Research shows climate change can be 'dramatic'

Holywood blockbuster 'The Day After Tomorrow' has centred world attention on the possibility that climate change could be closer, faster and more catastrophic than previously thought.

While the Roland Emmerich movie as been dismissed in certain quarters as far fetched - climate change is generally a slow process evolving over centuries – a University of Ulster academic has revealed that dramatic climate change as a result of global warming can happen in a single lifetime, much like it is portrayed in the motion picture starring Dennis Quaid.

Professor Marshall McCabe of the School of Environmental Sciences said that he has found evidence of just such an event 19,000 years ago.

His research, published in the journal Science, showed:

• There was a rapid rise in the sea level around 19,000 years ago at Kilkeel, Co Down, due to the collapse of ice sheets in the northern hemisphere.
• He was able to accurately date this sea level rise by carbon-dating forams, pinhead-sized organisms found on the sea.
• The fresh water ‘cap’ suppressed the circulation of warm surface water from the south to the north Atlantic oceans - leading to thousands of years of Arctic conditions in Ireland and Great Britain

“Heat is pulled from the tropics to the north," Professor McCabe said. "We are on roughly the same latitude as Alaska and if it were not for the circulation of water between the north and south Atlantic oceans we would be frozen.

“But that could happen if the climate was to flip, through increased freshwater in the North Atlantic - as happened 19,000 years ago," he warned.

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