For the complete article, go to : http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-worlds-weather-could-quickly-run-amok&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120528
Climate scientists think a perfect storm of climate "flips" could cause massive upheavals in a matter of years.
I've talked about tipping points in other blogs, and the Waking God Trilogy speaks of 'precipitating events' when that final event creates the cascade that is unstoppable. The key point here is that change CAN happen quickly. Read the post about what happened 5200 years ago and see more of what I'm talking about. Do not be deluded, lulled to sleep in your vigilance. Change is all around us, a wave that seeks every corner, every nook of our existence, and it is growing in intensity. We are not talking a hundred, fifty, twenty-five or even ten years from now. Just look out your window!
The real nightmare scenario is when all these changes begin to rein- force one another. The Arctic loses its summer sea ice, causing Greenland's ice to melt and encouraging the boreal forests to change as well. The freshwater runoff changes the thermohaline dynamics and affects the jet stream. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Amazon interact in such a way as to reinforce one another, perhaps affecting the monsoon in India and Africa. "It wouldn't be such a silly thing to say that if you meddle with one, you might affect the other," says Lenton. "Which direction the causality would go is not always obvious. We know it's connected, we know it's nonlinear, we know they somehow couple together. When you see one change, you see changes in the other."
"Then we start talking about domino dynamics," says Lenton. "The worse case would be that kind of scenario in which you tip one thing and that encourages the tipping of another. You get these cascading effects."
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