Global Cooling Hypothesis

2009-12-16T19:01:00.003+01:00

I remember some years back where northern Europe was hit by a massive series of cold storms from north. My thought back then was that there had earlier been a relatively stable wind system around the arctic that kept the cold in place around the pole, and that those storms were the result of a collapse in that weather system. If that's what really happened I don't actually know, but I still think that it is likely that that was what actually happened.

Recently I've heard rumours that the earth temperature haven't actually been rising, but that it has even been falling and that this is the reason for the Climategate "cover-up". I just thought of a hypothesis that I think is worthwhile investigating that may explain that discrepancy.

Maybe the collapse of the arctic weather system explains a sudden cooling some years ago that gave birth to the rumour of a global cooling.

I imagine that something like what I thought happened many years ago with the weather system around the arctic, is also happening with the cryosphere in general. How cold is 1 kilometre of ice under the arctic? How much warmer is 1/2 kilometre of ice under the arctic? I'd guess that the ice deep down is roughly the same temperature. It may be warmer at the top, the cause of the melt, but the melting water is spreading out more than usually causing a statistically discrepancy. A cooling.

So my theory is this in short… On a global aggregate level the temperature may be falling exactly because the weather and sea currents around an earlier more or less stable crysophere is now collapsing, spreading the cold out over a larger area.

Another related cause could be if thermal conveyor belt did not direct the cold melting water down long the ocean floor,

but that it rather didn't escape upper ocean regions.

Comments please…

Would future archeologist find remnants of our generation?

2009-03-27T11:00:00.002+01:00

On his blog Jesper 69 Green asks: If the world collapsed today, would future archeologists find evidence of our generation? In this post I'll reflect over that question and put forth an outline of how I see it.

There are several answers depending on which world path these hypothetical future archeologist have in their past. It raises a necessary question: The collapse of which world? In the present world we are billions of persons connected in a complex of different Internet based social media. We communicate and interact as if we are in the same living room.
On the other hand, there still is a world outside the circuit, The Real, the extraneous with which we do not experience a privileged communicative access.

We can travel extraneous, move about and explore. But as modern city dwellers we are indigenous to cyberspace rather than The Real. If we explore a jungle, we do so as foreign bodies. Visiting a foreign country, we do so as tourists or backpackers (which are essentially the same). We are unable to truly embed ourselves in these destinations, because the process of embedding needs more time than we are willing to spend. We have to truly live there to become truly embedded and one with the place, because nature need to develop a place for us. That happens through evolution and evolution takes time.
A fork in the road of human destiny marks these years, because the natural world is in rapid decline: It is in fact already in the process of collapsing. Although, that does not entail that the Real will disappear altogether. It will remain there as an eggshell with biological processes giving birth to new forms of life. And these will one day in many million years give birth to new forms of sentient beings.

For future archeologists to find remnants of us, they must be in a world shared with us, either physically or digitally. Our future archeologists can be indigenous to either of two worlds: The analog or the digital. The digital future will be to the analog past as what the ancient oral civilizations are to the era of written traditions. How could we know their generations apart when we lack the information needed differentiate them? We know they were there, but most is lost. What we have is the remnants of the early generations of the written era. What we have to study from the era of oral tradition is what they choose to write down.

Accordingly, our generation could exist as the preserved beginning of a long digital world era. So, if our hypothetical archeologists are digitally reborn, they will be able to find evidence of our generation exactly. We would become the historical generation marking the destruction of the natural order; the old Earth.
We made the Internet; that the firm legacy of our generation. Our generation manufactured and set up the routers of the Internet. Although, the content change from day to day, content die slowly on the Internet. Many of us have learned just how difficult erasing information from the Internet is. Publishing on the Internet is publishing infinite accounts. It’s pretty much there to stay; the exponential growth in storage allows it.

What would the hypothetical future analogue archeologists find? They have in their historical world path the collapse of the digital megacity dwelling world, and along with that most of the planets biological diversity. What relation do they have to us, other than the destructors of a rich world? We left them impoverished, and alone after orchestrating the destruction of a world. To them we would be the last remnants of a biological equivalent of the last mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
They might speculate that we had a sub-conscious raison d’être, to destroy the Earth so utterly that our genetic heritors were physically forced to seek elsewhere in the solar system and galaxy for places to live. But in that case, we might be nothing more than legend and myths on a distant planet: The unspoken cause for the exegesis of the Gods who came to that planet thousands of years ago.

Ulrik la Cour's Blog

Global Cooling Hypothesis

Would future archeologist find remnants of our generation?