Re: EVOLUTION: Stress needed for diversity?

From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 22:55:45 MST


Don Klemencic wrote:
>
> Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> < The Greenland ice cap may collapse, and the arctic ice cap will most
> likely vanish in a few decades. If the Greenland ice cap collapses, it will
> result in sea level rises of 3-9 meters at most.>
>
> This fragment from Mike's post brings something to mind. Amara Graps
> recently posted a reference to William Calvin's website at
> http://WilliamCalvin.com/ That has a link to his Atlantic Monthly article
> "The Great Climate Flip-flop" which says that the climate system has the
> potential for sudden (over a decade) temperature drops, which could give
> Europe a Siberian climate. The unstable mechanism is the Gulf Stream current
> which acts as a conveyor belt carrying warm water to northern Europe and
> giving them much warmer weather than they would otherwise have. It has
> flipped to other modes in the past and apparently could do so again. Melting
> the Greenland ice cap sounds to me like a pretty substantial nudge.

There's been some really good research that indicates that the current
situation in europe weather wise, along with el nino and the general
temperate climate warming is at least partly the result of the rise of
the Himalayan range, however the primary influence still seems to be the
Malenkovich orbit cycles, which seems to predice the end of the "Little
Ice Age"
and the current warming trend rather well, according to Drew. He says
that the results he and others have gotten back from cores of ancient
 glacial ice in Antarctica (8-22 million years old) as well as the more
recent glacial
ice in Greenland and the coastal areas of Antarctica track very well
with
the Malenkovich predictions of climate change.

Mike Lorrey



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