Earth s climate is undergoing an abrupt change, ending a cooler period
that began with a swift "cold snap" in the tropics 5,200 years ago that
coincided with the start of cities, the beginning of calendars and the
biblical great flood, a leading expert on glaciers has concluded. The warming around Earth s tropical belt is a signal suggesting that the
"climate system has exceeded a critical threshold," which has sent
tropical-zone glaciers in full retreat and will melt them completely "in
the near future," said Lonnie G. Thompson, a scientist who for 23 years
has been taking core samples from the ancient ice of glaciers.
Thompson, writing with eight other researchers in an article published
Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the
ice samples show that the climate can and did cool quickly, and that a
similarly abrupt warming change started about 50 years ago. Humans may
not have the luxury of adapting to slow changes, he suggests.
"There are thresholds in the system," Thompson said in an interview in
his lab at Ohio State University. When they are crossed, "there is the
risk of changing the world as we know it to some form in which a lot of
people on the planet will be put at risk."
"I think the temperature will continue to rise, the glaciers will
continue to melt. Sea levels will continue to rise. I think there is a
good indication now that the magnitude of severe storms will rise," he said.
Thompsons work summarizes evidence from around the world and ice core
sampling from seven locations in the South American Andes and the Asian
Himalayas. It considerably extends the reach of a growing number of
scientific findings documenting the historically unusual warming of
Earth. A top scientific panel last week endorsed an earlier study, by
Penn State professor Michael E. Mann, that concluded the recent warming
in the Northern Hemisphere is of a scale probably unseen for 400 to
1,000 years.
Thompson, whose research has focused on glaciers in the high mountains
of the tropics, writes that the warming there "is unprecedented for at
least two millennia." He teamed with his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, an
expert in polar ice sampling, and concluded that the glacial retreat
"signals a recent and abrupt change in the Earths climate system."
Caspar Amman, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colo., said Thompson s "perspective of the changes
over the past 2,000 years is striking. Something is definitely different
towards the end of the 20th century."
But the finding likely to cause the most debate is Thompson s conclusion
that a swift and sudden cooling of the climate five millennia ago
occurred simultaneously with key changes in civilizations.
"It represents a time where, for many parts of the world, people ceased
to be hunters and gatherers and formed cities," he said. "Many of the
modern calendars began around this time. It would also fall in the
general time frame of the biblical flood."
Thompson said he does not know what caused the abrupt change -- one
possibility is a "mega La Ni?a" shift in upper air currents. But he said
the evidence from such diverse sources as Mount Kilimanjaro; African
lakes; Greenland and Antarctic ice cores; the Andes and the Alps point
to a sudden arrival of cool and often wet conditions, all about the same
time.
That time saw cities form in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, his paper
says, and the end of a humid period in Africa that "seems to have begun
and ended abruptly, within decades to a century." In what is now
Florida, water levels rose rapidly. In Washington state, glaciers
covered whole trees. In the Alps, a mortally wounded hunter nicknamed
Otzi was buried quickly by snow and captured within a growing glacier
until it melted enough to expose him in 1991.
Theories linking climate change with changes in the history of humans
are increasingly popular. The book "The Winds of Change" by Eugene
Linden argues that climate shifts accompanied the fall of many
civilizations.
Gavin Schmidt, a scientist at NASA s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
in New York, applauded Thompson s work but said his conclusions about
events 5,200 years ago have many skeptics.
"You would have to put that argument as more intriguing rather than
definitive," Schmidt said. "There are a number of issues in the tropical
ice cores that are problematic for dating things 4,000 to 5,000 years ago."
Thompson and other scientists typically drill down to layers of glaciers
put down by snow thousands of years ago. The air bubbles caught in those
cores are analyzed to determine the atmosphere at the time. Sediment,
insects and pollen are further clues to the climate in ancient history.
(Por Doug Struck,
Washington Post, 27/06/2006)