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05 January 2010

I have been doing some reading on the ocean and climate, and stumbled across this account of a Year Without a Summer,[More:] when temps in the Northern Hemisphere got so low that the upper bay of New York froze, and many many died.

It is ironic that one of the scenarios of global warming is that the thermohaline circulation could be disrupted by fresh meltwater from Greenland, thereby plunging Northern Europe into another little ice age, while in other places, the earth would heat up considerably.

Dallas Murphy, the author of the mentioned book wrote a few years ago in that book that society was finally getting on board with the fact that human-caused climate change is a reality. This was before the most recent election, and before the Rise of Palin and her cadre of deniers.

Very interesting stuff, climate.

I knew about the year without a summer by reading Ripley's Believe it or Not as a kid.
posted by Obscure Reference 05 January | 19:57
Yeah, this got a lot of discussion in the 1980s heyday of the nuclear winter theory.
posted by dhartung 06 January | 01:28
Oh, and hey, Mayon is active again!
posted by dhartung 06 January | 01:31
I've dealt with that era a lot in history museums. Obviously it was pretty challenging for New England. Climate does swing back and forth interestingly. The salty, brackish river in my hometown in NJ only freezes across about once every 10 years or so. At times in history, both Long Island Sound and New York Harbor have frozen over - amazing.
posted by Miko 06 January | 09:59
Robot Radio: Machine Music || NYC people and/or readers of the New Yorker,

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