Slashdot Mirror
Antarctic Ice Sheet Growing?
kraut_juice writes: "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet just may have stopped melting, scientists reported on Thursday. Experts have been saying there is little evidence that global warming is responsible for melting the ice sheet."
How long until it hits australia/south america/NZ at this rate?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
The penguins are suffering this year because of the strange behaviour down there.
Every year i hear "Global Warming is Occuring" and "The icecaps are melting", but then i also hear "The icecaps are expanding! another ice age is coming!"
-make up your scientific minds already-. You're worse than the local weatherperson.
Now.. do i need this fleece sweater or not?!
It's shrinking as well. The iceberg reported in the link was enough to cause a concern for shipping lanes, at the time. I don't know whatever happened to it.
Also, the only thing that anyone involved in the science of the whole thing is that global warming will have an effect on the climate. Its anybody's guess, really. I could mean that in the sort term temperatures rise a little allowing snow to fall in places in which it used to be too cold to snow in large quantities resulting in more sun light being reflected back. Who knows? The problem as I see it is not climate change itself. The climate will change with or without our pollution. The problem it seems is our unwillingness to deal with the fact that we will face problems. Again, contingency is seen as a waste, and disaster is seen as the failure of those who were supposed to have the contingency that was so wasteful. Shit happens. Seas rise, lakes dry up, rocks fall from the sky and stars explode.
None of the experts think global warming can effect the ice sheets, yet. These ice sheets are huge. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is over 4km thick. The bottom of the ice will not feel global warming for hundereds of years.
We'll all be dead before global warming has any real effect on these ice sheets. So don't worry be happy?
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
Global warming is incredibly complex - it does not mean that everything is the same except that the temperature is a few degrees warmer everywhere.
Specifically, there were some predictions that GLOBAL warming would cause LOCAL cooling and increased snowfall. The reason is simple - increased temperatures means increased evaporation and increased clouds. Some early naive rebuttals thought that the cloud cover would increase globally, reducing the amount of sunlight and throttling global warming, but more sophisticated models (and experience) shows that there will be stronger "high pressure bubbles" that keep the skies clear of all clouds for prolonged periods. Read: expect more droughts, and more severe droughts.
In the high latitudes, there's been relatively little cloud cover or snowfall because cold air can't hold much moisture. I live in Colorado and can definitely see that here - we get heavy snow in the fall and spring, but in deep winter a heavy snowfall will be 2-3 inches instead of 9-12 inches. Global warming means that upper atmosphere warms up enough to sustain more clouds and more moisture, so you'll see local temperature drop and increased snowfall.
I saw a map of predicted changes over North America a while back. There were small pockets over SE Alaska and coastal British Columbia (IIRC) that showed modest temperature drops, but most of the rest of the continent showed larger temperature increases. In the dustbowl states the temperature was much higher.
Bottom line - the real question here is if this was predicted by the current global warming models.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
As you point out unless something is done about the problem then the effects of global warming could be disastrous, but the causal link that using aerosols (with cfc's)(or any one of a hundred atmospheric no-no's) is not clear in most peoples heads and hence convincing them that the massive spend is necessary is going to be difficult. I can give you a very simple example in London there is a flood defence system which is basically a system of barriers that can be swung up or down to protect London against high tides even though the barriers have been raised several times to protect the city against floods. The money spent on this is still considered by some to be a waste.
A must read for both sides: The Satanic Gases.
If the ice were melting you'd complain about that. The ice is getting thicker, you complain about that. There is no pleasing you.
I just finished a graduate-level Physics of the Weather class. The strange thing about global warming vs. cooling is that both sides are right. It depends on which scale you look at. For example, the long-term trend is towards warming while the short-term trend is towards cooling. You look at the graph of (estimated, very estimated) temp vs time, and it looks somewhat like a sine wave with a period of 10,000 years with a superimposed sine wave with a period of 400 years. In other words, it's a graph of something with changes occuring at different frequencies. For any EE that knows the slightest thing about FFT's, it's obvious. Apparently for your average journalist or weatherman, the concept is above them. When you mention changes with a complicated system, you need to include the scale. Are you talking about warming over a 100 period or our overall cooling trend?
We should have spent all of the money we've
wasted over the years on Environmentalism and
built up some kind of defensive asteroid shield..
Their's REAL environmental protection for you...
BTW, we really should all drive alternatively
fueled vehichles (sp?), not for environmental
reasons, but to stop terrorism...
hard core geek-ware
First of all, the only time we hear about "Global Warming" is during the summer; ironically the same time that temperature (in the northern hemisphere anyway, I'll address this later) is, in fact, rising! I really hope that the predictable rise in temperature in Summer isn't that much of a surprise to anyone.
But what really confuses scientists is the fact that this "Global Warming", aka "Summer" happens at a completely different time of the year in the southern hemisphere. I am thoroughly convinced that for the sake of some agenda (which again, I will address later) these "scientists" are ignoring all that "Winter" that occurs between the cyclical warmings, in favor of reporting a constant heightening of temperatures worldwide.
That, or course, is pure balderdash, but these "scientists" need SOMETHING to justify the millions of research dollars they leach from the public tax coffers. What is actually going on is that these "scientists" really aren't the great, prophetic thinkers they promote themselves as.
Every argument I have heard supporting "Global Warming" indicates that the effects of this phenomena won't be observed for hundreds, even thousands of years! That's easy to say when nobody now will be alive to disprove their theory. Present them with a very current, very REAL problem that affects us today, and their true ignorance wouldn't be hard to spot.
But year after year, we give credance to these "scientists" who make a good living by spouting theory and conjecture that has no basis on reality. When are we going to expose these charlatans for the fakes they are? When are we, as taxpayers, going to end the exhorbitant flow of cash into the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon the world's peoples?
I propose we organize a similar movement that acknowledges the global cooling (Winter, for us laypersons) that is always occuring SOMEWHERE in the world. Perhaps the funding for this research should come from these "Global Warming" funds, as there is at least equal evidence supporting a "Global Cooling" theory.
Thank you for your time.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
The polar ice caps both north and south are getting thicker and bigger.Just like the few half-brain cell types who still believe in global warming.Come on huge climatic changes occured long before man or woman for that matter set foot on our lovely little planet.Catch on the earth is a living, breathing,ever changing eco planet thing.GROW-UP learn to read the signs that gaia gives and adapt!
derrick the annoited one
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/i ce020117.html
:-)
This one gets the science a little better.
Too bad no one is reading this low.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
Summary: The majority of the Anarctic continent is isolated from the rest of the world when it comes to weather patterns. Most research stations aren't in the isolated part, they are in the most northerly portions of the continent. They are warming. The isolated part of Antarctica is cooling. It's basically a re-analysis of existing data that has resulted in this conclusion.