Yes. But who is to Blame?
Yes. But who is to Blame? | |
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| In 1832, when a fierce Atlantic storm breached the harbour wall at Lynmouth, the whole village was swept away with great loss of life. The subsequent public enquiry found that the disaster resulted from an act of God and the failure of the Harbour Commissioners to maintain the harbour wall in an adequate state of repair. | |
Previous generations, being more narrowly religious, would have absolved themselves of all responsibility and regarded such calamities as natural; they were simply to be accepted with stoicism as "the will of God".
There are many parallels with the current differences of opinion on who is to blame for global warming, although in this modern world no public official is ever likely to be found guilty of incompetence or dereliction of duty; in passing recent legislation even our New Labour Cabinet has thought it necessary to preserve Crown immunity against charges of malfeasance.
Let us consider some of the similarities in responsibilities:
Since global warming is a technical problem potentially affecting the survival of every vulnerable individual in much the same way as the harbour wall at Lynmouth, we would hope to make any long-lasting decisions on a rational basis. The issue will not go away and if we try to forget about it, a decision by default is still a decision.
Deciding what should be done tends to be a highly contentious matter, even among those best technically qualified to offer an opinion, and inevitably, what can be afforded will be an over-riding concern in any decision made by politicians. Even so, the technical points on which good men disagree need to be aired, especially when they differ over the accuracy of the relevant facts.
Some of the material presented here is not entirely in line with the predominant view of the experts. All simulations related to global warming must be, by their very nature, highly simplified versions of what is clearly a very complex problem. They may, in fact, lack unknown vital elements. A sensible approach is to study what has happened in the past. History is a great teacher.
It should come as no surprise to find that over many thousands of years global warming has happened several times before, and in fact just as often and equally important, so has global cooling.
It is now widely accepted that the temperature of the Earth's surface is rising steadily; also there is a willingness to believe that this increase is caused by the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the burning of "fossil fuels".
But while the slowly rising temperature is not in doubt since it is based on measurement, from the point of view of an experimental physicist, the extra heating caused by the modest increase in carbon dioxide is surely second-order and quite inadequate to explain what is clearly a first-order effect.
How is it possible to miss a first-order effect, which because of it's magnitude ought to be much more visible? Simply by confining one's attention to incremental changes over too brief a time scale; the appropriate basis for an enquiry is not "A Detailed Analysis of Our Recent Measurements", but rather what we can learn from the full time-span of the world's documented history, scaled in millennia.
I think we can accept that at the time of the collapse of the last Ice Age the burning of wood fires by early man made a negligible change to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Whatever the primary driving force underlying the disappearance of this vast ice sheet - global warming on a colossal scale - early man was merely a spectator.
Ice-core samples from Greenland indicate that melting of the ice-cap has happened before on several occasions in the last 500,000 years.
The amount of energy required when such a major transition occurs is a measure of the level of physical change and we must expect that small discontinuities will be more frequent than large ones.
Of the well-documented earthquakes that occur at 60-100 year intervals along the San Andreas Fault in California, the last "big one", 8.2 on the Richter scale, occurred at San Francisco in 1906, although there was a better-instrumented earthquake, magnitude 7.1 centred on Loma Prieta, 60 miles south of San Francisco, in 1990. This last tremor was felt only marginally at Sacramento, the State Capital, at a distance of 110 miles.
While the 1906 quake is thought by many who live near the San Andreas Fault to be close to the upper limit of what might occur, there have been events in the past that are very much bigger.
On December 16th 1811, an earthquake shook the 400 inhabitants of New Madrid, Missouri, which was powerful enough to ring the church bells in Boston on the east coast 1,200 miles away. The crew of the steam boat "New Orleans" on her maiden voyage, found that the island they were moored against had disappeared into the Mississippi River. It was the first of three powerful (mag.8) earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone that winter.
As a general rule, second-order effects produce slow changes over long periods c.100 years whereas first-order events arise when an unstable system is subjected to low-level "noise" and falls over. Although the onset may be immediately followed by strong oscillations ("after shocks"), the instability usually settles down quickly, and leads to a relatively long-term stable state. The time taken for the initial collapse is often very brief and may take less than a year.
If we think of these natural catastrophes as plotted on a logarithmic scale with the total energy released on the y-axis, and gestation period (interval in years) on the x-axis, then we have only two points, New Madrid and the end of the last Ice Age, which may be regarded as a lower bound and an upper bound for data relevant in estimating the gestation period for global warming.
Energy releases roughly equivalent to the New Madrid earthquake probably occur on the Earth around once every 200 years, whereas the melting of ice-caps occurs perhaps every 100,000 years.
Although the energy involved in current global warming may be several hundred times that released in the earthquake, even on a logarithmic scale the energy needed to melt the ice and then raise the temperature at the North Pole to tropical levels simply dwarfs the minor climate changes we have seen so far. The melting of the ice-cap affects a large area whereas an earthquake is essentially confined to a point.
My estimate for the total time for the current cycle of global warming and cooling is of the order of about 1,000 years.
But notice what we have here - this is a prediction that is capable of experimental test. What this estimate states is that global warming is a recurrent process and as a consequence can be evaluated against recorded history; on the other hand, the fossil fuel explanation cannot be tested and predicts nothing.
In England we have roughly 1,300 years of reliable documentation beginning with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle(1).
Comparing the estimate of a periodicity of 1,000 years with 1,300 years of recorded history, it seems probable that some substantial amount of a cycle would be encompassed by the written records.
The most specific data are to be found in the Domesday Book(2), prepared at the command of William, Duke of Normandy, after his defeat of Harold at Hastings in 1066. It listed in detail the worth of his various "fiefs"
A central personality in the preparation of the Domesday Book was almost certainly the larger-than-life Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother of William, who was made Earl of Kent after the battle in 1066 and Regent in William's absence(3).
Odo had "offered 100 ships for the invasion and taken an active part in the battle, swinging a huge mace in place of a spear and a sword since the shedding of blood was forbidden to an ecclesiastic."
| He was "given overmuch to worldly ambition, the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life" so it seems likely that wine for Odo's table came initially from the Archbishop's vineyard at Canterbury. |  |
At this time methods for the preservation of food from bacterial decay were limited and as a consequence, most meat dishes were very highly spiced; the table wines had to be robust, with high alcohol content, and at the press the grapes would need to be very ripe, most likely bearing the "noble mould" Botrytis cinerea.
The presence of Botrytis cinerea. was reported in Kent for the first time ever in the autumn of year 2001. Its presence on grapes occurs only with prolonged, extreme heat and can be regarded as a definitive marker for the existence of global warming. The alcohol content of high-grade wine made from red grapes is an excellent indicator of the strength of the sun multiplied by the time required to produce the high sugar content essential for the production of superior wines.
In France this results in some "good" years and many that are not so good. Too many poor years when the wine is unsold and prices are low leads to business failure - but this takes perhaps five to ten years.
We have here a very useful index which smooths out year-to-year "noise" and can be taken as a yardstick for global warming; the grape variety "Cabernet Sauvignon" is widely grown throughout the world and "is the principal vine used in the production of great Clarets."(4) Recently good California Cabernet Sauvignon wines have reached 13.5 - 14 per cent alcohol content, the higher the better, the number always being shown on the bottle; Ridge Vineyards offers wine of world-class.
A very rich, sweet white wine called Sauternes is produced in five parishes on the left bank of the Garonne River south-east of Graves and for it's production the presence of the noble mould is essential - the most famous classified vineyard in the region is Chateau Yquem.
It is commonly said by scientists that progress is made by measuring the next decimal place; however, for the layman to have an intuitive feel for further developments in global warming, the level of production of high-grade table wine is surely a very understandable yardstick.
From the surprising presence of green leaves on the trees in Lincoln, England into late November 2001, it seems probable that in England a major switch in the climate happened about a year earlier near the Winter Solstice, December 2000.
While the coincidence in timing suggests that the underlying processes may be to some degree phase-locked to the annual orbit of the Earth around the Sun, frequency division by 1,000 : 1, is likely to be erratic and unstable and vary by several percent. Engineers call this effect "jitter".
In the previous section it has been conjectured that global warming is a recurrent process with a period in the neighbourhood of 1,000 years and that the closing out of a cycle is very brief and catastrophic.
By implication, seen in the short-term, long-term drifts will be imperceptible and thus may be masked by powerful transient disturbances; however, when averaged across the approximately 1,000-year cycle, the short-term events contain only relatively modest amounts of energy.
Two serious disturbing processes are volcanic eruptions (5) and sunspot activity (6) both of which can create several decades of global cooling.
Volcanic eruptions occur frequently, e.g. the recent explosions of Mount St. Helens in California and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines which each ejected several cubic miles of fine dust into the upper atmosphere, but these are minor events compared with the explosion of Mount Krakatoa in Sunda Strait off Java in 1883.
The most spectacular cooling episode created by the lack of sunspot activity lasted from 1650 to 1680 when the River Thames was frozen over every year at London Bridge and carriages were driven from one side of the river to the other across the ice.
One basic question has so far not been raised - in electronic terms, whether the nature of the waveform exhibited by the weather cycle is a one-transition cycle or a two-transition cycle - in electronic terms, is it a saw-tooth or a square-wave? For the uninitiated, an analogy for a repeating single transition process is a hen laying eggs and for the second of a light switch where a full cycle requires two transitions.
A valuable pointer for deciding whether the climate changes taking place 1,000 years ago were single or double can be found in the folk-lore relating to the epic voyages of the Northmen and their subsequent colonisation of the coast of Greenland.
The great Viking expansion began about 800 A.D., but at first it was directed entirely towards the south, along the western coast of Europe and into the Mediterranean Sea. Rollo took over Normandy in 911.
The invaders exacted tribute ("geld") which could take the form of agricultural produce and so had time to concentrate on increasing the size and sea-worthiness of their long-ships.
Experience was gained in navigating the open ocean, first to warm, volcanic Iceland about 920 and then to Greenland. Folklore says they continued along the north American coastline as far south as Nova Scotia and this has recently been confirmed by excavations in Canada. Farming villages on the coast of Greenland were established during the 10th century, churches were built and the settlements flourished into the 14th century.
Then they suddenly died out. The climate had reverted back to penetrating cold, the blizzards re-appeared and the crops failed. The lucky settlers were the ones ones taken off never to return, while those left behind died miserably of cold and starvation.
The value of a theory lies not so much in the way it fits the basic facts as in the accuracy of significant, rather far-out extrapolations. At this stage we have the following premises to build on:
We are now in a position to do a little comparative English history in relation to events in the county of Kent. The switch to a warmer climate that began around 930 A.D. would have taken a firm hold by 1,000 A.D. so that when William, Duke of Normandy, landed on Pevensey Beach in 1066 A.D. he was about to take over a prosperous agricultural province.
Let us assume that a similar climate switch happened one clock cycle earlier at 140 B.C. and that by 90 B.C. in Kent the warmer regime was well established. There was considerable trade across the English Channel and from ornaments found in burial chambers, tribal queens were even adorned with amber and gold jewelry that came from China.
The "war-like ancient Britons" living on the coast of Kent were not exactly the savages seen in some of the history books, but mostly small-scale farmers and traders; they were simply hard-working peasants used to dealing with potential slavers and robbers who arrived on the sea-shore without warning. The raiding parties were mostly of about 50 men in three long-boats, with enough physical strength to overcome the inhabitants of any of the small settlements dotted along the coast.
Naturally the villagers were quite unprepared for the massive Roman invasion fleet which arrived off their coast in 55 B.C. We have Julius Caesar's personal account of his direct frontal attack and it is given in great detail. Caesar had already taken control of Gaul (present day France} and has left seven books of notes (De Bello Gallico)(7) covering his various campaigns; Book V deals with his invasion of Cantium (Kent).
The building of new boats for the invasion is described at the end of Book IV and the size of this addition to his armada is given in Book V - 28 longships for use by the landing parties and 600 ships to be rowed to carry supplies and troops. For the landing he assembled a total of 800 ships, five legions of foot soldiers and an equal number of cavalry.
He says of Cantium that "the people are by far the most civilised and do not differ much from the Gallic custom"; from Caesar's account it seems probable that by 55 B.C. the farmers of Kent were prosperous, while the environment was reasonably pleasant.
But although Caesar had relatively mild conditions for his landings in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C. much as William of Normandy found one whole clock cycle later, in the end the extreme tidal sweep across the open beaches, the sea fogs and the generally erratic weather defeated him.
Can the changes in climate be traced back even further than Caesar's assault on Cantium? If the conjecture that a clock-cycle has a duration of 1,070 years is valid, similar global transitions to significantly milder conditions would be expected at 1,210 B.C., 2,280 B.C., 3,350 B.C...
On Orkney there are many stone monuments showing that the islands had a large population around 1,000 B.C. and at Skara Brae there was a settlement of well-built stone houses. This shows that at that time the climate was congenial.
The Downs in the south of England had already been stripped of their trees by 3,000 B.C. and at that time carried a population density that was not equalled until the reign of Elizabeth I - the evidence is provided by contemporary fire ash and carbon dating.
The Stone-Age and Bronze-Age settlements failed to survive the subsequent switch to much colder conditions and the inevitable starvation that followed thereafter.
As a rising teenager I was inclined to scepticism and had serious doubts about Moses leading the Israelites into the Promised Land - a land flowing with milk and honey, at once enormously fertile and at the same time unpopulated. Fertile land was surely a prize to be fought over and to be defended to the limit, and the notion that it could be taken over just by walking in was beyond belief; however, subsequent evidence in the Bible seemed to be entirely in accord with the statement that when Moses arrived the land was empty. There had to be a rational explanation, but I could not see it.
But now I can. The environment for hundreds of years had been barren desert - no grass, a few scrawny shrubs, incapable of supporting goats much less sheep and with no resident population. Suddenly the climate switched and soon there was lush vegetation everywhere. Moses had been wandering around in the barren waste for 40 years and so was the first to come across its sudden transformation to fertility. The Biblical account now becomes fairly credible.
However, the devil is in the detail and there would seem to be a snag. In evaluating climate changes in Kent, the apparent shift appeared to be equivalent to a displacement of around 8 degrees in latitude to the south. A southerly displacement of this amount from Canaan (Israel) would transfer Moses even further into the desert. On the other hand, if the direction of the switch were reversed, i.e. one half-cycle later, he would have the climate of Trebizond, a legendary city on the great trade route to the East. That would make sense.
More can be learned from the variations in the climate of Greenland. The rapid change in the 14th century was matched by a similar sudden transition in England. Hyams says,(8)"Thereafter, through the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in Domesday Book, and in accounts and records of ecclesiastical houses, it is clear that numerous vineyards were cultivated both for domestic wine and for profit."
"We do not deny that England was a vineyard country between A.D.300 and c.1350. But the change of climate about that time ruined English viticulture, and the climate has remained unsuitable ever since."
Thus reasonably convincing evidence exists that the switch to a much warmer climate happened around A.D. 930 but suddenly reverted back to the previous colder regime c.1340.
A cycle is thus a two-transition process analagous to a square-wave in electronics with a mark/space ratio perhaps marginally different from one-to-one.
Television engineers familiar with the transient response of bandwidth-limited amplifiers will appreciate that by analogy it is possible to predict the nature of the waveform ahead of and subsequent to the rising edge of the climate transition.
In both cases there will be a characteristic oscillation - first an increasing oscillatory undershoot lasting for two or three high-frequency cycles and after the rising edge an overshoot of magnitude greater than the undershoot followed by a steadily diminishing oscillation lasting for two or three cycles.
This analogy suggests that ahead of the climate transition we might expect perhaps ten years of highly unstable and increasingly violent weather peaking two or three years following the transition and slowly diminishing over the next fifteen years thereafter.
In recent years we have seen terrifying deluges in Honduras, Italy, northern India and central Europe as well as seering droughts in Australia and Africa, but whether these can be ascribed to a persistant climate change rather than improved reporting technology is not entirely proven.
This investigation takes at face value that global warming is just that - global warming. So far our interest has been directed primarily to events on the eastern coast of the Atlantic Ocean and thus is not exactly global. We will next consider effects that have been observed along the eastern coast of the Pacific.
Instead of taking the annual yield of first quality red wine as the measure of long term changes in climate, we will use instead the strength of the annual salmon migration that begins at Monterey in California and ends under the ice-cap north of Alaska. The controlling influence that drives the salmon northwards is the seasonal cold-water ocean current known as "El Niņo".
El Niņo is the name that was given in the historic past by the Peruvian fishermen to the sudden surge of melting-ice water which wells up annually from the Antarctic. However, its strength has always been very variable, with little correlation year to year. In good years it provides an abundance of small fish as forage for the local predators so that a powerful El Niņo anticipates a bumper season ahead.
This spectacular up-surge has always arrived off Peru very close to Christmas Day and was regarded by the fishermen as having religious significance. It was their reward for constancy in the Faith. Together with their families they attended early Mass at the Mission and on returning home celebrated the "feast" of Christmas. The name "El Niņo" equates to "the new born" or "the Christ child".
Lately the term "El Niņo" has been used as a generic description for the entire sequence of surface water motion over the totality of the Pacific Ocean. It begins with the piling up of warm water in the western Pacific under the influence of very steady and strong "trade winds" which create a 1/2 m. difference in level between Indonesia and Ecuador (9). Since the water is full of nutrients it becomes opaque from the growth of microscopic life and as a consequence most of the Sun's radiant energy is absorbed close to the surface.
Water expands on heating so the lighter hot water does not sink and the structure becomes stratified. The trade winds gradually diminish and the hot water piled up in the vicinity of Indonesia moves eastwards under the influence of gravity, but the stratification is maintained.
The tip of Peru lies just 400 miles north of the Tropic of Capricorn where the sun shines directly overhead at noon on the solstice, December 21st.
The hot surface current full of nutrients flows from the Solomon Islands across the Pacific along the Tropic and is then diverted northwards towards Central America and California. At the same time the cold water from Antarctica forms a compact jet moving northwards at a depth of 200-300 ft. immediately below the warm surface water.
Each environment retains its own species of fish so that although the surface water contains its vast shoals of anchovies, the migrant salmon that come out of the deep-water trench at Monterey can only be caught in the cold water below.
The fishermen of San Mateo County working out of Pillar Point Harbor, always specialized since their only really profitable catch has been the migrant salmon that traditionally could be caught about 10-20 miles off-shore for about three weeks in March.
That was in the 1970s. Now no longer, the west coast salmon fishery is virtually dead and is only a memory.
I lived in California within a half-mile of the beach from 1961 to 1994. El Niņo was always unpredictable with no correlation from one year to the next, but overall from 1961 to 1984 conditions averaged out - my yardstick was the number of boats to be seen in Pillar Point Harbor on March 15th. As the peak of the salmon run moved steadily northwards, some of the local boats worked briefly out of Sausalito, but their season rarely lasted more than an extra two weeks. After 1984 the armada of small boats at Princeton on March 15th began to dwindle and in 1991 their numbers were approaching single figures.
When I asked a rather dejected fisherman repairing a winch where the salmon had gone, he said "they are in Alaska, under the ice". Salmon need ice-cold water to spawn successfully and only make their mad dash upstream from the estuaries when there is a powerful freshet of melt water; since the mature salmon always return to spawn in the river where they were hatched, three consecutive years of failure can wipe out the natural indigenous population for ever. The West-Coast salmon seem to have fallen victim to the recent temperature rise in the northern Pacific.
Supporting evidence for warming in the Arctic Ocean is not far to seek. In 1980, when submarines reached the North Pole, the ice was ten-feet thick. A decade later it was only two-feet thick; now there is open water. The collapse of the California salmon run indicates that there has been a rapid increase in the temperature of the water in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean and the melting of the ice-cap suggests that this change is part of a long-term process.
The latent heat of fusion of ice is 80 calories per gram and to convert 1 gram of ice at 0 degrees C. to 1 gram of water at 0 degrees C. takes as much energy as heating the same mass of water from 0 degrees C. to 80 degrees C. Equally, to convert this water back to ice, the same amount of energy must be abstracted.
It seems likely that the melting of the ice-sheet around the North Pole will continue whatever is done and that the climate differences we have seen within the last two decades will not alter their present course.
To a physicist the supposition that such a considerable change in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean has been produced by a minor variation in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere "caused by the burning of fossil fuels" is simply nonsense. Unfortunately, among the world's politicians this supposed "fact" has now become dogma; the waste of resources that has resulted from fighting this mythical dragon can only be regarded as futile and tragic.
Explanations should come with a health warning - their main purpose is often to persuade rather than to inform; as a consequence it is surely sensible to consider the credibility of the salesman before buying any of the goods. Unfortunately many of the environmentalists who denounce global warming supposedly created by the burning of fossil fuels, may be driven by a political agenda and may be illiterate in matters relating to physics. Our concern here is simply with trying to get the physics right - events will inevitably take care of the rest.
Global warming will definitely affect the future of every person on the Earth directly and to a non-trivial extent. We are all seekers after the truth. There are those who claim to have all of the answers by mystical revelation and do not need evidence - they "just know"; experimental physicists believe that truth, in the form of the whole truth demanded by the Law, is an aspiration to be approached by a process of incremental refinement and progressive improvement, but without perfection ever being achieved.
This attitude can be seen in the popularly used value for "π" - the ancients, who understood only integers, took the value as 3. In the later Middle Ages, when people began to understand fractions, they used 22/7 which gave a big improvement; by the middle of the 19th century, as people transferred to decimals, they switched to 3.14159; currently we have computer programs able to supply 100 decimal places routinely, if needed. Perfection is by definition absolute and although any decimal representation can be improved by computing more places, in the real world there is a point at which extra refinement ceases to serve a useful purpose.
Regarding global warming, we expect to start from the "π = 3" position, i.e. by looking in the right area but claiming no great level of precision. Once we have identified the deficiencies that arise from the imperfect starting point, we can hope to make adjustments at the 5-10 per cent level that will deliver useful improvements.
Building an explanation is rather like putting up an army tent; it calls for a strong centre pole able to carry the weight and a firm foundation to give stability. In assembling our theory of global warming, the centre pole is the approximate 1,000-year recurrent cycle.
And the foundation? The evidence of 5,000 years that goes back through the invasions of Kent by William of Normandy and Julius Caesar, the Bronze-Age village at Skara Brae and the Stone-Age settlements in the south of England. This would seem to be sufficient to establish the validity of a climatic cycle lasting roughly 1,000 years. But what mechanism defines the period?
Having examined the effects of the yearly El Niņo as a potential candidate, it is clearly a fairly weak energy pulse confined within a surface layer of the ocean and is only about 250 ft. deep. As the winds over the Pacific Ocean are quite powerful for months on end, they produce both evaporation and stirring of the top water; there can be little carry over of energy year to year. El Niņo is inadequate to provide the integration of energy compatible with a 1,000 year period. So what does control the 1,000-year period?
The vital clue is to be found in rather out-of-date text books on magnetism, for example Starling (8) - 1st edition 1910. Concerning the Earth's magnetic field he says: "The declination at all points is undergoing a long period change. Records of the declination do not go back far enough to compute with accuracy the periodic time of the secular variation, but it is of the order 960 years." (Lord Kelvin's observation).
Here we have an enduring synchronizing mechanism and now we know its nature the rest of the story follows directly from elementary physics.
The Earth's magnetic field is almost certainly due to circulating electrical currents in the magma, the molten layer of rock just beneath the surface crust.
The coolest part of the magma is a true fluid with a temperature increasing with depth from around 900 degrees C.
When the magma temperature lies above the Curie temperature of iron and nickel it cannot support ferromagnetism (it is not "magnetic" as in popular usage). However, the circulating currents do provide the Earth's magnetic field and the mechanical forces that generate stirring.
We know from "black smokers" that vast quantities of superheated water passes through the cracks in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in the enormous trench that meets California at Monterey. The heat for these high-velocity jets comes from surface water that makes direct contact through the cracks with the magma. Here we have a mechanism that has the level of heating potential and stirring of the magma we require.
The 1,000 year cycle time is defined primarily by the heat capacity of the Pacific Ocean. This in turn is coupled to the Atlantic Ocean which also has a central crack and black smokers, but everything is smaller.
Examining the years 1970-2000 there would seem to have been a time lag of 5-10 years between events in the Pacific and Atlantic. This indicates that the collapse in stability and the roll-over in the various temperature layers in the oceans began in the Pacific.
This roll-over provides mechanical coupling to the adjacent layers and if these also are in unstable equilibrium, the roll-over will have enough excess energy to more than compensate for frictional loss and will continue to spread.
In one or two years the unstable front can reach all of the other oceans and give rise to climate switching throughout the world - there are substantial channels coupling the Pacific to the Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Antarctic Oceans.
The event initiating the last collapse would certainly seem to have occured in the Pacific. However, at this stage our knowledge of the rotation of the Earth's magnetic field is not very precise and it seems doubtful whether all of the 1,000-year cycles will be of exactly the same duration. On the other hand, the actual triggering process does seem to be locked to pulses of El Niņo.
A printed version of this website, Global Warming, by Dr. Alfred E. Brain, was published by the Cosmic Elk, ISBN 1-871443-33-4, price £5 or €7.
Dr. Alfred E. Brain was a research physicist in the Engineering Division at the Stanford Research Institute for 25 years. He worked on the Minos machines - early artificial intelligence. His book on Minos was nearly completed when he died on March 14th 2004. The Minos machine is now part of a permanent exhibition at the University of Lincoln, Faculty of Applied Computing Sciences.
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