The Coming Ice Age (1958)

I assume the author is the Betty Friedan. This would be about 5 years before she wrote The Feminine Mystique, easily one of the most influential books in modern history.

It's kind of fascinating to see her here at 37, working in obscurity, knocking out fairly pedestrian writing assignments, when in just a few years she's going to change the world.

The author of this story seems to have only talked to two scientists, Ewing and Donn. Others at the time were measuring and modelling CO2 absorption rates and emissions:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...

William Donn doesn't appear to have many online tributes, but Maurice Ewing seems to have some interesting work as a geophysicist:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ewing

This article is from 1958, but we were taught in school as late as the 1980's that the Earth is cooling, and no longer a black box.

I vaguely remember in the last few years someone linking to a Time magazine cover published in the 80's about global cooling.

This has been one of those conversations I've followed for a while. One of the most provocative things about climate change was the notion that Global Warming could accelerate an ice age.

In popular literature, one of the more under appreciated factors in various models is the moisture carrying capacity of the atmosphere. Basically as the mean atmospheric temperature rises, the more moisture it can carry. This leads to the formation of clouds as different temperature air masses meet, and precipitation when the temperature drops below the dew point.

When you run different climate models, if the clouds form in the stratosphere the overall temperature goes up (more CO2 below the clouds to reflect IR back to the ground) if the clouds form in the troposphere the temperature goes down (clouds create a higher albedo and more energy is reflected into space rather than absorbed).

One of the papers discussing inter-glacial periods expressed essentially the same view as the Harper's article which was that kicking off an ice age would require a tremendous amount of material in the troposphere to reflect sunlight, and a bunch of water to condense into snow to boost the albedo of the surface to prevent it from absorbing solar energy and re-radiating it as heat.

In the 80's, when people looked at the possible after effects of a nuclear exchange between the US and the then USSR, it was suggested that the level of soot and ash thrown into the air would cool the planet to a point to enshroud it into a "nuclear winter." Later papers have looked not at nuclear exchanges but simply volcanic activity or firestorms of one form or another.

The duration of these effects is tied to both the amount of sunlight obstructed and reflected and the resulting weather effects.

Using those models it seems plausible that prior to the presence of humans, if the global temperature rose, it would dry out vast tracks of forests and grasslands in the mid-lattitudes, those tracks would be set on fire by lightning creating a tremendous soot load on the atmosphere. Once the soot layer forms, the temperature falls, and the atmosphere drops its moisture as precipitation. If the temperature is low enough it becomes snow, and gets compacted into ice. The ice become glaciers and it takes a while for the cycle to reset.

For me, it is an interesting aspect of climate dynamics on the water cycle as a feedback loop sort of problem. I have yet to see any paper that suggests the 'venus mode' (runaway greenhouse effect leading to boiling the oceans) is any more or less likely than the 'snowball mode', other than we have a geologic record of the planet going snowball mode on its own several times over the last million years.

In September, 1958 science was in the midst of the groundbreaking 18-month 'International Geophysical Year'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Geophysical_Year

It's what stimulated ice-core sampling. Before it, 60 years ago, science knew much, much less about climate, let alone climate history. (Plate tectonics was just coming into vogue!) IGY stimulated evidenciary techniques that forced a drastic revision of what we 'knew' before it.

The argument advanced here is that, counter-intuitively, warming climate triggers an ice age, because open Arctic waters feed the glaciers through increased snowfall. So it was climate cooling and the freezing of the Arctic that ended the Ice Age.

“The answer, we believe, is chat 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."

Can anyone explain this bit to me? Even if the magnetic pole was in the middle of the pacific, wouldn't snow and ice still accumulate at the geographic poles, because that's where the sun is weakest/absent for months?

This is an interesting article and a lot of what was talked about is correct, this wasn't pushing any agenda, it's just the conclusion isn't quite accurate. The warming of the arctic does indeed push colder temperatures south, and there's an area int he north Atlantic that has seen drops in average temperature in recent years. This process may in fact have been part of how ice ages started in the past.

The incorrect conclusion that we are headed for an ice age that they came to was likely based on a lack of the information we have now. Namely the fact that the increase in temperature isn't just part of the regular cycle of heating and cooling, we're at the top of a heating trend, but the increase of greenhouse gasses is driving temperatures up more than a process like this will cool it down. There'll have been and likely will continue to be some colder winters in the northern hemisphere for a bit as the process starts to kick in, but the overall temperature trend is still getting warmer and isn't going to stop for something like this.

Here's an interesting map to see average temperature change in different regions. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/12DA7/production...

The Wikipedia article about the topic has some other interesting sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circu...

Eventually it will happen.

The Harpers story here is that people are the reason why the climate is changing, with the solution being authoritarian control over the people. This is simply a game of using asymmetric knowledge to tell a story to justify a power structure that benefits a select few.

In reality, the Universe is Electric. The Sun goes through cycles. The Solar System travels through the Galaxy, creating cycles. The Galaxy travels through the Universe, creating cycles.

The cyclical variance of inputs of thermal, solar wind, xrays, cosmic radiation, magnetic fields has & will continue to drive the climate & geological change on Earth & the other planets in the solar system. There are also the unknown unknowns as well.