurate yearly temperature reading.
The new evidence shows a very rapid cooling in these cores. Much faster than the decades long previous view based on ice cores.
This is a very cool (sorry I couldn't resist) finding. But it isn't revolutionary at all. Just science marching on, refining it's previous understanding of the world.
You Know This Will Heat Up The Right Wing
But this iterative refinement of our knowledge is lost on the right wing. I'll bet by tomorrow the Freepers and such will be all over this saying it proves we don't know jack about the climate.
Throw in last week's e-mail nontroversy and the old myth that in the '70s climatologists thought we were heading for a new Ice Age and you've got 3 or 4 new cycles worth on Inhofe bloviations coming.
Writers don't get to pick their headlines so Charles Q. Choi is probably not at fault here. Chalk this up to some hack editor looking to drive traffic.