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Water On The North Pole
Auckerman writes: "I wonder how much of this can be attributed to man or to normal weather cycles. Per usual, free login is required at the nytimes." This is a sobering dispatch, no matter how skeptical you are of the ability of homo sapiens to model or understand his role in weather patterns. Seems that what used to be a comfortable icefield at 90 degrees north latitude is now swimming in seawater. [Note: Not "0 degrees" as I'd carelessly typed originally; thanks to YU Nicks NE Way for pointing out the boo-boo.] This sentence from the article especially grabbed me: "Scientists at the Goddard Space Science Institute, a NASA research center in Manhattan, compared data from submarines in the 1950's and 60's with 90's observations, demonstrating that the ice cover over the entire Arctic basin has thinned by 45 percent. Satellite images have revealed that the extent of ice coverage has significantly shrunk in recent years."
There is no reason to think that humanity has had any affect on the weather.
/. all week. We are pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. THIS WARMS THE ATMOSPHERE UP by trapping heat from the sun. It's practically unchallenged in serious scientific circles.
This is one of the most imbecellic statements I have heard on
Now you can argue about how much effect this actually has, and you can even make a case for it being a relatively minor effect compared to the Earth's natural cycles. But you can't say that we can significantly change the composition of the planet's atmosphere without affecting the weather and expect to be taken seriously.
Perhaps I am one helping to propagate our own species' extinction, but get in an airplane or look at space photos. Look at the volume of air in the atmosphere. Humans are an inconsequential deposit on the surface of this rock. What humans should worry about is our own air and water quality in the areas we live in. Fix those, and you have environmental harmony.
Fixing those requires money and work. Most humans- used to buying products which were sold for the value in raw materials and process, not their impact on the environment- will have a hard time dealing with it. But I agree with you, largely on this. To improve our air and water quality we have to make conscious changes, ones that will not unly benefit us immediately, but the system which supports our civilization.
For us to think that something as insignificant in size as ourselves can affect something as large as this planet on a macro level, is the product of a superiority complex. Only scientists with a superiority complex (probably characterizes many scientists in the global warming debate -- they seem to like attention) can claim that data collected in the last 50 to 200 years can be interpolated to an entire ecological history of this planet.
I disagree. The problem is not that we're not going to destroy all life on this planet, but ourselves. Earth, and life on it, has gone through a lot more extremes than we can probably imagine, but most of life today is not adapted and ready for it. Bringing on an extreme for which we're not equipped is suicide.
Scientists only have the imformation they have. They have to extrapolate and use indirect means of collecting data (ice cores, &c). Denying the fact they we've had any negative effect on the environment because we cannot compare it to data recorded by humans, even though we may see this effects within the course of one lifetime is silly. This doesn't give scientists a superiority complex, but simply a concern for themselves and their children. Those which believe that all of our problems are solvable through some technological breakthrough in the future have a superiority complex, not to mention being extremely deluded.
Finally, I don't see any of them coming up with new energy storage and conversion technologies that can even clean up our local environments. Instead, they seem to be hung on the idea of sounding alarm bells for something people can't readily see. All changes must start at the small level and become large. Their whining is doing us no good, except accelerating the decay of logical thinking among peoples otherwise inclined to improve life by improving their local environment. They (as in, scientists, somewhere) do come up with new energy solutions. They are largely ignored by a world that loves to drive gas guzzling SUVs and air conditioning. The mere fact that you've not heard of them is all the proof I need to conceed that statement. Many scientists do take steps in improving their local environment, but the fact is they know what they know- science. They may talk in lofty terms, but they're not just stitting around sounding alarms for some secret agenda. They're worried, and they're trying. Maybe they need to attack it at another angle.
In conclusion, I say these scientists who predict global geological failure, are in fact accelerating our demise. They make it appear that humanity has two choices: 1) Become bush people, 2) destroy ourselves. Naturally, being human, we will pick (2) because its more luxurious and comfortable and (1) is too much trouble.
Again, wrong. I would say that the majority of scientists wouldn't say we have to move back to being bushmen to survive, just revise the way we do things. Quit tearing down forests to stick out cattle on, so we can assert our wealth by eaying streak. Drive electric/hybrid/more effecient automobiles, and not drive any automobiles when possible. Self-regulate the number of children we have. Everyday at work, I see countless examples of people wasting resources, taking the for granted. If people started with little things, a lot could be accomplished. People, like yourself (from what I gather, excuse me if it's a hastily made judgement), are the ones who only see those two options, and would rather stick with (2), the status quo, in fear of moving back to (1).
In short... There are things that each and everyone one of us can do to help our situation, but for some reason (laziness?) do not. I try pretty hard to, and I still live a very luxurious life compared to many throughout the modern and historical world. No use in just dismissing the inbetween like you have in your above analysis.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Actually, there are three questions that haven't been settled, at least the last time I was reading the journals a couple of years ago.
(1) Are the computer models accurate? Remember, we're modeling a chaotic system here, and even the best computer models of a chaotic system can be so far off that they're worthless. (Remember the butterfly in Brazil causing thunderstorms in the United States notion from chaos theory? Well, it's impossible for a computer program modeling the weather to also model all the butterflies in Brazil. That's why weather reports are only good for at best 5 to 7 days.)
(2) Is there an actual net increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Granted, mankind has been burning crap for a hell of a long time (think campfires and man-made forest fires and stuff), but we also know that one good volcanic eruption can pump out more carbon dioxide in an afternoon than our modern civilization pumps out in a year. Further, carbon dioxide is not inert; it's the stuff plants breath--and it's unclear if there is more plant biomass now than there is a hundred years ago. (Ironically, due largely to tree planting initiatives and conservation plans in the United States, there are more trees and tree biomass now than there was 50 years ago.)
(3) Are there other gasses we are pumping out which counteracts carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses? That is, are we doing other things which affect absorption of energy into the atmosphere? We presume that the answer to this is true--after all, ancidotal evidence seems to suggest things are getting warmer now than they were 20 or 40 years ago. And even if things aren't warmer, we can at least point to how the weather seems more "energetic"--so that way, even if things are actually cooler this month, it's due to greenhouse warming.
But...is this part of greenhouse warming, and is this part of man's influence on the environment? And is this part of man's influence that is new this century that wasn't true a few hundred years ago when people would burn several logs to have light to cook and read by?
Keep in mind that scientists in the 70's believed that all the polution created by mankind due to our industrial modern age was causing global "cooling", not global warming. And also keep in mind that these same scientists believed that the overall CO2 polution output of a Europe who was practically deforesting entire landmasses just to have wood to build cooking fires and the like was doing less damage than a modern oil-burning electrical power plant.
I'm not saying we're not doing damage. And I'm certainly NOT advocating we continue our current practice of peeing in our drinking water and shitting on our food. I'm just saying that global warming is not as cut and dry as some people say it is.
And before anyone says "we need to do something now before it's too late!", just keep in mind that this is EXACTLY what conservatives have been saying about censoring the pornography on the Internet: that while all the scientific data may still be "out" regarding the effects of pornography on the development of children, we need to do something now before it's too late.
"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds ... An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise." -- Aldo Leopold, 1953.
I'd like to note that ecology != environmentalism. Ecology is the study of natural systems, the way the land and the things inhabiting interact. However, the reason that most ecologists also happen to be environmentalists has to do with the fact that through what they know, they can see the problems we're causing for ourselves. Same goes for the majority of climatologists, zoologists and botanists. It's very unfortunate many people, Slashdotters or not, seem to assume that if you're a scientist and have environmental concern, you're automatically a tool of the "Environmental Agenda," whatever that means. While I don't sound just as bad, it's usually the opposite- those "scientists" (usually authors with no related scientific credentials) who deny that there are environmental problems are usually backed financially by those who have an agenda, those for which the status quo of resource usage and waste is profitable, who insist on living off the Earth's capital, instead of the sustainable interest.
Having that said, I have a knowledge of ecology and our environmental condition that is above that of an average American. Unfortunately, that doesn't say much. Having attended a surprisingly unbiased environmental highschool (School of Environmental Studies, Minnesota), I was edumacated on a lot of these issues.
I agree with Aldo Leopold. I am torn between the ignorance of the greater community and watching this community slowly kill itself by power of their denial.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
eureka,
that's what a greek guy said when he figured something out. He was sitting in the bath, and according to the legend went outside without his toga yelling EUREKA!
In short, the volume of ice is not relevant to the discussion since the mass is constant. The whole reason Ice floats is because it has a lower density than fluid water.
Jilles
If anything, this is part of the earth's natural climate change. Everyone knows that the earth's climate changes over the centuries...this is just a normal phenomenon that will continue. One day you will all be complaining that we're making the earth too cold.
Gee, Timothy...I don't think that there's a lot of ice on the ocean a 0 deg north latitude. In fact, I'd wager that there hasn't ever been much ice there.
Now, 90 degrees North is a different matter.
You're also neglecting that if the North Pole is melting, then the glaciers probably are, too, given that they're a lot closer to the equator. In addition, if the warming is symmetrical, there will be similar melting at the South Pole, which is almost entirely on land.
A third factor to consider is the weather system, which relies on sea-based and air-based currents. Losing the North Pole would screw up sea currents directly, and (because it's a source of reflection and emission of heat, rather than absorbtion) the air currents indirectly.
In short, countries such as England (which rely on the Gulf Stream to be habitable at all!) will become uninhabitable waste-lands within a relatively short space of time.
But is this even man-made? Well, the Earth is a gigantic dynamic system, which will ALWAYS move towards stable points. It's irrelevent, for the purposes of this, as to whether the stable points are termed "strange attractors" (Chaos) or "points of preferred condition" (Gaia). What matters is why the shift is even taking place.
It's indisputable that humans have had an impact on the atmosphere. A =SUSTAINED= impact. Natural phenomina may have an immediate impact that is far greater, but few natural phenomina of that magnitude last for more than a few days, maybe a few weeks. Humans have been sustaining the level of activity which could -potentially- be destabilising for over a century.
What to do? I'm not sure there is anything anyone =can= do, now. If you think in terms of Newton's Laws, F=m(dv/dt), and integrate from the start of the Industrial Revolution to now, and then work out what kind of opposing force you'd need to counter that, you'd probably get something far greater than humans could achieve before the brunt of the effects had already been and gone.
Throw in the fact that we're not dealing with the nice linear system above, but a horribly complex non-linear system with constantly varying inputs from other non-linear systems, and the best guess you could possibly make will be way way out from whatever the reality will be.
IMHO, humanity has seriously blown it, and the best anyone can really do now is create gene banks of all existing species, with sufficient variation to create viable populations. Humanity's greed and obsession with dominion over everything (including other humans) =may= have brought about the end of humanity itself. From the perspective of those who can't realistically make any difference, no matter what the reality turns out to be, the best bet is to act as if. Preserve the preservable, in case the worst happens. If the worst doesn't happen, then you've still prevented the extinction of any species you've got in the gene bank, which may save other species from the worst that can happen to them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But I didn't see it off the root.
Global warming as a natural phenomenon is a normal event on a long-term cycle. We are not qualified to say whether or not we have a real impact on the cycle, or in fact if we are merely a part of the cycle. As volcanoes and sea rift expansion, as well as natural forest fire activity and other major sources of CO2 are normal causes of an increase in greenhouse gases, perhaps we also are just another factor speeding that cycle along.
Nature "wants" to go through cycles of warmth and coolth. For an excellent science-fiction take on this subject, see Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, which I just read - This is a deliberate self-regulating system, which Earth may or may not be. A coworker points out to me that one way we can determine if life probably exists on other planets is to see if it does go through cycles of hot and cold; Volcanic activity is normal (and life-producing) on our planet. If the planet undergoes volcanic activity, changing its atmosphere, and does not change back, then it seems likely that the system has swung out of control and the planet does not sustain (familiar) life. Earth is known to have gone through such cycles in the past, and still has an abundance of lifeforms on it. It is possible (however arrogant) to think that our effects on the atmosphere are merely an extension or acceleration of natural phenomena.
I am not of course advocating pollution. The kind of pollution we are producing is not the kind of thing we as humans will want to deal with. We dump lots of nasty things into waterways and onto the ground (which leaches into the water table, oh what fun that is - For another book reference, check out Neal Stephenson's Zodiac : The Eco-Thriller.) These types of pollution are difficult to see as anything other than bad; They tend to cause malady, not mutation. Whether or not beneficial mutation will rise from that malady is a seperate discussion.
I try not to get too alarmed about what is probably (to my way of thinking) a fairly natural swing in the global climate, which we may or may not be making a serious change in. The things I worry about as a result of our interference are little issues like dramatic die-off of seaweed, plankton, and algae.
I still want to kill off all the mosquitos, ticks, chiggers, and brown recluse spiders, though. It's not my fault I have a phobia of biting and stinging insects. Blame my upbringing and formative-year-events.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seems that what used to be a comfortable icefield at 0 degrees north lattitude is now swimming in seawater.
About the only ice you'd find at 0 degrees north (or south) latitude is in a long, cold drink - unless the weather is really fscked up...
No, that's only if ice on land melts (e.g. on Antarctica or Greenland). If ice at sea melts, the water level doesn't rise. Put an ice cube in a glass of water. When it melts, the water level stays the same.
You said it, brother!
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There's actually a lot of evidence that the entire oceans were frozen (to a fairly deep depth!) in Earth's geological record. It was the cover story of _Scientific American_ a few months ago.
It hardly seems coincidental that the Cambrian explosion (where you suddenly saw a *lot* of *very* strange critters in the fossil record) occured just after the ice pack melted.
As an aside, anyone who thinks that "40 years is too short to show geological change" should MEMORIZE this article. As I recall, they believe that the global icepack which survived for millions of years melted in 100 years! I've seen other articles suggesting that ice ages have also ended (and begun?) in surprisingly short times - decades, not centuries.
This is very scary because it implies that large climatic changes are closer to transitions between meta-stable phases than a nice smooth transition. (Which makes sense, mathematically, since nonlinear dynamics show "attractors" and abrupt transitions between them (or chaotic periods) instead of the mush you get with linearized dynamics.) This suggests there may be hystersis(sp?), and *that* means that our current global warming may force the climate into a new stable state which can't be easily undone.
(For the record, I'm in the camp that thinks that human factors are significant, but the relative lack of volcanic activity for the last century is probably more important.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Yes, I am a skeptic of scientific reporting. All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry. Maybe, just maybe, if there really is some global warming, it is due to that volcano rather than the fact that I don't carpool.
That's the part that fascinates me a lot--if the earth was so fragile that all the CO2 we released since the Industrial age (and notice that no-one blames pre-industrial man's use of fireplaces for any damage at all) was causing substantial damage, then life as we know it should have ended when Mount Pinatubo blew it's top.
Obviously we shouldn't pee in our drinking water. And it's not like anyone here who wanders about the validity of the global warming reports are supporting polluted air or fecal contamination along our beaches or in eliminating recycling programs which are used to reduce landfill. And it's not like I'm against programs to reduce CO2 emissions because they're generally tied to emissions of other atmospheric pollution.
There is a danger, however, in tying all of these programs to global warming: if global warming is proven to be invalid for whatever reason, and we have all of our ecosphere saving measures in that basket, then will people feel free to pollute more?
"Think Global: Act Local"--what a line of bullshit! I'd rather "Think Local: Act Global", such as getting Mexico to enact better pollution controls so that their air pollution doesn't drift across the US/Mexico Border and pollute Texas...
Actually, it's quite a bit easier to predict long term trends than short-term fluctuations. Just like the stock market: up or down almost randomly on any given day, but a safe 10% growth over long stretches.
The thing I wonder about is why anyone would want to ignore this type of data. All we're being asked to do is to not take everything for granted. The effort required on the individual's part is minimal. Now, if the theories of appocalypse are correct, then we've saved ourselves. If not, than we've still saved small pockets of the natural world, which may not be important to human survival but sure are important to our sense of beauty and responsibility.
The things I observed which give me pause include the admission by one climatologist who admitted in a lecture I attended that as the climate is a chaotic system, they were still having problems getting their computer models to predict anything with any real accuracy beyond a week. Further, they are assuming (at least as I hear it) that mankind has caused damage to the climate by contributing a very small percentage change, which has had a cascading effect on overall weather patterns.
However, the anthropology employed was complete bullshit: the study I listened to basically assumed that mankind's CO2 and methane contributions were 0 until the beginning of the Industrial Age. Yet it's pretty clear from anthropological reports that (a) man used a lot of wood to burn in various fireplaces, campfires, and the like, (b) ancient man had no problems setting fire to an entire forest if it suited him during a war, or for clearcutting, or for farming purposes. (The contribution is set to 0 because it's assumed that the CO2 released from these renewable sources are absorbed by renewed biomass elsewhere in the world--which begs the question why climatologists presume that biomass absorbption of excess CO2 stopped working after 1820.)
The other thing that gave me pause was while I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the whole ozone layer stuff was coming to the limelight. It was at a budget discussion to figure out how our group was going to go to congress to get additional funding. At the meeting we briefly toyed with the idea of hitching our fortunes to the recently discovered evidence for a growing ozone hole (note that we never observed from space a time when there was no ozone hole--the alarmists are concerned the existing hole is growing). After all, a growing ozone layer may indicate an environmental crisis--and as was acknowledged at the meeting, it's easier to convince congress critters of coughing up funding when there is an immediate concern. (Why do you think we send probes to Venus? Because it's an excellent model of the greenhouse effect here on Earth!)
Bah.
Don't get me wrong: these things need to be researched. And we do need to institute pollution curbs on a global scale so we don't destroy the air we breathe--but we need to do these things sensably, rather than giving into the passions of the extremist left who suggest we should simply dismantle our modern industrial society in favor of some sort of "primitivist nature revival" that never existed in the first place.
Where are you getting this absurd "desert wasteland" idea? You do understand that Earth has a very solid self-regulating atmospheric system, don't you?
Why do you think global warming would turn the planet into a desert? If anything it'll make many areas wetter-- warmer air leads to more ocean evaporation, and more clouds + rain. Plus, the increased cloud cover would reflect more sunlight back into space, thus cooling the atmosphere. Remarkable machine, this earth is. Hell it seemed to be unfazed by global catastrophies in the past (compare 1 degree of global warming with, say, a meteor impact that wipes out 98% of all life, which has happened on a few occasions).
This is nothing. It's not worth reverting back to the stone age to prevent any pollution, whether or not it's our fault.
Look at it this way-- it's just as likely that mankind caused the bizarre weather over the past few years, as it is likely that the Mt Pinatubo eruption caused it. A hiccup in the balance of nature. Familiar with chaos theory? The eruption could've upset the cycles a bit, causing the propogation of the disturbance to increase down the road (like a feedback loop) long after the eruption.
But we will probably never know. Whatever happens, we'll be OK. And Earth certainly will be, because it's already been through much worse.
All I know is these activist groups keep wanting money.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
From http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/volg as.html:
Emission rates of SO2 from an active volcano range from 10 million tonnes/day according to the style of volcanic activity and type and volume of magma involved. For example, the large explosive eruption of Mount Pinatubo on 15 June 1991 expelled 3-5 km 3 of dacite magma and injected about 17 million tonnes of SO2 into the stratosphere. The sulfur aerosols resulted in a 0.5-0.6C cooling of the Earth's surface in the Northern Hemisphere. The sulfate aerosols also accelerated chemical reactions that, together with the increased stratospheric chlorine levels from human-made chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) pollution, destroyed ozone and led to some of the lowest ozone levels ever observed in the atmosphere.
From http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/glossary.html:
Mount Pinatubo. A volcano in the Philippine Islands that erupted in 1991. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo ejected enough particulate and sulfate aerosol matter into the atmosphere to block some of the incoming solar radiation from reaching Earth's atmosphere. This effectively cooled the planet from 1992 to 1994, masking the warming that had been occurring for most of the 1980s and 1990s.
CO2 and H2O are both powerful greenhouse gases. Without greenhouse warming the global average temperature would be about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the big concerns of increasing CO2 concentrations is that if the atmosphere warms up, the amount of water vapor present in the atmosphere will also increase. In layman's terms, a warm atmosphere can "hold" more water vapor than a colder atmosphere; see the Clausius Clapyeron equation which shows that saturation vapor pressure (the total "capacity" of the air to "hold" water vapor) increases exponentially with increasing temperature.
As an atmospheric scientist I belive we are carrying on a great experiment, one which has no control experiment to run in parallel. Separating natural climate variability from anthropogenc (man-made) change is one of the biggest challenges we face today. However I encourage anyone who thinks humans aren't having an effect on the environment to take a look at CO2 traces from Mauna Loa which have been kept for over fifty years. There is a steady trend upward that occurs in concert with human emissions. There is little doubt where this CO2 came from.
Concerning the ice ages: variations in the earth's orbit (tilt, eccentricity, precession) are strongly linked with the big ice ages. These occur on scales of tens of thousands of years. However, ice core samples and sea floor samples suggest that the transitions between "normal" climates and "anomalous" climates have happened over only a handful of years, not gradually as was once thought. If we perturb the system hard enough, we could get into another "anomalous" regime (turn off deep convection near Greenland which would shut off the Gulf stream, chilling England etc.).
The truth is, if our climate changes significantly, the earth will keep on turning, millions if not billions of humans may die (think of rising sea levels, mosquito-borne disease etc.), but life will continue. In the end it will not matter who caused what or who was right or who was wrong.
Leigh Orf
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Meteorological stations (the weather guages) in the 19th century were boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of a field. Meteorological stations in the 21st century are boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of an airport tarmac.
This is standard canard. The main component (70%) is measurements over the sea surface. Further, most warming has occurred since 1980-- long after the effect you cite should have appeared. Be careful; the petrochemical industry spends a lot of money spreading such "commonsense" nonsense.
Or what about the ozone hole? [...] And we have no theory today to explain why it subsequently shrunk.
Our lack of understanding is my point, but... this from the 1998 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: "The large ozone losses in the Southern Hemisphere polar region during spring continued unabated with approximately the same magnitude and areal extent as in the early 1990s. [...] These ozone changes are consistent overall with our understanding of chemistry and dynamics."
All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry.
Pure invention. Here are global CO2 levels as measured at the Muana Loa observatory. No discontinuity due to Pinatubo's 1992 eruption. (You're probably thinking of SO2, but you're still overstating.)
Human-caused CO2 increases are certain. Global warming is certain. The first should cause the second. But conceivably we're missing something, the CO2 increases are not causing global warming, and coincidentally some unknown, natural force is the real cause. It's possible. But odds of even, say, 1 in 10 that we're hosing the planet should perhaps give one pause.
Guys like Al Gore.
I've often wondered whether the apparent absence of technological civilizations in the universe might be attributable to politicization of what should be technical decisions rather than nuclear holocaust or other forms of war. All you need is political animals with their paws on the technology decision buttons, (e.g. "I invented the Internet.", said Al Gore) to end a technological civilization. This seems to be an obvious failure mode of any technological civilization -- the animals want the authority of the technology and know how to acquire it: politics. The problem is, a sufficiently developed technological civilization can support a lot of evolution of political animalism before its robust infrastructure finally caves in -- and then you have really sophisticated political animals pretending to be inventors and technical thinkers, riding the top of the thing all the way back into the dust, and then they all scurry back into the weeds whence they came. Once brought down, the nonrenewables such as hydrothermally produced high grade ores, that were so critical for technological civilizatoin's rise, may not exist for a rebound.
It's an interesting intellectual exercise to ask at what point a technological civilization has achieved sufficient robustness in its infrastructure combined with sufficient evolution of its political animals, to pretty much guarantee it will consume all the economically accessible nonrenewables while driving itself into the dirt, to guarantee that planet will never become a spacefaring technological civilization.
Seastead this.
By the way, most of North Africa was farmland two thousand years ago, when it was the bread-basket of the Roman empire. I've heard several stories about what happened. One holds that plowing ruined the soil and allowed desertification, another holds that the rainfall patterns changed. I suspect that there is something to both those ideas. I'm not sure how much of this recent change is due to Aswan and other irrigation projects, and how much is due to shifting rainfall patterns. I've never looked into it.
Back to what I set out to say, there are many temperature series out there. Some of them go back over one hundred years. Reliable global temperature series don't seem possible in the pre-satelite era. Yes, many European cities have temperature series going back way further than that, and we have cores from the Greenland icecap which give us hints about the local-to-Greenland weather for hundreds of thousands of years. There is still some controversy about the conclusions to be drawn from them.
Here are a couple of links:
National Ice Coring Lab This has some ice core data sets, and some perspective on them.
Global Climate Perspectives System These guys have some models and some data up on the web.
Global Temperature Anomolies" This is a NASA site...
This is a fellow who seems to take it as given that the temperatures have increased (I'm still not convinced), but isn't sure about why.
Here is a site put up by some folks who aren't convinced by the popular press coverage of global warming.
I know I've found some much more usefull links in the past, but I can't stumble over them right now. One thing that you want to keep in mind is that ( according to researchers I've talked to) being trendy is vital to getting grant money. If the politicians and the bureaucrats they fund are convinced that global warming is politically significant, you base your grant proposals on the idea that global warming is real, even if the really interesting questions start from another premise. Or, you don't get funded. So while I won't say that anyone is whoring for grants, I will say that the scientific debate might be on rather different terms if it weren't for politics.
See what I've been reading.
Considering that we are coming out of an ice age still, I'm not surprised that ice is melting.
--
People have proposed "seeding" the ocean with algae to reduce carbon dioxide levels and lower the temperature. If they do that, northern North American will be under ice in fifty years.
Global warming is just a theory, people, and a poorly based one at that. I direct you to this article: Contrary thermometers (NASA) before you flame me.
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When ice forms, it makes rings out of the water molecules, which makes it less dense than liquid water. I think...I've done a lot of drugs since high school chemistry.
-B
Before people start posting in panic, even if all the ice at the north pole melted it wouldn't cause sea level to rise... now if the glaciers of Greenland and the south pole all melted, then you can worry.
The reason, of course, is that north pole ice is floating on water so that it's weight is already seen in sea level.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
If you can't work out why melting of the Arctic ice cap would not cause an increase in sea level then I suggest a few remedial experiments with an ice cube and a glass of water.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Have you heard of the concept of insurance? Risk management? Probabilistic thinking?
Here are some things we do know:
the earth used to be a lot warmer, a thousand years ago. That's when the Norse were farming in Greenland, where there is permafrost and desolation today.
The earth has been a lot colder than it is now. Think about the Ice Ages.
The earth was a lot colder than it is now just 500 years ago. Today they call that the mini ice age, and it's what killed off the Norse colonies in Greenland and North America. As recently as 200 years ago, the canals in Holland were freezing over every winter. That hasn't happened for a long time, now. We seem to be coming out of that mini ice age, but slowly and with steps backwards.
Sorry, but we have at least SOME long-range data, that are very preoccupying.
Two British scientists say the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere is higher than for 20 million years.
Sigged!
That's a lot of heat used for melting ice instead of being measured as a temperature increase. Which makes the measure temperature increases even more alarming.
Benny
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
However, to say that the current warming trend is influenced by man would require us to explain some hard facts:
- Volcanic eruptions alone pour out pollutants every year than anything humans can come close to
- Solar cycles seem to be tightly linked with annual variance
- Man could not have had any serious impact on the global warming trends that have been observed in the geological record.
- All historical indicators (that is to say, going back 200+ years), seem to indicate that our current tempratures might be a bit on the cool side, as compared to the average.
Global warming trends will likely continue as long as the Sun keeps powering them. Don't confuse this for an anti-ecological rant. I'm as much a tree-hugger as the next person who grew up in Vermont, and I'd love to see our conservation efforts get a little more reasonable. You cannot, however, base any reasonable discussion of the environment on misinformation (much as many will doubtless try).Now consider the fact that over these last 40 years, mankind has been at war with nature, consuming and polluting and otherwise raping this planet.
Actually, we've been at war with the planet for a lot longer than 40 years. Think of the evolution of black spotted moths in England due to rampant polution (such as soot) in the last century. It was routine for some Native American tribes to completely burn down the forests they lived in, such as was done by California Indians when an area of forest stopped producing adequate amounts of acorns to support the tribe. (The tribe itself would move out of the forest and bug the neighbors for a year or two while the forest healed itself.) It's also believed that it was ancient man who at least contributed to the creation of the Sahara Desert through overgrazing.
There is a commonly accepted "truth" by many that modern man is more destructive than ancient man because we have so much more. But the reality is that ancient man was extremely wasteful--not understanding as we do the value of not destroying an entire forest or no driving an entire heard of buffalo off a cliff for one or two pelts. And no matter how "in tune" or "spiritually connected" (or some other bullshit) ancient man was supposed to be with nature, ancient man did not know the value of land preservation or conservation.
My point is that mankind has been fucking with the environment in ways which make Los Angeles look like a picnic, for much longer than records have been kept. The only difference between conditions today and conditions a thousand years ago is that there is a larger population--but we are more efficient in supporting that larger population through better farming practices and land management than we ever have been before.
*shrug*
If this means we are affecting the environment or not, I dunno. But mankind has been fucking with things for more than just 40, or even a hundred years. We wiped out the mastadons and overgrazed the Sahara looooonnnng before the Industrial Age...
This is the best news I have heard in a long time! Some of us are snatching up property that is about 20 feet above sea level currently. Remember, its at bargain prices right now!
Some of us have *tiny* clues. Like the meteorologist that explained why the 20st century was warmer than the 19th, particulularly after 1950. Think about how you got a temperature reading in 1880 and one in 2000. Meteorological stations (the weather guages) in the 19th century were boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of a field. Meteorological stations in the 21st century are boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of an airport tarmac.
Cities are always warmer than the rural country side. Airport tarmacs are warmer than cow pastures. Comparing todays temperature data with that of the 19th century is scientifically invalid. Climatologists have to use that error-prone data because they have no other. And one of them who are honest will admit that their results are inaccurate.
And then you have that little statistic about "Each year of this decade has been one of the top 15 warmest of the century." The pessimist will see this as a sure sign that SUV's and hairspray are destroying the world. The realist will understand that this is predicted by the oldest and widest-held climatalogical model: the climate has cycles. Only 500 to 1000 years ago there was a mini iceage. 10,000 years ago there was a major iceage, and scandinavia is still rising a couple of centimeters each years because it is no longer weighed down by greenland-like ice sheet.
Or what about the ozone hole? Only in the past few decades have we been able to even detect an ozone hole over the antarctic. We had no theory to explain it in 1985. And we have no theory today to explain why it subsequently shrunk. Perhaps the polar ozone holes also follow a climatic cycle? Perhaps there's was an ozone hole every fifty years and we just don't know it?
Excuse me for not taking this news of doom and gloom with religious certainty. Yes, I am a skeptic of scientific reporting. All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry. Maybe, just maybe, if there really is some global warming, it is due to that volcano rather than the fact that I don't carpool.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
OK, I did state "artic cap", and my 10-100m was wildly incorrect for just the artic ice "cap". Having so many nasty responses, I took a quick peek to dig up at least one reference for that number.
If I stated "artic ice" instead of "cap", then the figure from "U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386-A" is 73.44 meters, given the conditions:
"Sea level rise potential (in meters) [defined as the maximum sea level rise
expected if all glacier ice were to melt in a specified geographic region
based on a density of 0.9 for glacier ice (Robin, 1967), an ocean area of
362X106km2 (National Geographic Society, 1996) and 400 km3 of glacier ice
melted to raise sea level 1mm]."
and
"The total volume of glacier ice in Antarctica is 30,109,800 km3. For
the calculation of sea level rise potential, only the grounded-ice volume
of 29,377,800 km3 was used. The total grounded ice volume includes 25,921,700 km3
for East Antarctica, 3,222,700 km3 for West Antarctic, and 183,700 km3
for the Antarctic Peninsula. The volume of ice rises on the Ross Ice Shelf and
the Ronne-Filchner ice shelves are 5,100 km3 and 44,600 km3, respectively."
So while the "artic ice cap" melting has little impact, that constitutes only ~0.5% of the ice at the poles. And before blasting back anything about how stable Antartic ice is, do some homework on the collapse mechanisms for the West Anatartic ice sheet, cross reference that with weather reports from the Ross Ice shelf, as well as the Wordie, Larsen, Wilkins, and George VI.
Would you like more references?
(Entropy, anyone?)
Welp, I think we just proved that you are an idiot, thank you
(Hint, the earths surface is heated by the sun, not the core)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Pure fat is bad for you, it probably wouldnt' be a good idea to eat a kilogram of butter, but it wouldn't kill you.
Lest say we added 100 milligrams (the same scale your talking about) of nerve-toxin to that fat, and you ate it. Would you die? hell yeh! almost instantaniously, as soon as you touched the stuff.
In other words, there are other issued besides magnitude here. Just beacuse billions of tons of CO2 get pumped into the air each ear naturaly, dosn't mean you can dump 40 pounds of plutonium dust into the atmosphere.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
An interesting question, but --
Think of a glass of water filled with ice. Good -- now think of what happens when the ice melts. Does the cup overflow?
Global warming isn't so much an issue of melting the ice caps and overflowing the oceans onto the cities (I suppose if enough ice melted that was significantly above sea level, that *could* start to happen), as it is a problem of -- when climates rapildly change, what happens to the life that used to live in those specific climates? There are a lot of plants and animals that are particuarly sensitive to climate. When it changes over the course of a few hundred years, the plants can naturally migrate. But plants can't move that fast when climate changes rapidly. (over a period of a few years, let's say.)
I agree with the fringe element here.
In sixth grade we were taught that to be "scientific" meant to have an hypothesis, and then remain completely unbiased while you collect data. Thus proving or disproving your theory. Then other scientists were supposed to pour over your findings for a few years, in order to ensure whether there were any flaws in your data.
Now, there are TONS of instances where this didn't work (so don't waste our time replying with examples please), and it's TIME CONSUMING. But, for the most part it works well.
The problem I have with the global warming theory, is that it's data is restricted to the last hundred years or so. Meteorology is a NEW SCIENCE. Hell, they can't even predict TOMORROW'S weather, how accurate can they be about stuff that happened 100 years ago?
So, granted that there's alot of evidence that could conceivably point to human's destruction of our global weather patterns.... however, THERE IS NO CONTROL GROUP TO COMPARE THIS TO! How do we know what the earth's normal weather cycles are in THE LONG TERM?!
We only just got to the North Pole in the 1950s. How do we know it was even there in the 1850s?
The water level stays the same when floating ice melts. The ice under the water line admittedly weighs less than a corresponding amount of water, but that is exactly offset by the fact that some of the ice is above the water line.
Try it out at home, it's a fairly easy experiment.
Benny
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
ice core
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
When measurements of polar ice thickness are plotted since 1950, we usually assume that there are no local events which could cause such a thing. However, during that period of time there have been increasing numbers of intentional cases of breaking-up of the polar ice, in order to navigate the surface of the polar region.
Recently there were photos of a commercial expedition, using a Russian nuclear-power ice breaker, for those scientists, journalists, and tourists who travelled to the pole by ship. While this may be a comfortable way to get there, it has the direct effect of causing major damage to the ice pack, and increasing the surface area in contact with the ocean. Add to this the vast quantities of excess heat generated by the ship's nuclear reactors, and there is some reason to beileve that there will be localized dammge to the ice pack. Just as with permafrost regions, damage from human presence can be very long-lasting.
It is also worth noting that undersea measurements of polar ice thickness are taken from submarines. Now the overwhelming majority of those subs which cross those cold waters are nuclear-powered. This is a matter of necessity, since the diesel/electric boats are not suited to long runs under the ice. Those nuclear reactors generate vast quantities of heat, which is dissipated in-place, under the ice. Now no one transit by a single ship may cause any measurable change, but the thousands of transits, each emitting many megajoules of energy as heat, can in concert cause measurable melting.
Whether or not there are external effects caused by long-term climactic changes, there are most certainly local causes which must not be ignored.
Free the mallocs!
Ok, here is the deal. The oceans are much like the atmosphere in that there are currents, and eddies, and large scale patterns. The north pole has an interesting phenom that there is this huge rotation from south to north at the ocean floor and then from north to south at the surface. So, you have all this water pouring into the North Pole between Canada and Greenland, and pouring out again. BUT, what is happening due to plate movement and such is that more water is going in then coming out, so all this water is now building at the north pole, all being accomplished NATURALLY, unless humans are the cause of Greenland slowing moving towards North America. Sorry, but there is no greenhouse phenom here, or increased methane emissions from cattle, or what ever. Nature. It does its own thing once in a while.
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
People should remember that Europe is as far north as Hudson's Bay in Canada in North America, and would be much colder without the benefit of the Gulf Stream. So anything that messes with this flow could mess with European weather. This is known as "Not a Good Thing" (tm).
My own take on this is that Global warming is basically increasing the amount of energy in a basically chaotic system. Given that, this would probably increase the range of variability in that system. This means that things would not just get warmer smoothly, but that there would be periods of more extremely weather, warmer and colder, wetter and dryer, etc. all around the planet.
While I do not think that this would lead to a new iceage, there are some, especially in the crackpot community that do.
There are also some legitimate scientists who are alarmed by the possibilities. It is certainly worth investigating.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"So what are you going to do if it turns out you're wrong and catastrophe ensues?"
I am not stopping you from eating organic breakfast cereals or riding a bicycle to work or donating to Nature Conservancy to buy up land or wearing cotton shirts instead of sythetic. I am imposing nothing on you. Yet you reciprocate by advocating increased taxation, lobbying to ban my vehicles, deride me for not voting for your candiate despite the fact that every single one of his non-environmental policies are tyrannical, and even spit at my feet when I inadvertantly toss an empty coke can into a waste basket. And to top things off you accuse me of killing fish and poisoning streams.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The atmosphere is a very myterious thing and we really don't understand most of it. Under these circumstances I think it behooves mankind to act in a very conservative matter when dealing with the climate.
A little known fact is that more important then overall cooling or warming is the degree with which the tempratures fluctate within the year. Over the past few years we have seen the extremes of both cold and hot, wet and dry swing wildly. Someone has to calculate the costs of floods, forest fires, droughts and mudslides into their calculations. It seems like some people only want to consider the costs to the businesses but not to the society at large.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Yes, species have always gone extinct, but never before has one speicies been the exterminator of so many others.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Global warming is a certainty. Here is an excerpt from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 1999 climate review:
The Global mean temperature for 1999 was the 5th warmest on record since 1880. The warmest and second warmest years were 1998 and 1997. The top 6 warmest years have been in the 1990's. Each year of this decade has been one of the top 15 warmest of the century.
Certainly, some climate changes happen naturally. However, it would be quite a coincidence if this rapid change had a natural cause at just the time that an obvious man-made cause appears: elevated atmospheric CO2 levels.
If there is one fact to know about the global environment, it is this: we have no clue. Water at the pole is not the first surprise. For decades, we poured out chemicals that appeared safe; they were non-flammable, non-corrosive, non-toxic, non-reactive-- what could be better? Well, in 1974 Molina and Rowland pointed out that these chemicals, CFCs, destroy stratospheric ozone, potentially allowing UV to devastate crops worldwide (not to mention causing skin cancer). Imagine the surprise: sometime totally inocuous like spray deoderant could devastate all life on earth. What a thought. It was like discovering that salsa causes tectonic instability. We had no clue. Since CFCs are stable enough to survive in the atmosphere for decades, estimates are that ozone levels will not return to normal until about 2050. That is, I will probably never live one day on this earth with a normal ozone layer.
But then everyone spent 10 years collecting data and running sophisticated computer models, and we got on top of the problem. Cool, right? Except that in 1985 the massive ozone hole over Antarctica was discovered. Totally unexpected. Didn't show in any computer model. No one had any idea why a hole should appear there instead of, say, over the continental US. After all that study, still we had no clue.
There is no reason to expect the global warming phenomena to be any more predictable than ozone depletion has been. In all likelihood, our CO2 emissions amount to a rampaging charge to fundamentally alter our entire planet. The eventual outcome? We have no clue.
Global Warming is in fact a secret Canadian undertaking - designed to make our vast expenses of frozen wasteland habitable again.
I can't wait to buy my cottage up on the cozy northern shore of Ellesmere Island.
=)
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Remember the Lorenz butterfly, one of the most populate demonstrations of a strange attractor?
In weather, like other phenomena governed largely by chaotic forces (read your Mandelbrot), transitional periods from one stable state to another involve highly erratic behaviour.
What I believe we're seeing now is the erratic behaviour in global weather patterns that will result in more long-term stability. Whether that will be warmer, colder, or whatever remains to be seen.
If you want evidence of erratic behaviour, just look at the number of records (record storms, droughts, cold, hot, rain, forest fires, locusts, etc.) that are set every year - we've had more extremes recently than in the past, even for this century when weather records are fairly complete.
Just live in your happy world and watch football.
Wah!
Here are some things we do know:
the earth used to be a lot warmer, a thousand years ago. That's when the Norse were farming in Greenland, where there is permafrost and desolation today.
The earth has been a lot colder than it is now. Think about the Ice Ages.
The earth was a lot colder than it is now just 500 years ago. Today they call that the mini ice age, and it's what killed off the Norse colonies in Greenland and North America. As recently as 200 years ago, the canals in Holland were freezing over every winter. That hasn't happened for a long time, now. We seem to be coming out of that mini ice age, but slowly and with steps backwards.
There is no reason to think that humanity has had any affect on the weather. If there is a warming trend today, it is most likely a return to the between-ice age conditions of 1000 years ago.
See what I've been reading.
Well, obviously, but ice floating in water displaces an amount of water equal to its own weight-- which, when it melts, is also equal to its own volume. So the water level stays constant. (Although, I should think it would change by some negligible but possibly measureable amount -- ice is fresh water which has a lower density than salt water.)
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* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
A dynamic equilibrium has no fixed value, but does have a reasonably well-defined RMS state, within a fairly well-defined variance. (NOTE: That IS the correct term. The "mean" generally won't mean anything, but the root mean square value, over a long enough period of time, usually will.)
You also seem to not understand what Chaos/Gaia are. They are non-linear dynamic systems which orbit one out of a set of fixed points. If the system gets a sufficiently-large push, it will leap from one point to another, and then orbit that. This is all very basic stuff, and I feel sad that anyone with the wits to read Slashdot hasn't got an understanding of these fascinating mathematical systems.
But then, maybe the difference is that most geeks, when confronted with something new, are curious enough to investigate. Anyone who flames, because they can't be bothered to reach for a scientific dictionary, is unworthy of any status as a geek. Being curious does not make one a genius, but it does make one a little more understanding, every day.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anyhow, for what it's worth, let me try to clarify the sea level thing. Melting sea ice has no effect on sea level (eureka!) because a floating object displaces exactly its weight of water. Melting glaciers and thermal expansion of water can cause sea level to increase. Both of these effects are basically inevitable in the coming century or two.
There's a countervailing phenomenon, which is that the snowfall onto the glacial landmasses (a.k.a. Greenland and Antarctica) is likely to increase under global warming, since warmer polar air can deliver more precipitation. This phenomenon would cause sea levels to drop. Best bets are that this phenomenon will be much smaller than the others, and sea level will rise gradually, unless there is a massive failure of a huge glacier.
The most likely candidate for that is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would be capable of raising sea level a few meters more or less abruptly if it were to slide into the ocean.
Now about the "still recovering from the ice age" thing, that's true about sea level, since the continents are still bouncing back from the weight of the huge land glaciers from a mere 20,000 years ago. This reduces the volume of the polar ice shelves, forcing sea level up in other places. So there is a background sea level rise that was ongoing before the industrial revolution.
However, the "still recovering from the ice age" is total nonsense regarding global mean temperature. Prior to 1900, global mean temperature peaked 6000 years ago and slowly declined since then.
Michael Tobis Ph.D. (Climatology, U Wisc Madison 1996)
mt
We've been conditioned to think that global warming is a reality. Unfortunately, those scientists trumpeting GW usually start their "centuries-long" studies of GW starting somewhere in the 1400's -- which, according to the geological constructs that allow us to see back into the past, was one of the coldest times since the last Ice Age.
We have to remember that the Earth is not some climatologically stable planet. There are many, many factors involved in the various warming and cooling periods, and while man is no doubt a factor, it's not as much as some would think. Studies at UAH's and NASA's Global Hydrology Climate Center by Dr. John Christy, et al. have shown that the GW predictions are off by a factor of ten -- the earth has warmed up, but not at the rate even the most conservative models predict.
Am I for being environmentally unfriendly? Nope. Am I for not worrying about rising water levels? Nope. Am I for playing Chicken Little? Nope. We must, through science, strive to understand the situations at hand and try to solve them. This is a case of quod erat demonstrandum, and we've got to just let the facts speak for themselves, rather than trying to extrapolate why it's happening from small statistical samples.
Of course, maybe the George Strait song about "Oceanfront Property in Arizona" will come true . . . -veg-
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<><
-- Geof F. Morris
As an experiment (and yes, kids at home can do this too:), partially fill a container with water and a handfull of ice (making sure that no ice is touching the bottom of the container). Note the level of the water. Allow the ice to melt. Note the level of the water. The levels of the water should be the same (or the new level slightly lower due to evaporation).
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
There is no way 10 billion people and an industrialized economy can effect the environment.
Buy an SUV.
Eat red meat.
Vote Bush.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
A good story HERE about how sea levels actually appear to be falling.
It's time for the EPA to crack down on Santa Claus and his polluting toy factories. A reasonable first step would be a mandate that Santa put scrubbers on his smoggy toxic smokestacks. This goes to show you what happens when century after century of unregulated toy manufacturing is allowed to occur. I smell Al Gore somewhere in all this.
Is global warming a product of mankind's industrialization, or is it just the natural cycle of things, brought on by such factors as the Earth's orbital precession and the like? To be honest, I don't know. Here's what I do know. We are doing things that impact our environment negatively, and they are affecting the health of real, live people. To say that we should scale back environmental restrictions because Rush Limbaugh thinks we're heading for a new Ice Age is ridiculous. What about cleaning up our factories and vehicles because it's the right thing to do?
Oh, wait
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The New World Order is upon us, and it's about damned time.
If the artic cap has thinned 45% (!!!!), then according to global warming models, the sea should have risen ~10-100 meters, depending on the model
No, you fool. These models do not exist, you have invented them. The melting of the Arctic ice will not affect sea levels a lot because most of it is displacing water already.
The article implied that it was possible to get a *tour* to the North Pole. Where can you do that? Sign me up!
http://www.h artwick.edu/geology/work/VFT-so-far/glaciers/glac
The first two sentences seem to imply that, geographically speaking, these seemingly alarming events are not necessarily unusual:
We think of ice caps on our planet as "normal," because in the recent past there has always been polar ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. However, if we look at all of Earth history we find that there are also extended periods in which there were no polar ice caps.
It's clear that the Earth's climate is currently going through a warming period. It has been since the last ice age, ca. 18,000 years ago I think. I've visited glaciers in both Canada and New Zealand that make this point dramatically with markers that show where the foot of the glacier was located in a particular year. The Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, for example, has retreated something like 1.5 miles in the past 100 years. (That's from memory, and I could easily be off by a factor of 2 either way on either of those numbers). Or just consider that Yosemite Valley in California was carved by glaciers. Obviously the climate has changed just a bit since *that* happened.
But what this really comes down to is two things. First, what is humanity's contribution to global warming? Others on this thread have pointed out a number of possible alternate possible sources of change such as solar activity or changes in the Earth's orbit or tilt. Second, is global warming necessarily a bad thing? There are a number of reasons to believe it might be: more intense drought-flood cycles, rising sea levels, increased range of traditionally tropical diseases a la West Nile virus in New York City. Then again, global warming might have some benefits too. The obvious one is making land arable at more arctic latitudes (a reply of the Vikings-in-Greenland scenario). Less obvious but even more importantly, it might make it easier for me to get a tan here in Seattle <g>.
Seriously, we have virtually no clue what the truly long-term cyclical implications of climate change are; the warming part of a global warming-cooling cycle may be important to, say, the development of certain ocean currents that support various aquatic ecosystems. But who really knows?
I'm reminded of the fact that, for decades, U.S. Forest Service policy was to quash wildfires as soon as they occurred, because letting forests burn is obviously a bad thing, right? Except it turned out that the forests need fire in order to remain healthy. The result of decades of fire suppression has been the buildup of unnatural amounts of fuel, which has contributed to the disastrous fire situation that the U.S. has encountered this summer. Or to use a Lorentz butterfly-wing-flapping chaos analogy: If I sneeze right now, I might start eddies that end up developing into a hurricane that destroys Haiti. Then again, if I don't sneeze right now, I might not disrupt the airflow that is going to end up developing into the hurricane that destroys Haiti.
When it comes to long-term climactic changes, we (including me!) are all sitting here pontificating about how we should behave to optimize a tremendously complex, probably chaotic, system whose inputs, outputs, and function we really don't understand. Given our incredible lack of knowledge, I'm inclined not to thrash and scream about humanity's influence at this point. Yes, we should watch and study, and we should enhance and tune our models, and we should take sensible steps to minimize obvious human impact on the environment. But let's not try to undo the Industrial Revolution just yet.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
There's another ecological problem that isn't being addressed: sound pollution in our oceans.
A lot of marine mammals use echolocation to navigate, and all the marine mammals "chatter" to one another in their family/social groups.
Water is a very good medium for sound transmission. Boat propeller noise carries for hundreds of kilometers.
In many areas, the noise from props is loud enough to be the equivalent of a nearby jackhammer. The marine life *literally* can not echolocate or communicate.
This is a growing concern. We humans have it easy: when we're on a noise construction site, we can always use hand signals. Whales, dolphins, sea lions, seals and other marine life don't have that option.
How does this relate to the article? Well, those "tourist icebreakers" are deafening the Beluga and Narwhal populations in the Arctic oceans. There are only a few tens of thousands of Beluga, and they need to echolocate and communicate.
The poor bastards are dying off more quickly than ever before, and prop noise is now being considered a factor in their decline.
Please don't assist in their destruction by participating on icebreaker cruises.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Just lastnight I watched the NOVA Episode Warnings from the Ice on PBS. Though they did point out that the speed of the ice melt during the 20th Century is exceptionally high compared to what can be determined from ice core samples, they indicated that it is at least partially due to volcanic activity directly under the Antarctic ice sheet.
I strongly believe that we are in a period of global warming, however, our impact is likely not as significant as geothermal activity, including ash and gases in the atmosphere from other volcanoes. I do feel though, that it is our responsibility to the future generations that we limit any negative impact we do cause to the environment. Critical at the moment is reducing forest destruction since forests are the 'lungs of the planet' removing CO2 and producing O2. (you can help the rainforest by visiting here or here.
The complete transcript of NOVA: Warnings from the Ice is available on the PBS website.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I think I have an alternate explanation of what may be causing the ice to melt abnormally. Are there a lot of icebreakers in the area? :-)
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* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."