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particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation.”



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particular thresholds of temperature and precipitation.” 
Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world's poor. 
During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn't 
work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. "To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause 
rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove 
one of the major safety nets for distressed people,” says the report. 
But first things first. Isn't the earth actually warming? Indeed it is, says Joyce. ‘In his cluttered office, 
full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the 
surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years 
in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of fresh water - the equivalent of a 10-footthick layer - mixed into the 
salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic 
ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy. 
The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer 
who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature 
in the Labrador Sea a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic
"arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record”. The 
trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the 


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Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and 
Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic 
winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter 
temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at 
the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And 
some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. “It’s a real mistake to think of this solely 
as a European phenomenon," says Joyce. 
Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North 
Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column 
of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep-water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that 
snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with fresh water, it grows less dense, 
making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively fresh 
water sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in 
turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply 
shut down, and do so quickly. “There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, 
from which we can jump to a new state.” 
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