CLIMATE COLLAPSE

The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare

The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.
By David Stipp


Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

More at

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,582584,00.html

Abrupt Climate Change

R. B. Alley,¹ J. Marotzke,² W. D. Nordhaus,³ J. T. Overpeck,⁴ D. M. Peteet,⁵ R. A. Pielke Jr.,⁶ R. T. Pierrehumbert,⁷ P. B. Rhines,^8,9 T. F. Stocker,¹⁰ L. D. Talley,¹¹ J. M. Wallace⁸

Large, abrupt, and widespread climate changes with major impacts have occurred repeatedly in the past, when the Earth system was forced across thresholds. Although abrupt climate changes can occur for many reasons, it is conceivable that human forcing of climate change is increasing the probability of large, abrupt events. Were such an event to recur, the economic and ecological impacts could be large and potentially serious. Unpredictability exhibited near climate thresholds in simple models shows that some uncertainty will always be associated with projections. In light of these uncertainties, policy-makers should consider expanding research into abrupt climate change, improving monitoring systems, and taking actions designed to enhance the adaptability and resilience of ecosystems and economies.

from:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5615/2005
may require a subscription

1 Department of Geosciences and EMS Environment Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
2 Southampton Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK.
3 Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
4 Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
5 Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA, and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY 10025, USA.
6 Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
7 Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
8 Department of Atmospheric Sciences and
9 Department of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
10 Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
11 The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.