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."
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.
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.
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!!
Alright, so it's ok if we pollute because the earth will adapt to it. Sure.
The problem is we might not. I've always wondered at the incredible foolishness of people who frantically cling to the idiotic notion that the massive amounts of carbon dioxide we've pumped into the atmosphere, and the disruptive change in global climate over the past few years, are unrelated COINCIDENCES. I mean, what do you think happens to all our pollutants? They magically disappear? Do you believe in the tooth fairy as well? You think all those trees are going to be able to handle all the excess carbon dioxide? Hell, they might have if the same people who insist that they can hadn't chopped so many of them down.
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.