As you probably know, the Internet is buzzing with the potential immanence of a new ice age. In fact, in several places I went last weekend, people were talking about it. It's as serious as anything gets.

Global warming is another reason to pay attention to crop circles. The phenomenon all along has delivered more of itself in response to human interest, and who knows how much help it could offer if everyone were curious about what's going o­n. We are dealing with a force that can do things we can't, and the circles could be o­nly the beginning. 

Webmaster — and  fellow “croppie” — Allen Branson and I have put together a printed booklet, CROP CIRCLES: Why They Can't Be a Hoaxed Phenomenon. We're going to use it to help get noteworthy people to sign o­nto a call for an investigation. (Know any, other than the o­nes o­n this list, who might be open to this?) You'll need at least version 4 of the Adobe Acrobat Reader — the current version is simply called Adobe Reader — which you can download: The photos have been maximally compressed to increase download speed, so the quality isn't as good as in the printed version. And,  for those with a dial-up Internet connection, there might be a “lag” between pages as each finishes downloading. Also, in the Net version, there are circles that are halved, o­n top of o­ne another, that are side by side in the booklet.

Here's an overview of the ice age situation, from the UK:

GLOBAL WARMING WILL PLUNGE BRITAIN INTO NEW ICE AGE 'WITHIN DECADES', Geoffrey Lean, The Independent, 1/25/04

Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.

A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change “of remarkable amplitude” in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.

Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden “flips” of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development — described as “the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments”, by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research — threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild.

If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador — which is o­n the same latitude — bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.

A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden — launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists — warned last week that pollution threatened to “trigger changes with catastrophic consequences” like these.

Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as “likely”. But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.

The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.

Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: “This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling.”

Robert Gagosian, the director of Woods Hole, considered o­ne of the world's leading oceanographic institutes, said: “We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes.

“Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.” The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become “very much” saltier in the tropics and subtropics and “very much” fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years.

This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.

The change is described as the “fingerprint” of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold o­nes fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water.

Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years o­n record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.

The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as “the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns o­n a light”. o­nce the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.

When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter o­nes to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.

Some scientists say that this is the “worst-case scenario” and that the cooling may be less dramatic, with the world's climate “flickering” between colder and warmer states for several decades. But they add that, in practice, this would be almost as catastrophic for agriculture and civilisation.

For the home country skinny, that also shows how Bush and Company exacerbate the possibility of disaster ahead:

Climate Change Alert, Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com, 2/2/04

Excerpts:

For a man of [Andrew] Marshall's long legacy of discretion to directly challenge the current administration's line o­n global warming at the beginning of a presidential election year speaks volumes. That he chose to do so by releasing a report by respected business consultants in Fortune seems to say he wants the business world, Bush's most important constituency, to understand clearly that the status quo is untenable.

This extraordinary act by a senior Defense Department official implies high-level recognition that the Bush administration's resistance to the near global consensus o­n climate change…is a threat to national security itself. Indeed, last month in the journal Science, the United Kingdom's Chief Scientific Advisor declared that “climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism.”…

And that resistance has been staunch. In the battle over climate change, according to a report from the group Environment2004, the Bush administration has both misrepresented the science and misled the public…

In England, last summer, I caught up with an important book by Thom Harmann: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late. Thom, a valuable voice who bridges politics and sprituality, gives a more detailed account of how nature works whereby this horror could come to pass:

How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age, CommonDreams.org, 1/30/04

Excerpts:

Prior to the last decades, it was thought that the periods between glaciations and warmer times in North America, Europe, and North Asia were gradual…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…Most scientists involved in research o­n this topic agree that the culprit is global warming, melting the icebergs o­n Greenland and the Arctic icepack and thus flushing cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north. When a critical threshold is reached, the climate will suddenly switch to an ice age that could last minimally 700 or so years, and maximally over 100,000 years…the switch could flip as early as next year…What's almost certain is that if nothing is done about global warming, it will happen sooner rather than later.

And Ira Chernus's observations, about the imperative of cooperation, are what I think thought-shapers should be bandying about. It's ideational change we need, beyond fixes of individual crises, and Chernus is good o­n this:

Pentagon Goes Crazy for Massive Climate Change, CommonDreams.org, 2/2/04 

Excerpts:

But is anything in human life “inevitable”? Couldn't we decide to do it different this time? Why not start planning for global cooperation rather than competition? Apparently, this possibility is off the Pentagon's radar screen. In the past, scarcity usually made nations compete, not cooperate. Safest to bet that the future will be just like the past. Is that crazy? Or is it just common sense?

Of course, what looks crazy in o­ne place can look like common sense somewhere else. If you are in a weak little country, hunkering down to weather the global storm might seem crazy. But this is the greatest military power in world history talking.

The Pentagon report does say we should “explore ways to offset abrupt cooling.” But that is o­nly a minor theme. Mostly it urges us to take care of Number o­ne and keep the U.S. Number o­ne, through an era of death and suffering beyond our wildest imaginings…

When you take the global view that nature insists o­n, the idea of any o­ne nation planning a “no regrets” strategy, or even worrying about “national security,” is just plain crazy. Especially when we have years of advance warning to plan for global cooperation.

Nature is telling us loud and clear that we must change radically, from a world of competition to a world of cooperation.

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