Sudden Climate Change

Weather Patterns Can Permanently Shift Within A Year ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE Records preserved in a Greenland ice core reveal that weather patterns can shift permanently from one year to the next. Excerpt ~ "The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most surprising outcomes of the study of earth history,..." ~ End Excerpt The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years.  Mammoth Mystery: Expert Q&A These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries. Various mechanisms, involving changes in ocean circulation, changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or haze particles, and changes in snow and ice cover, have been invoked to explain these sudden regional and global transitions. We do not know whether such changes could occur in the near future as a result of human effects on climate. Phenomena such as the Younger Dryas and Heinrich events might only occur in a 'glacial' world with much larger ice sheets and more extensive sea ice cover. However, a major sudden cold event did probably occur under global climate conditions similar to those of the present, during the Eemian interglacial, around 122,000 years ago. Less intensive, but significant rapid climate changes also occurred during the present (Holocene) interglacial, with cold and dry phases occurring on a 1500-year cycle, and with climate transitions on a decade-to-century timescale. In the past few centuries, smaller transitions (such as the ending of the Little Ice Age at about 1650 AD) probably occurred over only a few decades at most.  All the evidence indicates that most long-term climate change occurs in sudden jumps rather than incremental changes.                                                          Megabeasts' Sudden Death http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html (1.) MS 6335, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA (2.) Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK (3.) Center for the Study of Global Change, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, PO Box 208109, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8109, USA and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University, 265 Church Street, Middletown CT 06459-0139, USA. NOVA Season 4, Ep. 6 "Last Exctinction: Megabeasts' Sudden Death" (No customer reviews yet. Be the first) A provocative new theory about what killed off America's mammoths at the end of the last Ice Age. Runtime: 53 minutes   Play Free Preview:  Last Exctinction: Megabeasts' Sudden Death Original air date: February 28, 2009 Network: PBS Fibre System Plus (30 packets/box) http://shaperite.my4life.com/shopping/productdetail.aspx?mode=0&iid=224&cid=198 • Contains 27 herbal extracts to provide thorough, comfortable intestinal cleansing and purification • Provides the perfect gastrointestinal cleanse to start any nutritional regimen