Yiwu, way back in 1987, I helped our 11 year old son with a school project. I suggested he do one on climate flips into ice age. I'd been thinking about how climate change would work and decided the global warming doomsters had it wrong.
Much more likely was a flip into an ice-age and it wasn't much at all to do with us producing CO2 from fossil fuels. It was to do with natural cycles of desert forming and snow and ice cover and cloud cover and plant regeneration.
As many of us know, a white line on a road is cool compared with the asphalt. That's because it reflects the sunlight right back out into space. The same thing happens with cloud and ice. Look down from a 747 at 10 km and the dark oceans and dark green of plants is absorbing the sunlight. The bright clouds, and snow and ice over the ocean reflects the light.
So, the process is, starting from today, continued desert growth as the plants on the edges finally give up, continued retreat of the snowlines. That process has been going for 10,000 years since the last ice-age ended.
The deserts reflect heat - they are brighter than plants. When the deserts have extended enough and the plants are in the higher latitudes, there isn't enough sunlight being absorbed to keep the place warm. With coolness, clouds form, increasing reflection. With coolness, the snow comes and lingers longer on the ground. The snowline increases.
As the clouds form and snow cover and ocean ice cover increases, the world is looking very light-coloured from the sun's point of view, with reflectivity greatly increased. So more clouds form, more ice forms in the oceans and more snow covers more land [meaning where plants were growing and absorbing light].
So by the end of the first new ice age winter, there will already be extended snow cover. The cooling process will be underway, unstoppably. Following a cooler summer, snow will start sooner, last longer and within 2 or 3 years, the world will be waist deep in snow across northern latitudes [there isn't much land in high latitudes in the southern hemisphere].
The world will flip straight into an ice age. Deserts won't flip straight back to green. Once the ice age is entrenched, there's a vast reflective ice cap so Earth stays cold, summer and winter. Only when plants regain ascendancy and make the deserts green does warming start again. But that's a long, arduous process to force the ice back. The stuff will be 5 kilometres thick! It's still about 4 km thick over Greenland after the last onslaught.
Forcing the ice back takes about 100,000 years. But we could speed that up by coating it with soot from power stations. That, or other dark material, would absorb heat and melt the ice.
China is in the front line of ice age effects.
Mqurice |
