Greenland glaciers present threat if Earth warms up, scientist says

[Karl Davies]

truffler1635 at my-deja.com wrote:

<snip>

> True, kind of. If the earth warms, there will be greater evaporation,
> and higher rainfalls worldwide, according to the reports I've seen from
> scientists at Oregon State University. The problem _then_ becomes one of
> a increasing loop effect: water vapor is another greenhouse gas.

So is methane.  Both are much more powerful GHGs than CO2, and both are
rising very fast.

> You are right: eventually global cooling occurs. But it may take
> millennia to do so.

Or it could take days.  See http://www.globalsuperstorm.com for a pop
science book that describes a different scenario for how global cooling
takes place.  Or use Google to search for "thermohaline circulation" and
"Atlantic circulation."

> Right now, now one knows for sure. The last such
> occurrence occured several thousand years ago, according to ice from the
> Greenland ice cap.

The last drastic cooling was around 8,000 years ago, but it only lasted a
couple hundred years.  It didn't initiate another glacial phase.  It
apparently started with a global superstorm sometime after temperatures had
gone over the critical +2C level.  See
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/ for the
record of this event and other similar ones over the past 420,000 years.
We're somewhere around +1C now.

KD