Hmmmm, I was able to view the page. So
I pasted it below for those that might get the same
result from the link...

-Steve Gregory-

CLIMATE COLLAPSE
The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast.
That would be the mother of all national security issues.
By David Stipp 

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, 
most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 
9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit 
home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become 
so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather 
than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to 
a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that 
controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a 
decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. 
Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt 
climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the 
need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the 
geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the 
Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. 
and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust 
bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular 
thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as 
Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in 
abrupt climate change.

Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, 
after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic 
ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took 
place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years. The case 
for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation 
for the abrupt changes.

The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic 
Ocean current that flows north from the tropics—that's why Britain, at 
Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this 
"great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the 
current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the 
ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the 
roughly circular current on the go. But when the climate warms, according to the 
theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North 
Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity—and its density and tendency to sink.

A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further 
lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force 
and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the 
climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere. Scientists aren't sure what caused 
the warming that triggered such collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it 
wasn't humans and their factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources 
suggest the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were 
dismayingly similar to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began drawing to a close 
about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels 
near those of recent decades.

Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in 
the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions. (A 
dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at the time.) Though Mother 
Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that may be shaping up 
today probably has more to do with us. In 2001 an international panel of climate 
experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the 
global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human 
activities—mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release 
heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic 
ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly 
latitudes.

A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or 
grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently 
wait until we're history. Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is 
shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences 
issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. 
Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session 
at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution 
in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible 
abrupt climate change within two decades. Such jeremiads are beginning to 
reverberate more widely. 

Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate 
change as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issue—next 
summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a 
big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying to save the 
world from an ice age precipitated by global warming. Fox's flick will doubtless 
be apocalyptically edifying. But what would abrupt climate change really be 
like?   
    
    




> Unfortunately, it stated, "The page you requested is only available to
> current FORTUNE magazine subscribers.".
> 
> I think they meant "The page you requested is available only to current
> FORTUNE magazine subscribers.", as they probably did not intend all
> their other pages to be available to non-subscribers! :-) (Glorious to
> be a pedant!).
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Brian
>