
The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958) - mkempe
http://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/
======
dalke
Why is this something to bring up? I ask because a standard practice in
climate warming denialism is to argue that scientists are undecided about the
issue, or change their minds frequently, and point to the handful of
scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age.

In this case, research after the intriguing hypothesis of Ewing and Donn shows
that it's not what happened.

For example, from Science (1964),
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707)
:

> Pollen analysis of radiocarbon-dated samples from the arctic coastal plain
> of Alaska shows that vegetation of 14,000 years ago reflected a climate
> colder than the present, and that there has been a progressive warming,
> culminating in the present cold arctic climate. The record indicates that
> the Arctic Ocean has been covered with ice since the time of the Wisconsin
> glacial maximum, suggesting that the essential condition of the Ewing and
> Donn hypothesis for the origin of ice ages, that the Arctic Ocean be ice-
> free up to 11,000 years ago, cannot be met.

Ewing and Donn write (quoting from Harpers):

> “The answer, we believe, is chat [sic] until a million years ago, the North
> Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of
> the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could
> accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold.

Remember, this is shortly after we realized that the continents _could_ move.
They based their conclusions on the magnetic record, but the magnetic pole
also wanders and flips. The actual movement is nowhere near what's required
for their hypothesis to be true. See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander)
for some background. See
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/a...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/abstract)
for a paper which says that paleontological records show about 1 degree of
shift per million years for the last 7 million years.

From what I understand, global warming entered the popular awareness in the
1970s-1980s. This aricle from the 1950s shows awareness even then:

> Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an
> increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm
> water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland;
> annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here
> winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to.
> It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded
> by such a warming of climate.

~~~
tjradcliffe
It's interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is it shows how
the popular press gets science badly wrong, packaging it as a "just so" story
that seems to a) explain everything and b) leave very few loose ends.

Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite
common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified. We didn't know that
people would be still burning coal in forty years time, much less such vast
quantities, because nuclear was still a politically viable option despite
various hysterical claims against it. And we had even less clue then as to how
the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do today, and we
have relatively little clue today.

But a huge number of people think "the science is settled" with regard to
climate change because the popular press tells them so. With regard to the
_existence_ of anthropogentic climate change that's reasonably correct, but
with regard to the _consequences_ it's complete nonsense, and this article
from the '50's suggests why that is so: because popular accounts just don't
convey the messy uncertainty of the real science. They pull a coherent thread
out and make it sound as if we understand far more than we actually do.

This is not to say we shouldn't be building new nuclear capacity, and ignoring
all the "green" groups who are protesting solar, wind, geothermal and biomass
development (search for "environmentalists against $X" where $X is any
industrial-scale green power and you'll see what I mean). We should be doing
all those things, and we should be shifting taxes from income to carbon
emissions. But we should remember that the science is a lot messier than it
gets portrayed in Harpers and the like, and we shouldn't be so afraid of
Denialists as to want to avoid acknowledging that.

~~~
dalke
There are any number of articles which give examples of how the popular press
got it wrong on a scientific topic. If your conjecture is correct, then the
submitter did a grave disservice by dropping a link to a 1950s article without
any context. How do you conclude it wasn't an example of climate change
denialism, meant to muddy the waters and instill confusion, or a case of
simple trolling?

"Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite
common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified"

Concern by whom? Among the scientific papers of the 1960s and 1970s, the
majority view was for global warming. Quoting from
[http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf](http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf)
, "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; "The survey [of
papers from 1965 through 1979] identified only seven articles indicating
cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles
garnered just 12% of the citations." This is why I mentioned there were only a
'handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age'. Thus, that
stance _in the scientific literature_ was uncommon.

Among some of the popular press, there certainly were articles by Newsweek and
Time on the possibility of a new ice age. (Or in SF, Larry Niven wrote "Fallen
Angels" (1991) on the premise that anthropogenic warming was actually
preventing an ice age from coming.) Then again, some of the recent popular
press also had a lot of articles about the 2012 phenomenon, based on reaching
the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - "The Crazy Years" of
Heinlein. On the gripping hand, science popularizers like Issac Asimov
understood the global warming topic correctly back in the 1970s.

Regarding 'the messy uncertainty of the real science', what you've said
applies to everything the popular press reports. When the NY reports on the
situation in Ukraine, they leave out a lot of the messy details. The same when
Sports Illustrated reports on a doping scandal, or the WSJ about a recent
merger, or the latest weather prediction in the local paper. It's odd that you
think people treat science reporting as the final, conclusive word on a topic.
I don't agree.

I believe the rest of your comment pivots into your views on nuclear power.
This is not related to the Harpers piece or the presumed reasons for why this
link was posted on HN, and I decline to follow up on it.

~~~
hughw
What do you think about tjradcliffe's comments "...we had even less clue then
as to how the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do
today, and we have relatively little clue today...With regard to the existence
of anthropogentic climate change ["the science is settled" is] reasonably
correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense"?

~~~
dalke
I think that statement about less clue/relatively little clue is true about
nearly every field of active research, including nuclear fusion power,
hurricane path and strength prediction, understanding the brain, designing new
drugs, and the life of pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas. In 20 years we'll
look back and comment about how little we knew of the human genome, or how
wildly wrong we were in predicting the effect of autonomous vehicles on daily
life.

Also, "relatively little clue" can still enough to make useful decisions.
Therefore I ignored it.

Without knowing which consequences, what am I supposed to say? I see no reason
to think the Dutch are misspending their money in building up their sea
defenses against likely sea level rise.

------
NathanKP
This was a really interesting read. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any
followup information about the underlying theory.

In the grip of record snows in Boston, and an extra long winter here in NY its
easy to imagine being on the cusp of another ice age, but at the same time the
theory seems at odds with the idea of global warming. On the one hand we have
global warming as a one way operation of sorts accelerated by mankind, on the
other hand we have temporary warming followed by a super ice age, powered by
the Arctic Ocean.

I really want to know if this fascinating theory has been investigated further
for confirmation or if it has been debunked in the 50+ years since this
article was published.

~~~
saalweachter
The key thing to remember is 'global': while the East Coast of the US has had
one of the colder, snowier winters in recent history, the West Coast has just
come out of a hot, dry winter. Local weather is a terrible guide to global
climate.

~~~
chris_va
Adding to this, my (limited, apologies climatologists) understanding of one
theory is that global warming reduces the temperature gradient between the
temperate zone and the arctic. This destabilizes the jet stream, causing
bifurcation. That builds a high pressure zone over the northwest, sending
weather north and then down through Canada to the eastern seaboard, bringing a
brutal winter and leaving California dry.

Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.

~~~
msandford
> Weather is complicated, and hard to prove anything about.

Which is why not all people skeptical of AGW are right wing anti-science
nutjobs. A great many are I'm sure, but scientific skepticism may well be
warranted when the system is so complex.

~~~
chris_va
Well, being skeptical of an entire field of study is different than being
skeptical of the predicted outcome. One often sounds like the other, and it is
99.99% likely that _something_ is happening, even if we don't do a good job
understanding it.

For example, regardless of "warming", we'll still have to deal with ocean
acidification and all of the fallout from that.

~~~
kuni-toko-tachi
Something is happening, its called weather. And before weather was co-opted by
political agents with an agenda to control people to enrich themselves, that's
all it was.

------
chrisau
Incredible that this research from 60 years ago explains much of our current
weather events. The Article ice shrinks, northern North America gets more
snow.

It also explains why both global warming and impending ice age are linked.

This doesn't deny, of course, that mankind hasn't done his bit to accelerate
the natural ebbs and flows of the global climate and the pace at which they
are occurring.

~~~
krylon
I was thinking the exact same thing. :)

If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple
of years, it would not have been implausible.

The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in
drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not
really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much
warmer weather around the arctic circle is certainly fascinating.

~~~
dalke
The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle
of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that
the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to
the current alignment.

If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very
implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of
the physics of the Earth.

Pollen studies carried out within 10 years of the publication of the
hypothesis shows that the Arctic was colder during glaciation. See
[https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=p_CA7XOcE1&dq=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&hl=sv&pg=PA83#v=onepage&q=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&f=false)
,
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671)
and
[https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots=nrgyBsxcwD&dq=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&hl=sv&pg=PA230#v=onepage&q=arctic%20ice%20age%20pollen&f=false)
, which say the evidence was enough to make the hypothesis implausible.

This research was done after the model was published. While it was viable in
the 1950s, it no longer fits the evidence.

~~~
krylon
True enough. But I am not a geophysicist or a geologist or anything even
remotely close to that.

Is the article talking about the geographic poles (the rotational axis of
earth) or the magnetic poles? Because I think I remember reading that the
magnetic poles of earth have been moving around quite a bit over time, that
the magnetic poles are (slowly) moving today at a speed that scientists can
measure, and that at some point, the magnetic north pole was rather close to
the rotational south pole. (Although I do not know if the location of the
magnetic poles has any impact on climate.)

~~~
dalke
The hypothesis is that the geographical North Pole was in the Atlantic 1
million years ago, and rapidly shifted to where it is now.

The problem with the hypothesis is it doesn't answer the question (quoting
from page 7):

> What started off the first Ice Age cycle?

> “We know that during the past million years, the world has swung back and
> forth between ice ages and weather like today’s,” Ewing and Donn told me.
> “Before then, the whole earth was much warmer. There were no zones of
> extreme heat or cold; palms and magnolias grew in Greenland, and coral
> around Iceland; subtropical plants thrived within eleven degrees of the
> North Pole. Why didn’t the Arctic Ocean-glacier ‘thermostat’ work then? What
> suddenly turned it on one million years ago?

(We now know there have been multiple periods of glaciation. We are now in the
Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which started 2.5 million years ago. The
previous, the Karoo Ice Age, was 360–260 million years ago.)

It only explains why there are cycles, but if the planetary conditions were
the same 3 million years ago, and there were no cycles, then the hypothesis
would be in error.

Remember, in the 1950s the new theory of plate tectonics was only just coming
into wide acceptance. The quote from the Harper's piece assumes that the crust
moves a lot faster than the evidence found though the successive decades of
research.

------
larsiusprime
Did anyone else happen to notice this article's byline is "Betty Friedan" ? Is
that _THE_ Betty Friedan?

~~~
mkempe
Yes, I believe so. She was a freelance writer at the time, and she wrote
articles for major magazines.

------
ddp
I vaguely remember reading this article before. It's clear our planet is
changing, I don't see how anyone can deny that. We can argue all day long
about how much CO2 produced since the industrial revolution is affecting it,
but the melt's happening either way. Even partially wrong, I think there were
a lot of interesting points in that article. Thanks for posting it.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/201...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/2015/03/16/the-melting-of-antarctica-was-already-really-bad-it-
just-got-worse/?wprss=rss_homepage)

