6 ms·

The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)

51 points by mkempe 12y ago

NathanKP 12y ago
This was a really interesting read. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any followup information about the underlying theory. In the grip of record snows in Boston, and an extra long winter here in NY its easy to imagine being on the cusp of another ice age, but at the same time the theory seems at odds with the idea of global warming. On the one hand we have global warming as a one way operation of sorts accelerated by mankind, on the other hand we have temporary warming followed by a super ice age, powered by the Arctic Ocean. I really want to know if this fascinating theory has been investigated further for confirmation or if it has been debunked in the 50+ years since this article was published.
- nkoren 12y ago
  The former: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jan/climate.htm http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jan/climate.ht...
  - tbrownaw 12y ago
    I wouldn't call that confirmation, it looks like it suggests a completely different mechanism.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  The key thing to remember is 'global': while the East Coast of the US has had one of the colder, snowier winters in recent history, the West Coast has just come out of a hot, dry winter. Local weather is a terrible guide to global climate.
  - chris_va 12y ago
    Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a brutal winter and leaving California dry. Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.
    - msandford 12y ago
      > Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about. Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.
      - chris_va 12y ago
        Well, being skeptical of an entire field of study is different than being skeptical of the predicted outcome. One often sounds like the other, and it is 99.99% likely that something is happening, even if we don't do a good job understanding it. For example, regardless of "warming", we'll still have to deal with ocean acidification and all of the fallout from that.
        kuni-toko-tachi 12y ago
        Something is happening, its called weather. And before weather was co-opted by political agents with an agenda to control people to enrich themselves, that's all it was.
      - saalweachter 12y ago
        Well, you have to be careful where you place your skepticism. Some science is complex, but some science is simple. So when most people -- including most experts -- say "global warming", they're referring to the observed and predicted increase in the average temperature measured at the surface of the Earth. The observed trend, both the direct measurements and the inferences made about historical temperatures, is pretty solid science. But there's another way to think about global warming, and that is the heat content of the Earth. The Earth generates a little bit of heat itself, from its radioactive core, receives a boatload more from the sun, and then radiates most of it off into space. And we're also pretty confident that a little surplus is left over. That little surplus of heat goes to heat the oceans, melt the ice caps, and also towards the atmospheric heating that we commonly refer to as "global warming". Now, this underlying change in heat content is relatively simple. It's a lot of work to measure -- you need to keep track of how much ice there is, measure the temperature of the oceans at various places and times and depths, track atmospheric temperatures. It's also not guaranteed to be constant -- if the albedo of the Earth changes (like through there being more or less ice, or lots of dust going into the air) or the composition of the atmosphere dramatically changes, Earth will gain or lose heat at a different rate than it is now. But it's still relatively simple. Where it gets complex is how this change in the heat content of the Earth relates to climate. There, you've got a million variables. If the oceans heat faster or slower, the atmosphere will heat faster or slower. If it affects wind currents, you can get warmer or or colder air pushed into places it doesn't normally go. If it affects the ocean currents, the climate in some parts of the world could get dramatically colder, even as the heat content of the Earth continues creep up. If it somehow magically melted all the ice first, without changing the surface or ocean temperatures, you'd have no climate change at all for about a thousand years, but the oceans would rise dozens of feet over that same time. If the atmosphere heats first, the climate would get dramatically worse but the ocean levels would stay the same. So I think it's quite reasonable to be skeptical about any specific predictions of how the climate or the conditions on Earth will change as the Earth continues to warm -- that is complex. But I hope you aren't terribly skeptical that the Earth is warming, that its total heat content is going up -- that is much simply, much more definite. It may not be certain how this will affect the climate, but so far none of the options look good.
dalke 12y ago
Why is this something to bring up? I ask because a standard practice in climate warming denialism is to argue that scientists are undecided about the issue, or change their minds frequently, and point to the handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age. In this case, research after the intriguing hypothesis of Ewing and Donn shows that it's not what happened. For example, from Science (1964), http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707 : > Pollen analysis of radiocarbon-dated samples from the arctic coastal plain of Alaska shows that vegetation of 14,000 years ago reflected a climate colder than the present, and that there has been a progressive warming, culminating in the present cold arctic climate. The record indicates that the Arctic Ocean has been covered with ice since the time of the Wisconsin glacial maximum, suggesting that the essential condition of the Ewing and Donn hypothesis for the origin of ice ages, that the Arctic Ocean be ice-free up to 11,000 years ago, cannot be met. Ewing and Donn write (quoting from Harpers): > “The answer, we believe, is chat [sic] until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold. Remember, this is shortly after we realized that the continents could move. They based their conclusions on the magnetic record, but the magnetic pole also wanders and flips. The actual movement is nowhere near what's required for their hypothesis to be true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander for some background. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/a... for a paper which says that paleontological records show about 1 degree of shift per million years for the last 7 million years. From what I understand, global warming entered the popular awareness in the 1970s-1980s. This aricle from the 1950s shows awareness even then: > Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland; annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to. It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded by such a warming of climate.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  It's interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is it shows how the popular press gets science badly wrong, packaging it as a "just so" story that seems to a) explain everything and b) leave very few loose ends. Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified. We didn't know that people would be still burning coal in forty years time, much less such vast quantities, because nuclear was still a politically viable option despite various hysterical claims against it. And we had even less clue then as to how the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do today, and we have relatively little clue today. But a huge number of people think "the science is settled" with regard to climate change because the popular press tells them so. With regard to the existence of anthropogentic climate change that's reasonably correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense, and this article from the '50's suggests why that is so: because popular accounts just don't convey the messy uncertainty of the real science. They pull a coherent thread out and make it sound as if we understand far more than we actually do. This is not to say we shouldn't be building new nuclear capacity, and ignoring all the "green" groups who are protesting solar, wind, geothermal and biomass development (search for "environmentalists against $X" where $X is any industrial-scale green power and you'll see what I mean). We should be doing all those things, and we should be shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions. But we should remember that the science is a lot messier than it gets portrayed in Harpers and the like, and we shouldn't be so afraid of Denialists as to want to avoid acknowledging that.
larsiusprime 12y ago
Did anyone else happen to notice this article's byline is "Betty Friedan" ? Is that THE Betty Friedan?
- mkempe 12y ago
  Yes, I believe so. She was a freelance writer at the time, and she wrote articles for major magazines.
chrisau 12y ago
Incredible that this research from 60 years ago explains much of our current weather events. The Article ice shrinks, northern North America gets more snow. It also explains why both global warming and impending ice age are linked. This doesn't deny, of course, that mankind hasn't done his bit to accelerate the natural ebbs and flows of the global climate and the pace at which they are occurring.
- kr4 12y ago
  A related belief which is found in both Greek and Asian cultures that proovs cycle of ice and warm ages purports that world goes through cyclical but not linear progress. The ice age is typically considered an age of golden times. In the Timaeus, Plato talks of the mythical island of Atlantis, which was swallowed up by the sea in a “single day and night of misfortune” in c about 11000 years ago which matches with the time ice age is considered to have ended. Following article goes in length on this cyclical theory, most concretely defined in Hindu's yugas cycle and provides several geological, archaeological and historical evidence to back the research presented. http://bibhudev.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-kali-yuga-in-2025-unraveling.html http://bibhudev.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-kali-yuga-in-2025...
- krylon 12y ago
  I was thinking the exact same thing. :) If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple of years, it would not have been implausible. The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much warmer weather around the arctic circle is certainly fascinating.
  - dalke 12y ago
    The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to the current alignment. If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the Earth. Pollen studies carried out within 10 years of the publication of the hypothesis shows that the Arctic was colder during glaciation. See https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=p_CA7XOcE1&dq=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&hl=sv&pg=PA83#v=onepage&q=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671 and https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots=nrgyBsxcwD&dq=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&hl=sv&pg=PA230#v=onepage&q=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots... , which say the evidence was enough to make the hypothesis implausible. This research was done after the model was published. While it was viable in the 1950s, it no longer fits the evidence.
ddp 12y ago
I vaguely remember reading this article before. It's clear our planet is changing, I don't see how anyone can deny that. We can argue all day long about how much CO2 produced since the industrial revolution is affecting it, but the melt's happening either way. Even partially wrong, I think there were a lot of interesting points in that article. Thanks for posting it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/16/the-melting-of-antarctica-was-already-really-bad-it-just-got-worse/?wprss=rss_homepage http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/201...

51 points by mkempe 12y ago

This was a really interesting read. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any followup information about the underlying theory. In the grip of record snows in Boston, and an extra long winter here in NY its easy to imagine being on the cusp of another ice age, but at the same time the theory seems at odds with the idea of global warming. On the one hand we have global warming as a one way operation of sorts accelerated by mankind, on the other hand we have temporary warming followed by a super ice age, powered by the Arctic Ocean. I really want to know if this fascinating theory has been investigated further for confirmation or if it has been debunked in the 50+ years since this article was published.

nkoren 12y ago
The former: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jan/climate.htm http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jan/climate.ht...
- tbrownaw 12y ago
  I wouldn't call that confirmation, it looks like it suggests a completely different mechanism.
saalweachter 12y ago
The key thing to remember is 'global': while the East Coast of the US has had one of the colder, snowier winters in recent history, the West Coast has just come out of a hot, dry winter. Local weather is a terrible guide to global climate.
- chris_va 12y ago
  Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a brutal winter and leaving California dry. Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.
  - msandford 12y ago
    > Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about. Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be warranted when the system is so complex.
    - chris_va 12y ago
      Well, being skeptical of an entire field of study is different than being skeptical of the predicted outcome. One often sounds like the other, and it is 99.99% likely that something is happening, even if we don't do a good job understanding it. For example, regardless of "warming", we'll still have to deal with ocean acidification and all of the fallout from that.
      - kuni-toko-tachi 12y ago
        Something is happening, its called weather. And before weather was co-opted by political agents with an agenda to control people to enrich themselves, that's all it was.
    - saalweachter 12y ago
      Well, you have to be careful where you place your skepticism. Some science is complex, but some science is simple. So when most people -- including most experts -- say "global warming", they're referring to the observed and predicted increase in the average temperature measured at the surface of the Earth. The observed trend, both the direct measurements and the inferences made about historical temperatures, is pretty solid science. But there's another way to think about global warming, and that is the heat content of the Earth. The Earth generates a little bit of heat itself, from its radioactive core, receives a boatload more from the sun, and then radiates most of it off into space. And we're also pretty confident that a little surplus is left over. That little surplus of heat goes to heat the oceans, melt the ice caps, and also towards the atmospheric heating that we commonly refer to as "global warming". Now, this underlying change in heat content is relatively simple. It's a lot of work to measure -- you need to keep track of how much ice there is, measure the temperature of the oceans at various places and times and depths, track atmospheric temperatures. It's also not guaranteed to be constant -- if the albedo of the Earth changes (like through there being more or less ice, or lots of dust going into the air) or the composition of the atmosphere dramatically changes, Earth will gain or lose heat at a different rate than it is now. But it's still relatively simple. Where it gets complex is how this change in the heat content of the Earth relates to climate. There, you've got a million variables. If the oceans heat faster or slower, the atmosphere will heat faster or slower. If it affects wind currents, you can get warmer or or colder air pushed into places it doesn't normally go. If it affects the ocean currents, the climate in some parts of the world could get dramatically colder, even as the heat content of the Earth continues creep up. If it somehow magically melted all the ice first, without changing the surface or ocean temperatures, you'd have no climate change at all for about a thousand years, but the oceans would rise dozens of feet over that same time. If the atmosphere heats first, the climate would get dramatically worse but the ocean levels would stay the same. So I think it's quite reasonable to be skeptical about any specific predictions of how the climate or the conditions on Earth will change as the Earth continues to warm -- that is complex. But I hope you aren't terribly skeptical that the Earth is warming, that its total heat content is going up -- that is much simply, much more definite. It may not be certain how this will affect the climate, but so far none of the options look good.

dalke 12y ago

Why is this something to bring up? I ask because a standard practice in climate warming denialism is to argue that scientists are undecided about the issue, or change their minds frequently, and point to the handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age. In this case, research after the intriguing hypothesis of Ewing and Donn shows that it's not what happened. For example, from Science (1964), http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707 : > Pollen analysis of radiocarbon-dated samples from the arctic coastal plain of Alaska shows that vegetation of 14,000 years ago reflected a climate colder than the present, and that there has been a progressive warming, culminating in the present cold arctic climate. The record indicates that the Arctic Ocean has been covered with ice since the time of the Wisconsin glacial maximum, suggesting that the essential condition of the Ewing and Donn hypothesis for the origin of ice ages, that the Arctic Ocean be ice-free up to 11,000 years ago, cannot be met. Ewing and Donn write (quoting from Harpers): > “The answer, we believe, is chat [sic] until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold. Remember, this is shortly after we realized that the continents could move. They based their conclusions on the magnetic record, but the magnetic pole also wanders and flips. The actual movement is nowhere near what's required for their hypothesis to be true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander for some background. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/a... for a paper which says that paleontological records show about 1 degree of shift per million years for the last 7 million years. From what I understand, global warming entered the popular awareness in the 1970s-1980s. This aricle from the 1950s shows awareness even then: > Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland; annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to. It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded by such a warming of climate.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
It's interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is it shows how the popular press gets science badly wrong, packaging it as a "just so" story that seems to a) explain everything and b) leave very few loose ends. Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified. We didn't know that people would be still burning coal in forty years time, much less such vast quantities, because nuclear was still a politically viable option despite various hysterical claims against it. And we had even less clue then as to how the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do today, and we have relatively little clue today. But a huge number of people think "the science is settled" with regard to climate change because the popular press tells them so. With regard to the existence of anthropogentic climate change that's reasonably correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense, and this article from the '50's suggests why that is so: because popular accounts just don't convey the messy uncertainty of the real science. They pull a coherent thread out and make it sound as if we understand far more than we actually do. This is not to say we shouldn't be building new nuclear capacity, and ignoring all the "green" groups who are protesting solar, wind, geothermal and biomass development (search for "environmentalists against $X" where $X is any industrial-scale green power and you'll see what I mean). We should be doing all those things, and we should be shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions. But we should remember that the science is a lot messier than it gets portrayed in Harpers and the like, and we shouldn't be so afraid of Denialists as to want to avoid acknowledging that.

larsiusprime 12y ago

Did anyone else happen to notice this article's byline is "Betty Friedan" ? Is that THE Betty Friedan?

mkempe 12y ago
Yes, I believe so. She was a freelance writer at the time, and she wrote articles for major magazines.

chrisau 12y ago

Incredible that this research from 60 years ago explains much of our current weather events. The Article ice shrinks, northern North America gets more snow. It also explains why both global warming and impending ice age are linked. This doesn't deny, of course, that mankind hasn't done his bit to accelerate the natural ebbs and flows of the global climate and the pace at which they are occurring.

kr4 12y ago
A related belief which is found in both Greek and Asian cultures that proovs cycle of ice and warm ages purports that world goes through cyclical but not linear progress. The ice age is typically considered an age of golden times. In the Timaeus, Plato talks of the mythical island of Atlantis, which was swallowed up by the sea in a “single day and night of misfortune” in c about 11000 years ago which matches with the time ice age is considered to have ended. Following article goes in length on this cyclical theory, most concretely defined in Hindu's yugas cycle and provides several geological, archaeological and historical evidence to back the research presented. http://bibhudev.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-kali-yuga-in-2025-unraveling.html http://bibhudev.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-kali-yuga-in-2025...
krylon 12y ago
I was thinking the exact same thing. :) If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple of years, it would not have been implausible. The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much warmer weather around the arctic circle is certainly fascinating.
- dalke 12y ago
  The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to the current alignment. If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the Earth. Pollen studies carried out within 10 years of the publication of the hypothesis shows that the Arctic was colder during glaciation. See https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=p_CA7XOcE1&dq=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&hl=sv&pg=PA83#v=onepage&q=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671 and https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots=nrgyBsxcwD&dq=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&hl=sv&pg=PA230#v=onepage&q=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots... , which say the evidence was enough to make the hypothesis implausible. This research was done after the model was published. While it was viable in the 1950s, it no longer fits the evidence.

ddp 12y ago

I vaguely remember reading this article before. It's clear our planet is changing, I don't see how anyone can deny that. We can argue all day long about how much CO2 produced since the industrial revolution is affecting it, but the melt's happening either way. Even partially wrong, I think there were a lot of interesting points in that article. Thanks for posting it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/16/the-melting-of-antarctica-was-already-really-bad-it-just-got-worse/?wprss=rss_homepage http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/201...