Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level

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Ridgerunner said:
I realize it’s largely irrelevant to this topic, but among other interesting things about temperature changes is the effect it might have had on human history. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, a less welcoming environment than the Eurasian steppes. The way they are today, not many could live there unless heavily resourced.

There are those who claim that the destruction of the Roman Empire was linked to climate change, among other things. The steppes warmed considerably and over a few generations, allowing for a population explosion on the steppes. Then the climate took a change for the cooler, causing peoples to push into more moderate climates. The numbers were too much for western Europe to contain or absorb.

At least some think that. Not sure what it’s based on.
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Had that happened, would we all be speaking Latin right now? Or at least a Latinate language? Credo que si.
 
Greenland was not an anomaly. In a true global warming situation, the temperate food growing zones move toward the poles in their respective hemispheres and populations expand in that direction. Such as happened during the Medieval Warm Period. It wasn’t just Greenland, it was also Europe, Siberia and North America. This likely correlates to the population peak of the North American Indians before Columbus. While we don’t know that for sure, we do know the Indian population was severely decimated by a 25 to 30 year drought that took place just before Columbus’ arrival. Also the population of Europe rose in line with improving climate before the Black Death.

The Medieval Warm Period is rather inconvenient to the MMGW cause and every effort is made to minimize it.

Further, we just ended a major El Niño event (the biggest El Niño since 1998) which accounts for a good portion of the recent warming. Gonna be a good winter coming.
 
tomarin said:
Had that happened, would we all be speaking Latin right now? Or at least a Latinate language? Credo que si.
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Despite being classified by most as a Teutonic language, English is actually more Latinate than it is Teutonic, if one considers French Latinate (which it is in part). It’s interesting how that is, though. The French and Latin-derived parts are primarily in certain contexts, and the more technical or formalized the context, the more Latinate it is. The more “family” and “home” kinds of words tend to be Teutonic.

I have had occasion to have very good translators for whom English was not their first language complain about that. English speakers often switch from one mode to another and think nothing of it. So, for example, at a break in a business meeting, the participants might be speaking in more Latinate way about business, (mostly French-derived) then suddenly switch to football and speak in a more Anglo-Saxon way. Adding to the difficulty is that there are some (rather few) ways of speaking English that have Scandinavian roots, notwithstanding that English does not include many actual Scandinavian words. But they’re not uncommon in day-to-day English usage.

It’s also why an English speaker can partially read a French newspaper and partially read a German newspaper. But the first is easier than the second. Probably French is the easiest language for an English-speaker to learn if the person is also reasonably culturally literate. The cultural literacy matters because such a person will have already been exposed to more French-derived words and forms of speaking than a person of limited education and background.

To remain barely topical. I have never seen arctic ice, either forming or melting.🙂
 
Ridgerunner said:
I realize it’s largely irrelevant to this topic, but among other interesting things about temperature changes is the effect it might have had on human history. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, a less welcoming environment than the Eurasian steppes. The way they are today, not many could live there unless heavily resourced.

There are those who claim that the destruction of the Roman Empire was linked to climate change, among other things. The steppes warmed considerably and over a few generations, allowing for a population explosion on the steppes. Then the climate took a change for the cooler, causing peoples to push into more moderate climates. The numbers were too much for western Europe to contain or absorb.

At least some think that. Not sure what it’s based on.
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I have read this also. Then there is the the Bering Land Bridge over which it is hypothesized people from Asia migrated into North and then South America seeking the warmer climate. It is fascinating. Here in Cahokia, Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis, we have the remains of an ancient civilization, the Mississipians. They thrived about 1,000 years ago. Then they suddenly disappeared. It is theorized the climate was much warmer then, and a cooling period introduced crop failures, famines, and sickness. I’ll have to read up on this, as I remember certain crops they planted are no longer sustainable in the present cooler climate. This, among other archeological evidence suggests a warmer climate.
 
Zzyzx_Road said:
Greenland was not an anomaly. In a true global warming situation, the temperate food growing zones move toward the poles in their respective hemispheres and populations expand in that direction. Such as happened during the Medieval Warm Period. It wasn’t just Greenland, it was also Europe, Siberia and North America. This likely correlates to the population peak of the North American Indians before Columbus. While we don’t know that for sure, we do know the Indian population was severely decimated by a 25 to 30 year drought that took place just before Columbus’ arrival. Also the population of Europe rose in line with improving climate before the Black Death.

The Medieval Warm Period is rather inconvenient to the MMGW cause and every effort is made to minimize it.

Further, we just ended a major El Niño event (the biggest El Niño since 1998) which accounts for a good portion of the recent warming. Gonna be a good winter coming.
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Wasn’t there a mini-Ice Age as well, in Shakespeare’s day?
 
Ridgerunner said:
Despite being classified by most as a Teutonic language, English is actually more Latinate than it is Teutonic, if one considers French Latinate (which it is in part). It’s interesting how that is, though. The French and Latin-derived parts are primarily in certain contexts, and the more technical or formalized the context, the more Latinate it is. The more “family” and “home” kinds of words tend to be Teutonic.

I have had occasion to have very good translators for whom English was not their first language complain about that. English speakers often switch from one mode to another and think nothing of it. So, for example, at a break in a business meeting, the participants might be speaking in more Latinate way about business, (mostly French-derived) then suddenly switch to football and speak in a more Anglo-Saxon way. Adding to the difficulty is that there are some (rather few) ways of speaking English that have Scandinavian roots, notwithstanding that English does not include many actual Scandinavian words. But they’re not uncommon in day-to-day English usage.
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We have Latinate vocabulary due to the Norman Conquest and the expansion of vocabulary that occurred as a result of the Enlightenment explosion of scientific knowledge and general cultural sophistication but I’m not sure a linguist would agree with you that English is more Latinate than Germanic. When it comes to things like grammar and sentence structure and the way we form plurals of nouns (bretheren, anyone?) we’re still solidly Germanic. If our language were a car it would have a Latinate coat of paint but a Germanic chassis.
At least that’s my understanding (I’m not a linguist, far from it so I could be way off base here.) And I’ve always found German a lot easier than French but those things are pretty subjective and vary by individual. One advantage of our language’s dual heritage is that it makes for more word choices for poets, with regard to whether they want a poem to convey a solid, concrete Anglo-saxon feeling or a more abstract, flowery French one (or both, switching from one to the other in the course of the poem).

Back on topic, I’ve heard Arctic ice is a lot like non-Arctic ice, only more compressed.
 
tomarin said:
We have Latinate vocabulary due to the Norman Conquest and the expansion of vocabulary that occurred as a result of the Enlightenment explosion of scientific knowledge and general cultural sophistication but I’m not sure a linguist would agree with you that English is more Latinate than Germanic. When it comes to things like grammar and sentence structure and the way we form plurals of nouns (bretheren, anyone?) we’re still solidly Germanic. If our language were a car it would have a Latinate coat of paint but a Germanic chassis.
At least that’s my understanding (I’m not a linguist, far from it so I could be way off base here.) And I’ve always found German a lot easier than French but those things are pretty subjective and vary by individual. One advantage of our language’s dual heritage is that it makes for more word choices for poets, with regard to whether they want a poem to convey a solid, concrete Anglo-saxon feeling or a more abstract, flowery French one (or both, switching from one to the other in the course of the poem).

Back on topic, I’ve heard Arctic ice is a lot like non-Arctic ice, only more compressed.
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I have said this before, but I’ll say it again in case you hadn’t read it.

An author of some note went on a world tour and met with an Argentine writer of considerable fame. The Argentine had an English grandmother and went to Oxford, so he was totally fluent in both English and Spanish. Among other things, the Argentine said there were some things one could say in English but not in Spanish.

The example he gave was Kipling’s “Harp song of the Dane women”. I won’t repeat much of it here, but it’s about the complaint of Viking women when their men go to sea, and Kipling did it in a somewhat Scandinavian way of saying it. I had occasion to talk about that to a Puerto Rican who was thoroughly fluent in both languages. He didn’t believe me, so I sent him the poem. After about a week or so, he emailed back and said it was true.

Among other things, the use of modifiers in Scandinavian poetic languages is a little odd to an English speaker, but certainly intelligible. But you can’t do the same thing in Spanish, apparently. Among other usages were “hearth-fire”, “home-acre”, “ten-times-fingering weed”.

"What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth-fire, and the home-acre
To go with the old grey widow-maker.

She has no strong white arms to 'fold you
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you."
 
peter26 said:
No, no. Its up to those claiming there is a problem to prove that clearly and convincingly. And they haven’t.
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If I were to make the effort to lay out all of the evidence clearly, would you be open to being convinced? I can explain it, but I can’t convince you unless you are open to the possibility that I am right and you are wrong. If you go into an argument convinced that you are right, you can’t be convinced.

Also, you would have to be willing to accept that the people working on collecting the evidence are a more trustworthy source than someone merely speculating on it? I’m not saying that I need to appeal to authority, but if you aren’t willing to accept that the satellites say what the people in charge of monitoring them say they say, again, I can’t convince you. It’s like if we were discussing Catholicism, you can’t have a serious conversation about it unless you agree with that the CCC is a preferred source of information over an anti-Catholic blog.

I’m willing to do it step-by-step, providing evidence of every claim, but I don’t want to bother if it is just going to be rejected out of hand.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Despite being classified by most as a Teutonic language, English is actually more Latinate than it is Teutonic, if one considers French Latinate (which it is in part). It’s interesting how that is, though. The French and Latin-derived parts are primarily in certain contexts, and the more technical or formalized the context, the more Latinate it is. The more “family” and “home” kinds of words tend to be Teutonic.
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My father being German and my mother being French, I can attest that the German side is a much warmer people and their language reflects that. Words like Heimat and Gemütlich come to mind. These words evoke images that are not translatable.
 
TheCuriousCat said:
I’m willing to do it step-by-step, providing evidence of every claim, but I don’t want to bother if it is just going to be rejected out of hand.
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Regardless of Peter’s response, I wish you would, for the benefit of all of us here.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I have said this before, but I’ll say it again in case you hadn’t read it.

An author of some note went on a world tour and met with an Argentine writer of considerable fame. The Argentine had an English grandmother and went to Oxford, so he was totally fluent in both English and Spanish. Among other things, the Argentine said there were some things one could say in English but not in Spanish.

The example he gave was Kipling’s “Harp song of the Dane women”. I won’t repeat much of it here, but it’s about the complaint of Viking women when their men go to sea, and Kipling did it in a somewhat Scandinavian way of saying it. I had occasion to talk about that to a Puerto Rican who was thoroughly fluent in both languages. He didn’t believe me, so I sent him the poem. After about a week or so, he emailed back and said it was true.

Among other things, the use of modifiers in Scandinavian poetic languages is a little odd to an English speaker, but certainly intelligible. But you can’t do the same thing in Spanish, apparently. Among other usages were “hearth-fire”, “home-acre”, “ten-times-fingering weed”.

"What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth-fire, and the home-acre
To go with the old grey widow-maker.

She has no strong white arms to 'fold you
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you."
Click to expand...
Yes, that’s a throwback to Anglo-Saxon. Beowulf has a ton of those alliterative thingies (there’s a technical term, but I’ve forgotten it.)
 
tomarin said:
Wasn’t there a mini-Ice Age as well, in Shakespeare’s day?
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Yes there was. Again, this icy weather in both North America and Europe caused much misery as the shortened and wet growing season resulted wide-spread crop failures, famine, and disease.

It is said that the violin maker Antonio Stradivari’s violins were of superior quality due to the denser woods that result from the colder weather.

Edit to add, a warmer climate is not necessarily the catastrophe that some alarmists would have us believe.
 
tomarin said:
Wasn’t there a mini-Ice Age as well, in Shakespeare’s day?
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Yes, toward the end of his life. You would be thinking of the Maunder Minimum.

For those who study the effects of climate change on history, this period in European history is rather illuminating. Think famine, civil disorder, riots, wars, etc. It was hard enough growing food as it was, just imagine how much harder that got when the weather was more cold, the winters lasted longer and the crops frequently either fell short of what was needed or they failed, period. It likely had severe effects in North America as well though there is no good record inland from the coasts. Personally I’m a lot more nervous about global cooling than warming because it is dang hard to grow crops and stay warm in that environment, takes a lot of energy just to remain in place. Or migrate southward to survive, as the case may be.
LeafByNiggle said:
Rather, every effort is made to maximize it by the opponents of the theory.
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Wake me up when they’re growing wheat and brewing beer in Greenland …

Mention was made of the North Atlantic Current being warm for that period of time, that would not have affected just Greenland, that would have affected Europe and North America as well. No, not an episode to be dismissed that easily.
 
qui_est_ce said:
Edit to add, a warmer climate is not necessarily the catastrophe that some alarmists would have us believe.
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That’s how I see it (although as a fan of winter I don’t relish the idea of warmer ones).
 
qui_est_ce said:
We need to go back centuries, because climate evolves over centuries. This graph
doesn’t go far enough back.
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There are plenty of graphs that go back very far.

Seeing those graphs makes it easier to understand that there are a handful of factors that impact climate, which makes it more predicable than weather. (Note, graphs don’t PROVE climate change, they only reflect it – climate scientists have other very good proofs from physics, etc).

One of the warming factors is greenhouse gases. In the past these were released naturally, and the warming caused by their release and/or the other warming factors also caused more GHGs to be released during great warming episodes, which is something we REALLY need to be cognizant of, during this time when we are forcing the warming much more rapidly, orders of magnitude more rapidly, than nature has done in the past.

It’s like we are poking a sleeping dragon of methane hydrates and methane ice-locked in permafrost. We’re in for a whole lot of trouble. Maybe not us (I’m up there in years and won’t see the worst), but the children and yet-to-be-born.

Here’s the graph you want (also see “paleoclimatology” at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology):🙂 (sorry for this really big image, but it does go back some 500 mill yrs)

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

Several things to note here:
  • The end-Permian 251 mill yrs ago when there was a great warming triggered by burning coal from the “Siberian Traps” – 95% of life died out from that warming and its knock-on effects.
  • the PETM (Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum) some 55 mill yrs ago, which also lead to one of the 6 great extinction events.
  • the “Eocene Optimum,” which was a great warming period – with palm trees and alligators in the Arctic – but did not involve a great extinction event because it happened very slowly over millions of years, which gave species time to evolve and/or migrate.
  • the Holocene (the past 12,000 years) during which agriculture arose and the human population expanded greatly.
  • our current global warming, which is now about 1C above the average Holocene temps. However, with the amount of GHGs we are emitting, plus those that are and will be released from nature due to the initial warming we have caused, it is projected that the temps could increase to 6C above that baseline by 2100, and much more thereafter, which will greatly harm agriculture. It will become a killer “musical chairs” of diminishing life-sustaining resources, especially after mid-century and on through centuries to come.
As it is with global warming AND many other environmental assaults some scientists are claiming we are already in the 6th major extinction event in human history.
 
I also wanted to note for those who think we can simply move our agriculture up to the Arctic, the soil is very poor there (due to lack of decomposition), and there is not as much land there as the flat maps may lead us to believe.
 
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