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

http://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/

by mkempe • 11 years ago

51 25 11 years ago

NathanKP• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

The former: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jan/climate.ht...

tbrownaw• 11 years ago

I wouldn't call that confirmation, it looks like it suggests a completely different mechanism.

saalweachter2• 11 years 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_va2• 11 years 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.

dalke5• 11 years 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 :

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 for some background. See 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• 11 years 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.

dalke5• 11 years ago

There are any number of articles which give examples of how the popular press got it wrong on a scientific topic. If your conjecture is correct, then the submitter did a grave disservice by dropping a link to a 1950s article without any context. How do you conclude it wasn't an example of climate change denialism, meant to muddy the waters and instill confusion, or a case of simple trolling?

"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"

Concern by whom? Among the scientific papers of the 1960s and 1970s, the majority view was for global warming. Quoting from http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf , "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; "The survey [of papers from 1965 through 1979] identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations." This is why I mentioned there were only a 'handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age'. Thus, that stance in the scientific literature was uncommon.

Among some of the popular press, there certainly were articles by Newsweek and Time on the possibility of a new ice age. (Or in SF, Larry Niven wrote "Fallen Angels" (1991) on the premise that anthropogenic warming was actually preventing an ice age from coming.) Then again, some of the recent popular press also had a lot of articles about the 2012 phenomenon, based on reaching the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - "The Crazy Years" of Heinlein. On the gripping hand, science popularizers like Issac Asimov understood the global warming topic correctly back in the 1970s.

Regarding 'the messy uncertainty of the real science', what you've said applies to everything the popular press reports. When the NY reports on the situation in Ukraine, they leave out a lot of the messy details. The same when Sports Illustrated reports on a doping scandal, or the WSJ about a recent merger, or the latest weather prediction in the local paper. It's odd that you think people treat science reporting as the final, conclusive word on a topic. I don't agree.

I believe the rest of your comment pivots into your views on nuclear power. This is not related to the Harpers piece or the presumed reasons for why this link was posted on HN, and I decline to follow up on it.

brc• 11 years ago

Careful, you'll fall foul of fashionable thought and the marauding thoughtcrime enforcers. Questioning that perhaps modelled climate sensitivity to co2 has been well overstated will get you branded a heretic, a denier and earns bucket full of down votes. [1]. Even obliquely hinting that past history of scientific theorems have proven themselves to be wrong despite widespread support is dangerous territory, lest one question the 'consensus' of our times.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

larsiusprime• 11 years ago

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

mkempe2• 11 years ago

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

chrisau• 11 years 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• 11 years 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...

krylon2• 11 years 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.

dalke5• 11 years 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=... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671 and 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• 11 years 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/201...

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

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