Can global warming helps to creat a new ice age?

Question

like what happend after global warming stage

Answer 1

My science teacher says it can but I don't quite understand how. As itgets warmer, warm air gets higher and higher. After it gets too high it some how cools down. I don't get it much.

Answer 2

LMAO, I am laughing at Lily correcting someone else's spelling.  That is funny!  An by the way....  Creat is with an e... LMAO  Good one Lil

You are right, a sudden rise in temperature will cause an ice age, contrary to what Lily was saying.  I think she may be listening to Gore but she ignored that other fear monger movie called "The Day After Tomorrow."  If Global warming were correct and we were causing it, then a global warming would end in an ice age.... LOL

Answer 3

actually it could. if global warming gets to the point where enough of the frozen land mass melts (the poles, greenland, etc.) to change global currents then the upwellings would no longer be a seasonal occurrence but a random occurrence. this could in turn create a massive La Nina since the world would be one big ocean. however, this is INCREDIBLY unlikely. if global warming got to the point that the poles and frozen land masses melted... i don't think we'd be around for it to be a problem.

Answer 4

The theory is that enough fresh meltwater will disrupt the Thermohaline Current in the Atlantic Ocean and in The Day After Tomorrow I think that was one of the causes for the catastrophic and entirely impossible climate changes. The Earth has been ice free without disrupting that current, but an abrupt dumping of millions of gallons of water from Lake Agassiz (it was 440,000 square kilometers in size) thousands of years ago did stop it for a time. Ice is not melting in that way so the Thermohaline is safe.

There is no other plausible way for warming to lead to an ice age but a change in solar irradiance or magnetic field strength could do so.

Answer 5

no. there is a very small chance that it may disrupt ocean currents and cause some cooling in Europe but this is very unlikely. the most likely thing to happen will be an increase in global temps.

Answer 6

Here is an article about the possibility of an ice age in Europe and the eastern United States, caused by an interruption of the ocean currents normal flow, as a result of global warming.  The Gulf Stream  keeps these areas relatively warm and temperate.

Hopefully this is not a likely scenario



The scenario and the basic science is explained

here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130...

  exerpt:

Published on Friday, January 30, 2004 by CommonDreams.org  

How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age...  

by Thom Hartmann

  

"In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world."

Here's how it works.

"If you look at a globe, you'll see that the latitude of much of Europe and Scandinavia is the same as that of Alaska and permafrost-locked parts of northern Canada and central Siberia. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia.

Why? "

"It turns out that our warmth is the result of ocean currents that bring warm surface water up from the equator into northern regions that would otherwise be so cold that even in summer they'd be covered with ice. The current of greatest concern is often referred to as "The Great Conveyor Belt," which includes what we call the Gulf Stream."

"As a result, the warm water of the Great Conveyor Belt evaporates out of the North Atlantic leaving behind saltier waters, and the cold continental winds off the northern parts of North America cool the waters. Salty, cool waters settle to the bottom of the sea, most at a point a few hundred kilometers south of the southern tip of Greenland, producing a whirlpool of falling water that's 5 to 10 miles across."

"This falling column of cold, salt-laden water pours itself to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it forms an undersea river forty times larger than all the rivers on land combined, flowing south down to and around the southern tip of Africa, where it finally reaches the Pacific. Amazingly, the water is so deep and so dense (because of its cold and salinity) that it often doesn't surface in the Pacific for as much as a thousand years after it first sank in the North Atlantic off the coast of Greenland."

"The out-flowing undersea river of cold, salty water makes the level of the Atlantic slightly lower than that of the Pacific, drawing in a strong surface current of warm, fresher water from the Pacific to replace the outflow of the undersea river. This warmer, fresher water slides up through the South Atlantic, loops around North America where it's known as the Gulf Stream, and ends up off the coast of Europe. By the time it arrives near Greenland, it's cooled off and evaporated enough water to become cold and salty and sink to the ocean floor, providing a continuous feed for that deep-sea river flowing to the Pacific."

These two flows - warm, fresher water in from the Pacific, which then grows salty and cools and sinks to form an exiting deep sea river - are known as the Great Conveyor Belt.

"Much of this science was unknown as recently as twenty years ago. Then an international group of scientists went to Greenland and used newly developed drilling and sensing equipment to drill into some of the world's most ancient accessible glaciers. Their instruments were so sensitive that when they analyzed the ice core samples they brought up, they were able to look at individual years of snow. The results were shocking."

"Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years. Something was flipping the weather of the planet back and forth with a rapidity that was startling."

"It turns out that the ice age versus temperate weather patterns weren't part of a smooth and linear process, like a dimmer slider for an overhead light bulb. They are part of a delicately balanced teeter-totter, which can exist in one state or the other, but transits through the middle stage almost overnight. They more resemble a light switch, which is off as you gradually and slowly lift it, until it hits a mid-point threshold or "breakover point" where suddenly the state is flipped from off to on and the light comes on."

"In millennia past, however, before the Arctic totally froze and locked up, and before some critical threshold amount of fresh water was locked up in the Greenland and other glaciers, these 1500-year variations in solar energy didn't just slightly warm up or cool down the weather for the landmasses bracketing the North Atlantic. They flipped on and off periods of total glaciation and periods of temperate weather."



"If the Great Conveyor Belt, which includes the Gulf Stream, were to stop flowing today, the result would be sudden and dramatic. Winter would set in for the eastern half of North America and all of Europe and Siberia, and never go away. Within three years, those regions would become uninhabitable and nearly two billion humans would starve, freeze to death, or have to relocate. Civilization as we know it probably couldn't withstand the impact of such a crushing blow. "

"And, incredibly, the Great Conveyor Belt has hesitated a few times in the past decade. As William H. Calvin points out in one of the best books available on this topic ("A Brain For All Seasons: human evolution & abrupt climate change"): ".the abrupt cooling in the last warm period shows that a flip can occur in situations much like the present one. What could possibly halt the salt-conveyor belt that brings tropical heat so much farther north and limits the formation of ice sheets? Oceanographers are busy studying present-day failures of annual flushing, which give some perspective on the catastrophic failures of the past. "In the Labrador Sea, flushing failed during the 1970s, was strong again by 1990, and is now declining. In the Greenland Sea over the 1980s salt sinking declined by 80 percent. Obviously, local failures can occur without catastrophe - it's a question of how often and how widespread the failures are - but the present state of decline is not very reassuring."

You really need to read the whole article to get the whole picture.  It's not very long.

"Few scientists think there will be a rapid shutdown of circulation. Most ocean models predict no more than a slowdown, probably towards the end of the century. This could slow or even reverse some of the warming due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which might even be welcome in an overheated Europe, but the continent is not likely to get colder than it is at present."

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

Answer 7

Probably not...... but natural global warming typically follows a period of natural global cooling which....in turn....typically follows a period of natural global warming..... and on and on.......

Answer 8

That's the theory of Lowell Ponte, the guy who founded the DENIER/skeptic movement in the 1970's.  It was nonsense then, and it's nonsense now.  He's a rabid antisemite who supports high oil prices for the Arabs to fund the war on Israel.  He says Jimmy Carter is a war criminal for his efforts at peace in the Mideast.  That's the political agenda behind the DENIER/skeptic moronicisms.

Answer 9

They are oxymorons. Global WARMING, ICE age. No, global warming heats the earth, and is melting the poles. The only reason for a slightly cooler temperature is the La Nina effect. Look it up. An by the way, creat is wrong, I think you were trying to spell 'create', with an 'e'.