I am sure many of you have seen or
at least heard of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". For
those of you who haven't, here is a short summary...
A paleoclimatologist
Jack proposes a theory that anthropogenic global warming has caused a major
melting of polar ice, which in turn disrupts the North
Atlantic current and will lead to a major fall in temperatures
over the next few hundred or thousand years. Jack turns out to be slightly
wrong with his predictions, a new ice age hits the Earth within a week and
this is how our planet ends up looking:
There is also a love story and a (relatively) happy
end, but the apocalyptic vision of the Earth's abrupt climate change is
what I want to draw your attention to.
The response of the scientific community to the film
can be summed up in the words of Andrew Weaver from the University of
Victoria: "I'm not losing any sleep over a new ice age, because it's impossible"... but surely the film director must have got the
idea of such a sudden cooling event from somewhere?
The history of our planet has plenty of examples of
rapid climate fluctuations, most of which fit into a roughly 1500 year cyclical
pattern. This pattern is known as Bond cycles when referring to Holocene, or
Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles in the context of the last glacial. Not being as
extreme, perhaps, as shown in the movie, some of these events can still boast
an 8 degrees increase in temperature over just 40 years!
In this blog I am going to look at the science behind
Holocene abrupt climate change events, explore and critically assess various
hypotheses for their occurrence, see what impact they had on human populations
so far and, finally, try and predict how likely are we to experience such a
rapid climate change event in the future. I really hope you will enjoy this
blog and will greatly appreciate any feedback you may have for me!
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