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Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses
Cally writes in: "The BBC reports that the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a 200m thick ice floe covering 3,250 sq km, has disintegrated. This is terrible news. The widely respected British Antarctic Survey are quoted as saying "We knew what was left would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering[...] [It is hard] to believe that 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." As a Greenpeace member who's been following the debate for over a decade, it's hard not to feel aggrieved at those with their own agenda who have pushed the theory that global climate change isn't happening. Risk = probability x consequence..." The big iceberg is a separate event.
We need some up here in Maine! Bad drought.
You mean - Ice Melts cause the sun is hot? Im gonna have to jump on the side of the facts that say "global warming is bullshit" just like those before me in the 70s said global cooling was bullshit. Id like to dedicate this thread to the brave souls who stopped and realized that 2+2!=5 in the global warming bad science debate. In their memory and honor, post good links that show that global warming is about as real as my chance to score.
For those that disagree, please tell me im a mo-ron, but lets see your URLs as well
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The article said 500 Billion Tonnes. Lets not start overreacting and and a couple orders of magnitude.
In that case, we'll destroy 500 million billion tonnes!
Would it happen as fast? Probably not, but the fact is that the earth will change if we do anything or not.
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...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated -- massively. Only in the past thousand years or so has the temperature leveled out at a rather warm plateau. But if you look at a statistical chart of the earth's history over the past few million years you'll see wide temperature swings that have absolutely nothing at all to do with humanities actions or inaction.
I know it's nice to think we've become so powerful we can disintigrate millions of billions of tons of ice just by driving to the quick-e-mart, but in reality it's probably nothing more than the sun outputting a little more energy than normal.
A PR comapny if ever there was onr. Greenpeace's only motivation is the continuation of itself.
A few years ago they created a huge amountof havoc over plans to decommision an oil platform. They cited the huge environmental damage caused by the radioactivity, without actually considering that this was natural radioactivity. The net result of the media misinformation was that the platform had to be dismantled at great cost, and actually caused considerably more pollution, and took up a great deal of landfill spcae when otherwise it would have served as a habitat for lots of rare marine life.
And I get a bit fed up of them giving me the hard sell for donations. I would have much more of an urge to do this if their salepeople weren't on commision.
Given that we are constantly learning about various cycles in global climate, some of which seem to span over thousands of years ( E.g. NASA: The Sun-Weather connection), you can't possibly claim for certain that any temperature fluctuations over the past 10, 20 or 50 years are due exlusively to our behaviour.
I'm not against cleaning up the earth, I just think that global warming isn't a good argument.
For comparison, how much water is in Lake Titicaca? About 9 trillion kg. Over a thousand times as much. And how much would global sea levels rise if Titicaca drained into the ocean? Negligible.
It seems as though Slashdot has expanded from making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted claims about technology and privacy to making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted and non-mathematical claims about the environment.
I'm glad somebody pointed it out.
Thank you.
What did it do to the "Envirenment" of Antartica? This does sound like a huge sheet of ice.
I just heard that penguins (real ones, not linux geeks) have been dieng in Antartica. How would this breakage effect them?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
From what I understand, Man produces about 1% of all of the planets cloro-floro carbons (greenhouse gases). If we cut production completely, we would end up with a negligible effect.
In addition to that, we produce carbon dioxide thru processes like, say, breathing. Carbon dioxide is what plants breathe with. More C02 means more plants! Oh no!!!
Finally, who caused the last Ice Age? But more to the point, who raised the global temperature enough to get us out of the Ice Age? Actually, nobody knows for sure, but I highly doubt it was because the cave-men had too many campfires.
Perhaps we can change the global temperature to some small degree (no pun intended), but the natural processes that take place on the earth (volcanoes, most notably) do much more to raise the global temperature than Man could ever hope to achieve.
Yup, it sucks, but we're pretty much at the mercy of our planet. Not the other way around.
People do realize that for 6 months (during the fall and winter in the northern hemisphere), it is continously daylight in Antartica, right? Of course the ice cap there is going to shrink.
Last summer, when it was dark there, it was reported that the ice cap expanded, so what is the big deal?
I'll bet you in 6 months, Greenpeace will be saying the northern polar ice cap is melting too.
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The real problem is all the salt in the ocean, it is eventually gonna melt all the ice. We need to get rid of it NOW. It is probably caused by the road commision spreading so much in the winter --to melt the ice on the road, which then drains off into the creeks and streams, then to the rivers and then the ocean, making it salty! Stop using salt to melt road ice, and things in the ocean will stop melting.
Will these two phenomenon affect sea water salinity? I read recently that decreased salinity is a serious threat to the sub ocean currents that keep our global climate stable. Does anyone have a link that discusses the point?
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It always ticks me off that the Greenpeace people oppose anything that creates greenhouse gasses while at the same time protesting nuclear power which is the only real way to get free of greenhouse gas emmisions. That is unless we decide to go back into the stone age as many of them suggest. If they weren't such jackasses about the nuclear power situation public opinion might be much different and greenhouse emmission might be significantly less.
The alternative power that they keep on trying to push is a myth. When you look at actual output, it is trivial to any real source. You aren't going to run a 60 MWe silicon refining plant in the northwest with solar panels and windmills. It isn't going to happen. Not unless the price is increased 10-fold. Sure you can power your house as they always point out. But your house is 2 KW load. Industry takes up far more power than housing.
The only way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses is to stop burning coal and gas. Thats it. And it has to be done now instead of 30 years from now when the alternative power myth becomes useful (probably more like 50).
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Heh! You said "titicaca"!
Am I the only one tired of hearing from groups like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and PETA?
I swear, the world is overflowing with whiners.
This is the day I finally stop reading slashdot. Already it is full of stupid stories but this is the worst. The traditional media has completely fallen for the myth of global warming but I thought that the people here had more sense. Clearly not. Goodbye
Actually more water != higher sea level - there are some other factors.
Ocean Bed Compaction due to increased water mass may compensate, Gravitational influences... this is just from memory so there are bound to be more.
That said, the sea being in your living room is a problem whatever the cause. I better learn to swim.
They've always happened, and alway will (as long as the sun burns). Nevertheless, small pressure groups imagine themselves as Canute, and scream let us attempt to halt progress and try (in an extremely futile manner) to stop these natural phenomena.
As for the individual chunk of ice breaking away, I would ask how long has it actually been closely observed for (50 years, 100 years, not very long I'll venture). Should our accurate records go back, for example, 10000 years I'm sure that this would not be seen as an unusual or isolated event.
I am getting very nervous with these developments. I live less than 5 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and only 5ft above sea level.
:-)
What to do? I am not certian at this time, but I guess when I inherit my mom's property in North Florida at 150ft above sea level, I will have Ocean Front Property
I just have to remember to move or learn to tread water!
A Jedi doesn't drink Coors, a Jedi Drinks Guinness or Bass!
If you're unsure where you stand on the issue of global warming, you might want to look at the following two graphs. The first shows that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising. There is no real question that this is much human induced. At the same time, global temperatures are also dramatically rising. Here the extent of human influence is more debatable. It is possible that an apparent cause (rising CO2) and an apparent effect (rising temperatures) are both happening independently but, coincidentally, at the same time. And, also at the same time, there is some other, unknown force causing the entire planet to heat. It truly is possible. But I wouldn't personally bet the world on that.
The St Roch, commanded by Sergeant Larsen, needed 28 months to complete its first traverse of the NW passage, during WW2. (Basically defending the Canadian Arctic from our insensitive American allies.) The recreation of its voyage, in 2000, encountered clear sailing in waters that had been choked with ice sixty years earlier, providing very clear evidence of global warming.
Where you're completely wrong is with regards to carbon dioxide emissions, the primary vehicular contributor to global warming. CO2 emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption (no pollution control gear can make the CO2 go away), and the US market chooses larger and thirstier vehicles than every other significant market. No matter how much emissions gear you have on your Chevy Suburban, it's still a fuel-sucking greenhouse gas factory.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
According to most scientistics, the retreat in the West Antarctic ice sheet has been occuring for 10,000 years.
Also on BBC, Ice thickens in West Antarctica
Sun is hotter, but shrinking (mass energy conversion, you know).
Maybe we should realize that perhaps some of the global warming hype is just hype. Everytime there is a heat wave on the news coasts, there a new round of global warming stories. Normal climate variability is large, and modern winters are not the warmest ever (or even in modern history). Check out Minnesota 1877. The observed long-term warming trend since 1900 is not unusual in terms of climate history.
BTW, risk of Kyoto protocol is followed in 100% of the expected cost, because it is certain damage to world economy.
...or that it wasn't the north american continent that disintegrated
Quoting from the ' British Antarctic Survey' article:
' As it is already floating the disintegration of Larsen will have no impact on sea level. Sea level will rise only if the ice held back by the ice shelf flows more quickly onto the sea.'
oh well, i guess that's terrible news for all you doomsayers.
You don't have to know much physics to know that when floating ice melts it doesn't raise the water level at all. And even if you DIDN'T know this, they mention this in the article, had you bothered to read it.
It seems like most of the people complaining about this post didn't read the article (including whoever submitted it). The article never really says the ice melting is a result of global warming, but states its due to LOCAL weather changes occuring. Now I'm not saying global warming isn't real, but this event isn't necessarily good evidence of that by itself.
How many of you have been to china? Seen any pictures of the Yangzte River? Ever been up close enough to it to see the wonderful color it is? How about the fact that China planned to divert another river
using nuclear weapons.
Now, lets get away from China, regardless of the fact that they are 1/6th the worlds population. The greenhouse effect is not a myth. I cannot believe the level of ignorance being shown on here. Hell, considering we're supposed to be at least partially enlightened a generation.
I feel incredibly confident about the world my children will grow up in. Lets hope we get some interplanetary space travel developed, or at least make contact, otherwise we'll right screwed.
rant--;
.
It's great to be looking out for the earth and all, but please avoid supporting bad science.
Looking to Greenpeace for facts is like looking to Salon for the same.
The issue that arises is, do any of the doomsayers really know what it means for this large chunk of ice to separate from the main flow? We just don't have enough historical data to honestly say what effect it will truly have. As proved countless times, mother nature does more damage to computer models than those same models predict we do to her.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's classic fun listening to you yanks wank on about how it's
- a conspiracy
- its crazy
- its "bad science"
- it ain't the american way
- (oh god this ones the best) American suv's are *cleaner* than all those third world wrecks LOL
I guess you all know now, without realising, what it must feel like to have a dependency that needs facing before you can get a cure - you're like alcholics in the denial phase.
I'll give all you fact haters a link http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/reports.htm that'll help a bit.
"Its sunny out-side! Don't these enviroweenies get it!" LOLOL
Is global climate change happening? Probably.
But it happens all the time. We've had ice ages and hot spells in the last 1,000 years and none of it is related to man's activity.
That's the part that makes rational people laugh at greenspeace. And college student are my favorite because they find out that climate changes over the years and they're shocked. Its like somebody told them Santa Claus doesn't exist. Its so cute.
Please explain to me why is so worrying about ice flocks melting in the poles. When I was a kid I remember that in science class we put an ice cube in a cup and filled it with water up to the rim. Even when part of the ice cube was outside the cup, once it melted the water did not spill because ice is much less dense than water. So, how would the poles melting affect the global oceanic levels?
I realize something so obvious would already have occurred to scientists, that's why I'm asking which is the little fact that I'm missing. I think that even the fact that the south pole ice cap is earth-based (as opposed to floating on the ocean) would not matter, considering that 3/4 of Earth's surface is water (and, the first lands to be flooded would be Antarctica's themselves, giving more liquid surface again)
Someone please enlighten me
Damn, Mulder must've found the spaceship!
Could somebody tell us what the consequences are ? Precisely?!?
Common sense says that when billion tonnes of ice will melt, it will go somewhere?? My house is on the top of a hill but what about others?
Are we 0+ (zero plus ) on the ice-age cycle?
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God: Voltaire is dead!
The trends have been measured over several thousand years using ice cores and sediment analysis.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Using the figures you quote (I haven't read the article yet, and I don't know the density of ice)
The amount is ~2.16e14 kg or 216 million billion kg (US billion)
I'm guessing you either divided by the density when you should have multiplied, or you forgot that 1 Km sq = 1,000,000 m sq not 1,000 m sq
Scientific data -- and not anecdotal stories -- does suggest a warming trend for the Earth. I'm quite convinced that "global warming" is, indeed, happening -- at least in the short term.
However: We don't know if global warming is a long-term event, or if humanity is the sole (or even most important cause) of any changes in climate. Consider, for example, ice core evidence from Greenland, which shows how the Earth's climate has undergone radical short-term changes, long before humans were a factor. NASA recently noted changes in the Sun's output. Over the last 10,000 years the global climate has significantly warmed, and I don't see how we can make absolute statements based on a few years (maybe a century) of research.
I'm not in favor of pumping our atmopshere full of chemicals and garbage, regardless of global warming. I am in favor of rational, scientific debate, as opposed to the scare-mongering going on at both ends of the political spectrum.
All about me
Considering that we'be been living with the (after)effects of the Little Ice Age for the past couple of centuries, I find it difficult to be concerned... Climate fluctuation's been around longer than our race, and will continue after we're dead or fled from the planet. Deserts form, mass extinctions occur, with or without our "help."
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The purpose of your reactor is to deplete the uranium by fission. When this happens its fission products are typically radioactive and it produces transuranics (like plutonium) by neutron absorption than are also radioactive. This is no-shit radiation. Its not bullshit like radioactive water discharges or similar small things. This must be shielded and buried to protect people. Typically it is put in a water pool for about a year or two to reduce the short lived radioactivity (therby reducing most of the radioactivity). It will still be life-threatening without sheilding for your lifetime. 10,000 years is BS. Its not going to kill you in 1,000 years (unless by increasing the 'risk' of cancer).
The uranium itself is the same though. If you want to chemically seperate it and use it again in another reactor or give to your friends you can. No significant 'risk' whatsoever (this isn't true for freshly mined uranium since it has been in the earth for millions of years and has had time for radioactive byproducts to accumulate though the uranium itself is still safe).
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
We might need it someday. What for? I don't know. The ancient Greeks couldn't see much use for that nasty black tar stuff.
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Why do so many people seem to think that humans are somehow special. We are just animals that live on earth just like any other animal. Suppose elephant dung was radioactive and there was a large poulation of elephants. Whatever effects that dung had on the earth would that then be unnatural? Why do people seem to think that everything we do is unnatural? Something that is "natural" occurs in nature. Guess what? I have NEVER escaped nature - ever, and no one has.
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There was a lot of screaming that if this happened the ocean level would rise and flood every city with a harbor.
Odd that on the news this morning the greatest problem were two traffic accidents. How far underwater is New York City this morning?
And this quote:
CDIAC responds to data and information requests from users from all over the world who are concerned with the greenhouse effect and global climate change.
The greenhouse effect and global climate change due to it are a theory. Read this center's About and Philosophy sections and you'll see they've already made the assumption that the theory is real.
That's not science. That's dogma.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
What I find laughable is the people who say all this ice melting and going into the sea will raise the level of the water, ice is expanded water is it not? Thus when it melts it takes up LESS space and with the majority of ice being under the water, the sea levels changing to swamp Florida/London/Anywhere I think is total crap, if the south pole melts where the ice is actually on land, then this will create an additive effect yes but perhaps cancel out the north pole? Still bad though having the buggers melt!
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The current theory is that the Himalayas have caused the ice ages which began about the time those mountains rose. As the rock crumbles and is exposed to air, it absorbs carbon dioxide through chemical reactions. Water vapor is our main greenhouse gas, and those mountains also take varying amounts of water out of the air. If a little too much of that happens at once we get an ice age.
I wonder how many of these so called environmentalists actually have any understanding of geological temperature cycles or if they buy hook, line, and sinker, everything their group feeds them (in this case, it looks like I can pick on GreenPeace). I'm not talking about data we've obtained over the past 100 years. I'm talking about cycles that might not be spotted unless you look at data over thousands or tens of thousands of years. And since we haven't been collecting data that long, well, I guess we can't spot those kinds of cycles.
I'm not saying that mankind hasn't had some sort of short or maybe even longer term effect on the environment. However, to champion global warming simply because of human actions is very short-sighted. I graduated with a degree in geoscience and one of the courses I took was in mathematical modelling of geologic processes. In that course, we constructed a model for the carbon cycle, trying to account for the fluxes of carbon into a system (aka the earth). While a model is only that, a model, it was inherently clear that any number of lurking variables could introduce drastic changes into the system, which in turn could have adverse effects on a whole bunch of other things.
Also, consider this thought: make a graph and plot temperature vs. time over a 20,000 year period. You should get some sort of sinusoidal curve. Now drill down to the past 100 years. You'll probably still see some sort of sinusoidal curve. We might be heading towards the apex of the curve now but it will go down again. Thinking of it another way: pick a spot on the globe. Plot temperature vs. time for that spot, for 100,000 years. Probably a smooth curve. But now, suppose your data was granular enough to plot by century, decade, year or even day. You know what? You're going to start seeing more sinusoidals with different periods - definitely a yearly and a daily period. So you're going to see a sinusoidal thats composed of many smaller sinusoidals. My theory is that we, as humans, are excaberating one of those shorter period sinusoidals. We might be bumping the temperature up on a century sinusoidal curve but in the context of thousands (or tens of thousands) of years, if you step back and look at the curve, you won't notice a difference.
Thats not to say that global warming isn't happening. Its just to say that the sensationalism that environmentalists spout is just that - a huge churning PR machine that preys on people who look at things from a myopic viewpoint and believe everything they're told (the TV said it so it must be true!).
But, my cynical friend, what business are you in?
What we may discover eventually is that the radical left's contribution to the world is a great deal more important than yours.
The problem is that too many people use "global warming" and don't understand what it means.
Here in Ireland we've seen the effects. It doesn't really get warmer but it's got a hell of a lot more extreme in the heights of summer and the depths of winter. It's a lot wetter too.
This is a big deal...specially for you people on the coasts and in the central states. If I was you I'd start investing in appalachian or rockies property.
Tap Tap... HELLO
We still have ICE CAPS... we're still coming out of an ICE age!!
of course it's gonna warm up
Duh!
For a real understanding of why, government researchers, EPA, NOAA, NASA, IPCC and most peer reviewed reports and data on global warming can't be trusted read:
Satanic Gases
The author also debunks the myth that global warming would actually harm us. It is a little dated, but still a great read. Very technical.
Follow it up by reading some of Micheal's other recent articles:
2002 where he shows that even some of the original governemnt scienists are coming around.
Global warming, whether caused by humans or not, is nothing to scoff at, either. Many people, particularly in third world nations, live on the coastline, in areas that would (and will) be innundated if and when a higher global temperature causes ocean levels to rise. This is a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of many people. People in the third world can't simply move and buy another house, nor can they afford to maintain a system of dikes like those of the Netherlands. Whether or not humans caused global warming, it exists, as the collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf indicates, and it is a threat.
In addition, it's true that a certain amount of melting, calving of icebergs, and such occurs with the change of seasons in Antartica. Thank you, whoever noted that sun causes ice to melt, for stating the obvious. But the Larsen Shelf was not noted for being susceptible to such seasonal oscillations - indeed, it was incredibly stable, and old. Ice sheets that are 200 meters thick and more than 3000 square miles big don't form or melt overnight. The instability which caused the collapse was a relatively recent development. That such a stable chunk of the Antarctican ice should disintegrate is of great concern.
Finally, while man may not have created global warming, our industrial revolution has certainly contributed. A previous poster listed these graphs. A temperature spike and carbon dioxide spike, coinciding with the industrial revolution, are clearly visible. We have contributed to global warming. Sure, we can't stop industry, and sure, we don't have effective alternative energy sources. But we can adopt less wasteful methods of doing things, and cleaner manufacturing processes. And if we never start seriously investigating alternative energy sources, we will certainly never make any progress in that realm. So don't dismiss global warming as a liberal joke, or a tool for Greenpeace. Perhaps humans didn't create it, but the Larsen Shelf's collapse joins a growing bank of data suggesting that warming does exist, and that humans have contributed to some extent. We should be concerned, because this does affect us, and our future.
I'm sorry, I just dont agree with all the hype and stuff like that about saving the planet. Mankind is only a occupying a small period in the history of the Earth. Mankind is being pretty egotistical about themselves if they think that it really matters in planetary terms what we do...
Maybe we should consider saving the human race rather than worrying about the planet. We should be more interested in saving the animals we are killing of at a great rate of knots
Because in the end, it can look after itself...
Even the worst that we can do to the planet (totally irradiating the place with nuclear bombs) will sort itself out in a few thousand years. Will the human race be able to do that...
50,000 years or 50 Million years from now, will mankind still be around? somehow I dont think so. If we are what sort of condition will we be in?
It's our necks and our kids necks on the line, so lets try and leave them a place to live!
*** I had a
Floating objects float because they displace their mass. The ice shelf extends from land and is in fact floating. When it breaks off and floats away, it neither raises or lowers the water level. As it melts, it becomes more dense taking up less volume than the ice did. (ice is less dense than water which is why it floats instead of sinking) If an iceburg were coated underneath with some kind of container, the entire melted iceburg would fit in the container except a small amount. This is due to the ocean being denser than fresh water and a smaller volume of seawater would is displaced. (A smaller volume of sea water is displaced by an object than the same object floating in fresh water. The floating object displaces it's mass in both cases.)
The truth shall set you free!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't global warming talking about something on the order of a tenth of a degree every decade? Soo... The Industrial revolution was late 19th century, but we'll assume we've been abusing the atmosphere since the early 19th century. That's 2 centuries. That's 2 degrees. 2 degrees have melted this ice floe? What are you smoking? I'm not saying that because it's a slow speed of warming that we can continue to abuse the planet, but I am, however, saying that it's fairly unlikely that global warming is the monster who destroyed this ice floe, but rather that it was a natural part of the earth's ever changing environment. Maybe it broke up a year or two earlier than it would have, but two degrees isn't going to dissolve 500 million tonnes of ice in the span of a month.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I wonder how many scientist would get funding if they found out everything was just fine. Scientist have a knack for finding exactly what they are looking for and they are now looking for higher temps.
I've seen plenty of reports the earth is warming, the problem is people don't know what the earth was like 5,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago. These are geological 'blinks of an eye'
The average temperature may be warmer than it was 200 years ago, but that short of a time fram is vitually meaningless.
wasn't there a 'big freeze' scare back in the '70s?
good luck with your greenpeace group,
sopwath
Anyone who wants no fusion, fission, nor coal power plants has never seen what a city of wood burners looks like. I'm glad I haven't either, except in medieval paintings -- those large areas without trees mean there have been some cold winters, and the next one will be worse.
For that matter, someone who doesn't want radon in their house should also prefer that radioactive material be locked in a power plant after being removed from the environment. And the power from a nuclear plant means much less uranium and other icky things being scattered by coal plants.
Also, your comment about the price of electricity being 10 times higher causing an increase in demand for solar panels and windmills ignores how much less we'll be able to spend on things if electricity becomes so expensive, and how much less money will be created by business, and that there will be LESS money available for luxuries like a hillside covered with windmills and a toxic solar cell factory.
Yes, I believe the earth's climate changes all the time. We had an ice age that proved it. We also have had warmer times. We are somewhere in the middle. Now the ozone layer fluctuating so much depending on our environmental laws shows that sometimes we can slow or speed these climate changes up.
Now gas and oil energy is of course bad in the long run. But who here thinks we are strong enough to actually kill our world in the next 50 years? Seems pretty arrogent to me. And if you think so I'm sure you were the same people who thought those horrible factories in the 1930s which produced pure black smoke would have killed us by 1980. Somehow we survived.
Now who thinks in 50 years we won't be using water, wind, solar, hydrogen, and fusion power? Its hard to imagine we won't. In 10 years we should be seeing electric cars in large cities all the time. So to think in 50 years that we won't automatically save ourselves is a little foolish.
Our main problem will be getting asia and south america (and who knows if Africa will be industrializing by then) to switch over after Europe and the US does. That may take forever.
Now do I support corporations saving every last dollar to destroy the earth? No, but I understand that these same evil corporations that are destroying our earth will eventually save our earth for the same reason. Money.
I love the way they drive boats, cars, and fly to protests to try to stop the use of fossil fuels.
I wonder if they have a plan on how to get home if one of the protests actually worked?
Don't panic. This is a floating ice shelf. That does little to the total mass or volume of the ocean.
Now if the polar ice caps melt which are not floating, run to the sea, and add to the mass and volume of the ocean...
The truth shall set you free!
You better learn to swim? The ice already collapsed. The water was in your living room two days ago, as predicted. Glad we could point it out to you, although it was after you drowned. Sorry.
All this "we only have information going back 150 years, therefore it's not really carbon dioxide causing the warming" stuff ignores two facts:
1)Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases do absorb reradiated heat from the earth. Try putting the absorption spectra of the gases over the emission spectra for the earth, and you'll see what I mean.
2)There is more CO2 in the air than there used to be, and we're burning much more carbon these days.
Surely this is enough to at least make us worried that there could be a problem coming up?
How can you trust an organization, such as Greenpeace, when its own founder quit the organization because he thought it was hijacked by environmental extremists?
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As a long time skeptic on many issues myself (just ask my friends who have asked me what sign I am) skepticism is a good thing. Just remember that it goes both ways.-Miko
Miko O'Sullivan
I won't bother arguging one way or other,
but I'd like to mention a very intersting book
that everyone should at least take a look at
in regards to this topic --
the Skeptical Enviromentalist
by Bjorn Lomborg.
Just pick it up at your local Barnes and Nobles
and leaf through it. You won't be dissapointed you did.
--Dante
-- What doesn't kill you hasn't tried hard enough.
Those "environmentalists" who quote their own "scientific research" to prove their own agendas.
Those "hard liners", who mirror the actions of the above environmentalists.
Those between, who explore concrete evidence, eon-ic scales, and logical conclusions, despite their pre-disposed subjectivity.
Too bad most scientists dealing with environmental concerns are part of the first two groups....
WhatEVA
RFN had links to other research sites, some of which have pics every week or two for the past two months.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
How exactly would it NOT make a difference? Each tiny bit of increase in temp causes a decrease in the longitude that ice can remain frozen. Imagine a line drawn around antarctica, and the line moving downward towards the south pole with each change in average temp. Even a small change in the position of that line causes a pretty big change in the area in that circle.
:P
One of the iceberg articles said the change was 2.5 degrees.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
I want my (SUV, McMansion, Economic Status Quo, etc.) and nothing anybody can say will persuade me that my needs don't trump all. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I don't care about anybody else. I am the emotional equivalent of a 4 year old, only equipped with larger and more elaborate playthings, and slightly more articulate if not actually better informed. I'm perfectly prepared to spout off with a bunch of worthless opinions about an extremely complicated topic which combines climatology, statistics, remote sensing, oceanography, forestry and numerous other topics about which I have only the most shallow and superficial awareness. Anything I say is ok because I fear change. Despite a preponderance of evidence suggesting a cautious approach to further modification of the planet would be prudent, in order to keep what I have and even get more, I will insist that those who would err on the side of caution are suffering from some form of psychosis.
Also, it was recently determined by the legislative and executive branches of the US government that it is economically and technically impossible to achieve even 1 mpg of additional fuel efficiency in the US auto fleet over the course of the next 12 years. This makes perfect sense on the face of it, right? Completely incontrovertible
Thank you so very much. I'm serious.
As an American, I get more disgusted every day with the whining that goes on around here in the States. Everybody trying to justify their wasteful habits and all that.
Just recently our Congress sank an attempt to (horrors!) make our auto manufacturers produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. Forget for a moment that the plans allowed for over a decade of time to prepare, and that the targets are technically and economically feasible today.
No, instead, our stalwart solons caved in to lobbying tactics, like the commercial with the SUV-owning suburban housewife who declares "they won't take my keys away!!". (I hope somebody does, for the safety of the rest of us on the highway, but that's another rant.)
If you, my fellow citizens, think this post offends you: Quit your goddamn whining. Stop being slaves to convenience & accept from responsibility for a change. The Bill of Rights does not contain the phrase "sport utility vehicle". God we've become such a nation of narcissistic losers...
".sig,
I'll take your city-centered parking lot surface temperature charts and raise you a lowered stratospheric temperature chart.
In response to this terrifying news I'm going to turn my thermostat up two more degrees. Because if we're all doomed I might as well be comfy.
Also - CFCs are merely a subset of greenhouse gasses. CO2, for example, is also a greenhouse gas. It doesn't matter how much we produce in net terms; what matters is how much we increase the amount of greenhouse gasses above natural levels, and whether the environment can tolerate those levels and facilitate conditions like those of our world today.
Sure, the planet's natural processes are formidable. But we can and do alter the environment with our activities, mostly negatively. We are not helpless; we should not deny responsibility for what we have done; we should not pretend that we couldn't, with some effort, make some minor changes for the better.
The problem with that is just because life in general can survive that doesn't mean that 'human' life can survive that. Every continent except antarctica has tons of human life on it. You can't just say, well Asia just froze over... just move away from Asia! More than a few people would die.
Just because there have been radical changes in climate in the past doesn't mean it is 'ok' for it to happen in the future.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
I should not expect much more from a bunch of bald apes. The dinorsars were big and ate alot and left big piles of doo. BUT in the several BILLION years they lived on the planet they did not scar the planet as bad as you stupid bald apes have in the last few thousand years. Every where man has been there is destruction. I do not think that man could touch anything without breaking it and sucking the life out of it for profit. I look forward to the day when you finaly distroy your self in your GREED. STUPID BALD APE!
A mini-ice age ended around 1850. The earth has been warming up ever since. Before that it was cooling down. Now it's really convinient that the industrial revolution just happened to start around the same time. Makes it easy to point the finger at us because you KNOW that the earth's climate is 100% stable! (sic)
Scientists have predicted that the earth will continue to warm up for the next 300 or so years. And there's not much we can do about it. And lets face it, the earth's climate is about as stable as an interview with Robin Williams. It's been ever changing and will continue to be ever changing regardless of the numbers that we generate.
Remember, humans didn't cause the global warming that cleared up the glaciation that was as far south as the south western US.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
As a Greenpeace member who's been following the debate for over a decade, it's hard not to feel aggrieved at those with their own agenda who have pushed the theory that global climate change isn't happening. Risk = probability x consequence..."
A nice biased report, as usual. What Greenpeace don't want you to know is that there is no scientific proof that global warming is the result of the actions of mankind. The majority of scientists agree with this. I am sick of hearing about people that Greenpeace describe as 'having their own agenda', which generally means those people brave enough to question these fanatics. Or those who lose their jobs as a result of eco-terrorism.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
I feel shaken, but not stirred.
...can we say worlds larges margarita!!
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
Get a towel. You do know where your towel is right?
CAREFULLY, fill one of those huge 64oz Texaco cups full of ice, and THEN oh-so delicately fill it up with water. Also, add a little salt (remember, we ARE talking about salt water: Ocean, DUH...)
Now, RUN LIKE HELL!!!
That thing is gonna go off like an ill-measured volcano at a 4th grade science fair!!! The water will overflow the glass and flood your kitchen, so be prepared! Thats what the towel is for!
Luckily, you are on a hill, so just open the door and all the water will flow down on your lowlying neighbors...(for fun, open a door facing someone you don't like!)
*shaking head/rolling eyes/laughing lightly*
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
So I guess this is good news!
Has New Orleans or New York been flooded yet? No?!
With enviro wackos, any change whatsoever in the status quo is gloom and doom.
Oh my goodness, something changed, it will be the end of us all!
I'm still working on a clever footer.
I think it is correct to say we can't say with certainty what the climate would be doing without human intervention. It's a chaotic system.
However, I've never seen the logic of the argument fully followed through.
If massive environmental change is inevitable and out of human control, doesn't it make sense that humans adjust their behavior to this fact? To protect the resources the biosphere will need to adjust to the new state -- ecological and biological diversity?
This point is always argued by people who want to believe that they don't have to take the environmental impact of their actions into account. If anything, these people would be happier with the Kyoto protocols than the logical policy consequencs of accepting a chaotic climate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
perhaps in the days of black and white television that might have been the case.
We still count our building floors from zero instead of from one though! (unlike you quiche-eating pascal-programming people :-)
After many diplomatic disastrous decisions, and a terrorist attack (that turned a completely dumb president in a great stadist), maybe now GWB listens to the commom sense and decides to accept Kioto treat.
Its a fact that US is by far the most polluting country in the world, and the only economically big to refuses to accept Kiotos terms.
US must realize that this kind of decisions make it more and more seen as a "evil empire" (using GWB own words) by other countries that believe that all this decisions aims its own interests and forgets about all cooperation among other countries.
Its due to these kind of decision, and due to the ignorance of countries that feels that they can solve this problem with violence, that attacks like the ones in 9/11 happens.
Itll be much better if GWB really considers to change his decisions about foreing politics to avoid more conflicts, not armed conflicts, but economic conflicts that can be worse then armed ones (US cant lose a armed conflict, but I cant say the same about economic ones)
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Oh I hadn't thought of that. Of course if it's floating, it's already displacing the volume.
Gee, thanks for clearifying that a bit for me silly me.
A Jedi doesn't drink Coors, a Jedi Drinks Guinness or Bass!
Stop overclocking those Athlons!
My first thought was: What does this mean for our Mars colony? Is this going to cause a massive ocean level increase, forcing a mass migration to Mars and sparking war between earth/mars and colonists/megacorporations? John Boone is NOT going to be pleased.
check out this
article at new scientist. A little more balanced about what this might mean. Two things I noticed right away. a) The Larson A Ice Shelf, which is nearly as big as this one dropped off in 95. b) this ice shelf is only 1800 years old. Where I am sitting now was under a mile of ice 15,000 years ago. Perhaps the Ice shelf's existence is the abnormality, not the fact that it has dropped off! These are MODELS people. Models can be wrong. Until these guys can predict the weather accurately one month from now, I'll save my money betting either way. Watching these guys "predict" events is like watching Jack Ryan predict Crazy Ivans. Its a guess, but you might just get it right some time...
I, for one, am sick of this global climatic change. I'm also sick of the debate over its causes, whether it's good change or bad, etc, etc. Let's all commit NOW to stopping global climatic change in its tracks. We know the cause, now let us effect the cure:
Kill all the butterflies!
It's obvious that there's a species of giant butterfly, perhaps in Brazil or Norway, continuously flapping their wings, causing giant changes in the weather, and ruining my picnics. I want them stopped.
What? Oh, I'm sorry, have to go now. Nurse says it's time for my injections again. Already?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Nobody contests that global climate change is a fact, what they contest is that a direct link has been established between human production of "greenhouse" gasses and long-term global warming. Temperature averages over 40 years do not a geological event make. Nor can you make the assertion that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming without having to prove it. It's called the scientific method.
Fact: Global cyclical heating and cooling patterns are well documented in the geological record. Fact: Production of "greenhouse" gasses is on the rise. Fact: Short-term weather patterns suggest we are in the midst of some form of warming effect. Hypothesis: This is the direct result of the build-up of "greenhouse" gasses. However this assertion is by no means proven.
Environmentalists also asserted that the burning of oil fields in Kuwait would blanket the earth in black smoke, blocking out the sun and causing the world to descend into another ice age where humans would be forced to labour in underground sugar mines by pale, telepathic masters with gills behind their ears. (I just checked, still no gills!)
It's entirely possible, and even quite likely, that "greenhouse" gas production and global climate change are inextricably linked. However I for one will wait for proof before I elevate a theory from conjecture to fact.
My pet peeve as well.
Local green party leader (they're actually in goverment!) commented that they "allow" people who do not oppose nuclear power to vote for them. How very enlightened of them.
I think those two viewpoints (ecology/anti-nuclear) go hand-in-hand, because both tend to attract the same kinds of people. I'm an engineer and I pretty much run on electricity by now. But I rather like some of the enviromental agendas. Some of them. But since I've been trained to look at arguments from rational POV, not from an emotional one, I can see many of the concerns just fall apart at close examinations.
There's very simple argument in favor of more nuclear power - Coal plants, during their operation , *will* kill many many more people than a nuclear plant. If you average all the people who've died of radiation-related illnesses and divide that by the number of nuke plants, you get fairly low figures.
Lung cancer, now, thought.. Ouch.
Well, there will be fusion power available relatively soon, but I do not think it'll change the picture any. Yeah, it's inherently more safe as the process cannot run away from you and cause a meltdown.. But it's still very scary-sounding technology that the layperson cannot begin to understand. And you get radioactive waste. Never mind that the waste is buried where the sun doesn't shine, not spread all over the once-blue sky.
(1) Americans, who don't believe in evolution, who think its safe to eat whatever monsanto has bribed their senators to let them eat, who think tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer, who think evolution is a myth, global warming doesn't happen, there is no ozone hole, the world would be safer if there were no treaties on chemical biological or nuclear weapons.
(2) and everyone else.
OK -
sure, it's bad news. If you suppose that things should never change. Assuming you think that the climate and ecology of the planet should be held in stasis then this is really bad. But, I suppose that if you're for stasis, you're against evolution.
I guess that's what bothers me - I'm not proposing that people be reckless and stupid - but I wish that some of these people would get a clue. The number of species that have become extinct since man walked the earth pales in comparison to the numbers prior to man. Things evolve, things change - life on Earth in 1,000 years may not be the same. Life on Earth in 10,000 years definitely won't be.
In short I tend to think that while these people pretend enlightenment they actually are afraid to move on. They hold too tightly to what was/is and don't think much about what might be.
- Woodie
Why is this a disaster? The shelf displaced the same amount of water when it was solid that it does now melted because it was floating in the first place. Considering that the interior recessions have appeared to stop, the dire predictions of a sealevel rise are totally unsubstantiated.
Someone you trust is one of us.
a 200m thick ice floe covering 3,250 sq km
believe that 500 million billion tonnes of ice sheet
1 km^3 ~ 1 billion tonnes ice.
The Larsen Ice Shelf: 0,2 km * 3250 km^2 = 650 km^3.
This makes the total mass of the shelf around 0.9 * 650 billion tonnes = 585 billion tonnes, assuming that the mass of the ice is roughly 0.9 that of water.
Study a little archeaology. You'll see that global warming is natural and has been going on for thousands of years. The ocean has been rising something like a foot every 100 years for the past 8000 years at least. This global warming is human induced stuff is worse than BS.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
I am really fed up with listening to all those whining european liberals. The USA leads the world in science and technology. Why don't they just listen to us and trust what we say? Global warming is just hippy crap.
I think we're absolutely right to tell those whining Europeans to stuff their Kyoto protocol. It is obviously just political and not based on scientific research, like the USA's policy.
And the Japanese! What are they doing agreeing with the Euros? And those South Americans. Of course they don't have many scientists there, so they probably don't understand what they've signed up to. Even the Chinese have implemented reforms of their energy sectors to cut Co2 emmissions and have cut them by over 6 percent over the last five years. What are they thinking? I guess they must be just sucking up to the Europeans.
I just don't get it. When will the Euros (and the Japanese, Chinese, South Americans and the rest of them) stop falling for that environmentalist rubbish and start listening to informed, scientific, and unbiased view of our great leader, G W Bush?
Yes, this is sarcasm.
ACtually I toured a nuclear power plant once. It was designed to sustain a direct hit from a large plane and a major earthquake. Apparently these were known threats decades before Sept. 11.
I mean, I believe the earth is warming, and I guess this shelf's collapse isn't a good omen, but how bad is it really as compared to the big picture ?
the article sais some parts of antarctica actually got colder, were there parts where ice was added to the continent ?
how much is this a global damage and how much is this a change of the local antarctian climate pattern ?
any links ? (to scientific journals, please, not to popular press)
Working for necessity's mother.
sickening
something is happening from us and our actions.
maybe not what we think, but something is going on
is your kid sick a lot ? Probably the AIR POLLUTION - read the latest studies
but MONEY is still the GOD, has been for centuries
Please Vote for me. You'll know it when you see me running for President. No Shit.
you think it's easy, but you're wrong...
that maybe this thing broke off when it got too heavy to support itself because there was so much SNOW piling up on it? Snow isn't caused by warming. BC
What the heck are you wasting time on that big boat for Noah? You and your delusions....
Like with any other liberal... the problem is NOT in what you claim to represent. Your stated goal is very noble. However, because of your methods and your actions, you prove time and time again that you care little about your stated cause and are just another special interest group out to cause problems and tear others down. Facts do indeed say that the Earth is warming, when you look at averages. When you begin to take samples of glaciers and soil (and the like) you begin to get even more evidence for that. however, those tests also show that this happens regularly (from a planetary perspective), and that there is no solid proof yet that shows a significant increase lately and its being a result of man and his toys. If all the money and effort that is put into the hate campaigns that people like you partake in, is then put into research for alternative methods that are cleaner and perhaps even more efficient, then you will begin to be taken seriously. Until then, you will be nothing but a group of yapping puppy's.
I will make you a deal. You stay out of my life, through any personal intrusion or legislation you push/support... and I will not push legislation that requires you and your tax dollars to give me a backrub, buy me a big screen tv and a large hard drive. Or I might just come take your stuff and use it for myself.
40 miles x53 miles = 2120 sq miles.
That's bigger than Delaware: 1954 sq. miles (land area)
That's more than twice Rhode Island: 1045 sq. miles. (land area)
But only a very small fraction of Alaska: 571951 sq. miles. (land area)
(The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2002)
For those interested, I have other RadarSat pictures on my website.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
IIRC nuclear power stations are designed to endure that.
They should endure also earthquakes of some magnitude, ...
hany
On the other hand, if we're wrong about these assumptions, I would like an anti-environmentalist to tell me where I can find the undo button. Is Bush going to re-plant the forests American companies burn down to give space for US Burger Cattle?
Next thing we know they'll be telling us the human race is low on flint and silicon.
From the article;
'However, the picture generally in Antarctica is a complicated one with temperatures in the interior actually falling over the same period. There is also some evidence that the retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, on the other side of the peninsula to the Larsen B shelf, has halted'
Add to that there is this gem 'Scientists hope the data gathered on site will help them determine when such an event last happened and which ice shelves are threatened in future.'
Oh, so we don't even know if this is a cyclical event and if so how often it happens..... From 1947 to the late 1960's or early 1970's (depending on who you believe) there was a global cooling. At that time some scientists were predicting another ice age.
This is a serious event that warrants study and careful scientific examiniation. It does not warrant people running about screaming at the top of your lungs "The sky is falling".
Doing so just makes people disbelieve you when/if you do have the hard evidence to back up your claims.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I sure hope this was a troll. If it is, it was a good one. You managed to convert a metric mass into a metric mass and introduced an inaccuracy of 2.4x10^11 into the calculation. And it seems like several people bought it too ! Good effort.
Maybe you're just a fuckwit, but that's the essense of a good troll, it's hard to tell.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
In the mean time I will go look for facts, but your group does not inspire me to help your stated cause. Until you learn that, you will always be just a group of angry little men
The winters in the early 40's were exceptionally cold, obviously there would have been more ice if the temperature is lower. ;-)
This only shows that there were less ice during their recent journey, nothing more. Making blanket statements based on 2 observations is not good science.
"I believe that increasing global air pollution, through its effect on the reflectivity of the earth, is currently dominant and is responsible for the temperatiure decline of the past decade or two." (Reid Bryson, "Environmental Roulette," Global Ecology: Readings toward a Rational Strategy for Man, John P. Holden and Paul R. Ehrlich, eds, 1971)
"The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations. It has already made food and fuel more precious, thus increasing the price of everything we buy. If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000. (Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976)
Thank you Julian Simon, may you RIP!
The Forcast:
last Thursday for Saturday, sunny and in the upper 60s, the rest of the week increasing temperatures...
The Reality (as of Tuesday):
Saturday, mid 50s and cloudy, Sunday 50s and cloudy, monday - wednesday rain with possible flash floods, possible freeze next weekend
If they cant forcast into next week I sure as hell dont believe they can forcast 100 years out.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The Vikings in Newfoundland are probably not the best example for historic Climate change as most Historians place Vinland around New Brunswick/Nova Scotia/Mane.
We just havn't found it yet.
I have NO idea if they grow grapes in Mane.
However it should be pointed out that form the 400 to the year 1500 (CE) there were masive world wide migrations from the North to the South. Angles, Saxsons, Jutes, Goths, VisiGoths, Vandals, Huns. in Europe. Inuit (Rather the people who were before the modern Inuit) abandoned The High Canadian Artic. China Was invaded from the north also at the same time.
If you want more evidence of Climate chage
There are Prehistoric Farms that are being uncovered in Northeren Europe that are well with in the current Perma-frost regions.
Britans main Export in the Roman era was Wine (From Grapes)So it had a warmer climate.
Cartharage Was a major exporter of Wheat... Indicating a wetter climate. Now it is just desert.
We can also ask How all those Coral Islands Rose above the surface of the seas also... Did Global cooling lower the water levels, and they are now returning.
Any body else have better examples?
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
And to think that a small pile of snow has lasted over a month here in our parking lot for over a month of above freezing temperatures, and 500 million billion tons vanished in a mere 30 days.
The ocean must be at a rolling boil.
Why the funky spelling of Greenpeace? Where are the vast sums of money and the fat-cat bleedinghearts getting rich off the donations of well-meaning hard-working schmoes?
Just askin'.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm so sick of the crap from the left on this issue that I should puke.
.. here's where the leftists get really mad .. even if there were, it is still our Scriptural duty to continue our human progress!
Let's call "environmentalism" what it really is: sanctioned hatred of Christianity. Mankind is given dominion over Earth and its creatures, not the other way around. When environmentalists say that struggling farmers in Oregon have to starve in order to preserve a few "sucker fish", they are committing a moral atrocity. When environmentalists say that the entire industrialized world has to radically alter its well-established processes in order to protect "Mother Earth", they are committing a moral atrocity. There's no evidence that anything we can do as a species will even remotely affect the long-term health of "Mother Earth", and
Environmentalism is really about the eventual governmental control of private enterprise and, following that, the abolition of private property. The United Nations and its collectivist associate organizations have long been involved in a war against Christ and His principles. The chief offensive of this war has been the advancement of "environmental" principles; the establishment of Communist mechanics in the guise of "saving the planet." Well, let us serve the U.N. notice: The moral community is not going to take this any more.
Indeed, my SUV is powerful.
I would agree that we need to cut pollution where ever possible. Fuel cells anyone. But to blame the current global changes on anything but solar cycles is just plain silly.
Nothing to see here. Move along....
--Scott 8-}
Then fight polution on the grounds that it kills people, not on the highly suspect grounds that it casues Gobal Enviormental change.
I do not think that anyone is opposed to clean air , clean water and such. I live in a highly poluted area of North America.
I would love to see the Kyoto Accords implimented.... I belive they will have a great impact on our citys quality of life. I just do not belive they will stop global warming , becasue that is a natural Process outside of mans control.
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
The earth probably won't mind if the eastern seaboard of the United States slips into the sea (for example), but it's no exaggeration to describe the consequences for humanity as catastrophic.
I wouldn't mind if the eastern seaboard of the United States sliped into the sea, either. Getting rid of that many Liberals and environmentalists would probably the greatest benefit to humanity in Western history.
Come on, yes the planet will always change, evolve and there is nothing we can do to stop or predicit the natural evolution. The planet will survive no matter what we do, the problem is we may not. What we are really talking about here is saving ourselves. We are destroying the planet, cutting down the forests, scooping up all the fish, irreversibly altering our climate, polluting the water we depend on for life. Yes, climate change is a natural part of the history of the planet, but this isn't natural. The planet will take care of itself, long after we are gone, and only then will the natural cycle of the world become natural again. Go mother nature go. Get rid of us, because we lack any basic respect for the environment we live in and our fellow humans who will soon be drowning in the crystal clear unpolluted glacial ice.
Heya heya heya... :-(
The numbers i posted were not correct (my memory isn't perfect :-) The correct numbers regarding how long the supply would last are closer to: 88 years at current consumption rates and 20 years if employed vigorously world wide. These numbers are from Dean Abrahamson's article "Energy sources: Som environmental constraints" published in 1995. (I have not found an online copy if).
These numbers are of course based on the assumption that we are still using current reactor types in the future, not breeder-reactors. But as Abrahamnson also writes in this article; "The issue is not, however, wheter the present nuclear technololy can be expanded rapidly, for it is demonstrated inadequate and non-breeding reactors would quickly axhaust uranium resources. It is unlikely that the first advanced light-water reactors could be demonstrated before about 2020 and the first commercially-acceptable breeders before 2050" The last figure is apparently based on a MIT study published in 1993.
Abrahamson also points out the problem of weapons proliferation that haunts both regular and current breeder reactors.
Let me admit a lack of knowledge on this issue. I have a few questions.
1. What is an Ice Shelf? Is it the same thing as a glacier that starts over land and then over water as it expands?
2. Why is this event significant? Did this event raise the global sea level or something?
3. I know that massive chucks of ice fall into the water all of the time, how is this different?
Thanks.
Let's apply the Environmentalist's argument to another situation. Facts: Recently, the tolerance for homosexuality in various countries has increased dramatically. In the same period, the population growth in these countries has begun to drop, and in many of them is now negative. Conjectures: If population growth continues to drop, then the human race will eventually die out. Since homosexuality results in decreased sex drive, and homosexual tolerance and negative population growth have a positive correlation, there is a possibility that homosexuality will cause the human race to become extinct. Extinction is obviously a huge problem, so even if the probability of homosexuality causing it is small, we still must do everything possible to stop homosexuality. Solution: Make being a homosexual a capital offence. Hey, if the argument works with one situation, it should work with a similar one, right?
It's people like you who give me comfort that the ice caps melting is a good thing.
Should change people's attitude once our climate kills many of our population.
See you at the shoreline dickhead.
when commenting on legal issues, I'd see loadsa 'IANAL''s. Now, on environmentalism, which is even more of an intricate subject involving astophysics, chemistry, biology and whatnot, everyone has an opinion (most of them to do with the Brent Spar), yet nowhere is there an IANAEnvironmental Scientist.
Sure, keep saying that what's happening now is normal, that the earth undergoes cycles of ozone content in the atmosphere etc.
But you cannot deny that mysteriously, there is a hole in the ozone layer above Mexico City, a very polluted place. Also, we still have acid rain...it didn't go away because you haven't heard anything about it in the news. This stuff is still corroding brick houses, people.
Any chemist could tell you that what we're doing has unpredictable (and thus dangerous) effects...we're just pumping more strange substances into the atmosphere, then saying "it wasn't me!". People, get real, realize that unless you've done your research (and I'm not talking reading one or two books), then you have no idea what's up with the environment, let alone what factors are changing it in what way. All you do know is that we're pumping toxious stuff into a closed system, which used to be fixed in that system...
Actually, that's pretty far from the truth. Check out the IPCC report and the NAS report. Both say that global warming is happening, and that it is likely to be partially caused by human activities.
Some selections from the NAS report:
Quite simply, those who know (the climatoligists) agree this is significant.Do not talk negativly about King Bush, you are clearly a terroist, please kill yourself, of we will be forced to bomb you, your neigbors, people you met on the subway, you grandmother, your grandmothers neighbors, and the country of your origins. This is in support of safety and to help save lives, if you are an American, please blame a sutable member of the "axis of evil" so we can bomb them, using our newly armed nukes.
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/earth/environ/ice/ic e.htm"
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
You mean like those impartial scientists that falsified the lynx data in the Pacific Northwest?
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Any temperature fluctuations that we humans may cause (even if we tried to do so intentionally) pale in comparison to dramatic climate changes that have occurred in the (relatively recent) past and that are certain to occur again in the future.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
The GreenPeace nix are just out to destroy capitalism and all that is American. If you look at real data from real scientist you will see that the Earth has cooled for the last five years not warmed up. The Earth has cycles of warm and cold. The ice core samples from the South Pole show the evidence very well. Computer models show atmospheric temperatures at high elevations and terrestioral data shows that the "Global Warming" in bunk.
The problem is not Western countries causing the pollution to this "Green House Gases", it is the third world countries the UN is so pandering to that cause most of the air based pollutes.
I don't see the big problem, so some large piece of ice has fallen apart. Look at the Anarctic, there is still a whole lota ice down there. Get over people. The Earth will take care of herself. It is arrogant and ignorant to think that man can damage God's greatest creation - Earth.
If global warming does exist, well we all need a little shaking around. If California floods into the Pacific, the world would be a better place. The fewer the liberals the better. Drownd the liberal communie bastards. Go swim with the precious fishes.
What did it do to the "Envirenment" of Antartica? This does sound like a huge sheet of ice.
I just heard that penguins (real ones, not linux geeks) have been dieng in Antartica. How would this breakage effect them?
What, are you NUTS?!? Tux is out there somewhere! He might have been on that iceburg!!
This does not bode well for the Linux community. It has now been revealed that global warming was probably all part of the Microsoft plan after all.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Ouch...perhaps you meant to say "millions of fundamentalist-extremist muslims", in which case I'll see your "millions of fundamentalist-extremist muslims" and raise you 500,000 conservative southern baptist clansman, and 125,000 child raping catholic priests.
Could this be the result of underwater nuclear testing? Or perhaps a meltdown in a nuclear submarine underneath the ice shelf?
Idiotic racist.
-------------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
When I was growing up, they where talking about the upcoming New Ice Age. There where scientists on TV telling about why this was coming and how bad it was going to be. Then, people started talking about global warming with the same dire predictions.
I have a hard time giving any credit to the "scientists" who reverse themselves every 30 or so years. The planet goes through cycles. Sure we need to stay as clean as possible and I'm all for protecting our home. But this Chicken Little routine is getting old.
Environmentalists have a huge problem: they have divorced themselves from science. As science no longer supports their outlandish claims, they attack legitimate inquiry with rhetoric and McCarthyism. I am disgusted to pick up Nature or Scientific American and see opinion and speculation not only reported as fact, but a political agenda advanced as doctrine. Environmental science has become a religion where the adherents worship government funding and restrictive legislation. Perhaps they will seek to ban overclocking next as it contributes to global warming.
You can see it on this board as well. Whereas such a posting would previously meet with considerable support, it is now closer to 50/50. As the environmental movement has turned to dogma instead of data, people are turned off.
It can be argued that environmentalists have hurt the environment. All the protesting of nuclear power has really backfired. Instead of encouraging hydropower (with the attending benefit of keeping plants watered), it has been strongly opposed. Money that could have been spent on legitimate cleaning and research has instead studied how much methane cows contribute. Certainly all the hot air environmentalists have spewed has contributed to global warming ;-)
Finally, perhaps someone out there can resolve what has been termed the "deep environmentalist paradox. 1. Whatever is "natural" is good. 2. Whatever an animal does is "natural." 3. Man is an animal. 4. Therefore, whatever man does is "natural" and "good."
Also sad sad horrible news: the sky is falling, Pippy Longstocking's stripes are fading, Popeye's spinach is genetically altered, and computer monitors are making women grow mustaches.
This dude wants us to believe he's an expert because he's been a Greenpeace nut for 10 years. Some people have been in asylums for 10 years, that doesn't make them experts on much more than pudding.
Finally...who cares?! This story is such krunk. It's a prime example of the crap that makes me wonder why I bother with Slashdot. I hate browsing, so I prefer to visit a few bookmarked places...maybe time to bookmark something decent. Maybe this will be place I go. "news" for nerds??
Nobody disputes the fact that the average temp has risen 1-2 degrees in the past 100 years or so. What is disputed is the cause. Not one scientist has been able to PROVE that WE are cuasing it and that it is not due to normal shifts in the earth's climate. Considering we have only kept records of the earth's climite for around 1 BILLIONTH of the earth's climatic history, it is very hard to draw meaningfull conclusions.
Well frankly I think none of us (those of us who aren't in the field) are qualified to say "this study's right, that model's wrong"; thus we can only make a judgement about the credibility of the people advanccing the various cases. And the the IPCC [www.ipcc.ch] have the most credible findings - if anything, they err on the conservative side so as not to freak out certain wobbly 'Western' nations with shakey commitment to doing anything. (The IPCC was set up to establish the global consensus amongst eveyone working in the field.)
Er, look at the name "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2001" Does "Intergovernmental Panel" suggest anything to you? In fact, there are *NO* scientists on the IPCC, it's entirely composed of political appointees! Here's their organization information, not a single scientist listed. In fact, if you look at IPCC's forecasts for the near future dating back to their initial conception, time has proved every one of them wrong.
Interesting that your post quotes "500 million billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." while the original article says "500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." But what's a minor 10^6 error when you're trying to make a point? And isn't the British "billion" equivalent to the American "million"?
Risk = Probability x Consequence..."
Probability = small chance human action is having significant impact on global climate
Consequence = unknown
Risk = a small chance that something unknown will happen as a result of human action.
Human nature is far more predictable than the climate. Humans want things to stay the same, out of fear that things may get worse, so they tend to emphasize the bad things that might happen. But the consequences are not known - and could be an improvement.
For example, what if the earth had been about to slip into another ice age (as was thought by climate scientists in the 80's), and greenhouse gases have prevented that so far? Humanity would fare much better with a hot planet than a cold one.
"...the earth will shake us off like a bad case of fleas..."
And it's true! The earth has been and WILL around for much longer than us, and it's completely arrogant of the human race to think that we can do anything about it. Our pollution isn't ruining the earth, it's ruining human life. Once we poison ourselves to death, Mother Earth will take over and heal whatever superficial wounds we've inflicted and create life again...this time maybe lifeforms with a little more intelligence...
Save the earth, hell. We have to be concerned about saving OURSELVES!
The reason that anti-environmentalists don't want to acknowledge the warmup is not based on degree of error in measurements, or a disagreement about basic science.
They want to drive their cars.
They have a visceral dislike of long-haired hippy tree huggers.
Antarctica will continue to melt. The north pole has turned into a giant Slushie(tm) as of last summer.
If God writes in letters a thousand miles tall on the face of the moon: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OF THIS, then the Almighty would be accused of liberal sympathies.
The warming is starting to pick up steam. It may take most of a hundred years, but it will happen, mostly because of our beloved cars.
But, the way it will happen, I think, is that the same businesslike people who now deny the reality of the change will be the same ones buying up new oceanside property to develop at amazing profits. Call me cynical...
dont forget that most will be american too :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
...is not flooding. Think about this folks, the ice shelfs are in the range of millions of billions of tons. How does that affect our rotation? If those ice caps melt, and the waters relocate along with their weight to the equator, don't we slow down? Is there even a chance the earths tilt may change?
Entering a new decade, (millenium for that matter) will it remain global warming this decade, or will we go back to global cooling?
Slashdot/VA Linux oops, I mean VA Hardware oops, I mean VA Software=Greenpeace?
When was the date that plant food, Carbon Dioxide, became a poison?
Or perhaps it was just a warmer year ... we will never know!
If anyone if unnerved by this event, you should read Clive Cussler's "Atlantis Found" which deals with an evil organization attempting to cause a similar event in order to take over the world. Good escapist reading.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Check out the Gr$$npeace website and see what they really stand for:
http://www.greenpiece.org/index.html
You make the mistake here that everybody makes. What you don't understand is that it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. What we're talking about is what kind of CHANCE we want to take with the environment. The bottom line is, there's a probability that one side is right and there's some other probability the other side is right. Then you look at the down side, and decide what kinds of risks you want to take on.
My feeling is that the downside of the pro-environment movement is that we have more efficient cars that cost a bit more. The downside of the fuck the environment movement is the slow heat death of all life on earth.
Let's say there's only a 20% chance the environmentalists are right. Still feel like taking that chance?
Do you have a cite for that assertion?
As i posted in another part of the thread, commercially acceptable breeder reactors might not be available before 2050. And you do not remove the problem of waste management with breeder reactors. You still have to find high-level radioactive repositories to store waste, of wich none can be found today. And as you point out, weapons proliferation will become a even greater problem with the widespread use of breeder reactors. My point is that there are many problems with nuclear energy that need to be dealt with. Hopefully they can be overcome, by my bet is still on the fact that we will be able to harness the energy from the sun (wich is really fusion energy transorted to us through light :-)in an effective way.
I remember as a kid watching the cartoons and this one character going around with a sign saying, "The END is near!"
Then ever time a new century comes around, oh it going to be the END of the world!
Well look's like we made it through to the new century with out Armageddon happing!
If anyone has not notice the Earth has went though quite a few changes over the last Millions years. And if any one believes that the climate will always be the same where they live and the Earth is stopped changing have their heads too far up there ass to see.
And the Environmentalists and PETA should be jumping for joy if it is true that man is about to self-destruct. If there is no man, then all the little furry animal well be safe from harm. They should be promoting pollution not trying to stop it!
"Some say the end is near, some say we will see Armageddon soon!
I certainly hope so, I could use a vacation from this stupid shit!"
Tool enema
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
I know using the waste heat from a nuclear reactor was looked at for Stockholm, which already has a system of heating buildings with water. The idea died mainly because of the genreal superstition agains all things nuclear. Most people probably believed that their homes would become radioactive. So instead the warm water is just flushed into the Baltic and Stockholm heats it's water some other way.
The other cost is that, statistically, there will be other 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc., incidents. The more plants you run, the higher the chances.
Not really. Each incident gives us new knowledge and makes new accidents less probable. Look at the airline industry for a comparision. In the early days, accidents were much more common than today. (I'd guess at least 100 times more, but I don't have any real facts available.) The accidents that happened in those early designs will not happen again.
global climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon. all of the global warming crap is simply an ignorant observation. people have not been paying any attention to the global climate changes that happened long before humans evolved. in fact, the earth is likely to plunge into an ice age in a few hundred years. don't worry about global warming. since the ice age ended, the average temperature of the earth has risen only two degrees farenheit and in fact, that rise has been slower since the advent of internal combustion engines and mass production in factories. that is not to say that we have been helping to slow the rise, it is simply to point out that we aren't really affecting it, we are totally at the mercy of mother nature.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
While one may argue about the significance of the human contribution to global warming, I find it hard to understand anyone who can doubt that there has been a contribution. Actually, there have been many contributions. They range from the killing off of the buffalo herds to the paving of large areas of the planet's surface to the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere to the denudation of rain forests. Etc.
That these have effects on the climate seems hard to deny. I can understand one who might argue about the magnitude of the effect, but to deny that there has been any effect seems non-sensical.
So, to me, there is clearly some measure of contribution from human activity to the current state of the global climate. And, as we need to live on this planet, we need to take what steps we can to ensure that it remains livable. Arguing avout the effectiveness and tradeoffs between various options is reasonable. Trying to assign "blame" is only useful in so far as assigning blame helps one to determine causation, and that is basically useful in determining what steps would be most useful at the moment.
As an example: The collapse of the ice sheet was dramatic, and acts as an obvious sign, but is arguably less important than the weakening that has been reported in the Gulf Stream. And that may be a precursor of a new ice age (which would lead to global cooling). But it appears to be caused by the Atlantic becoming too warm (I've seen projections that within 40 years the Artic Ocean will be essentially ice free).
Climate is hard to predict, complex, and with lots of pieces that fit together in a way that isn't simple. Just because it's hard to figure out exactly what role we have played in causing our current situation doesn't indicate that we didn't play a role. Manifestly, we have. But it seems plausible that the current heat wave has so far advanced that we may need to start worrying about how to prevent a new ice age. It's hard to know, our models are incomplete, and the whole thing appears to be a chaotic system.
But warmer oceans lead to not only melted ice, but also to increased rainfall and cloud cover, and, eventually, to large snow packs building up on the continents. Which can lead to glaciers that march south. But perhaps it doesn't always happen that way.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Imagine fission at the turn of a switch!
Also, radioactive waste may not be a problem. Laser induced fission.
Essentially it means that radioactive waste can be recycled. Bombarding it with laser induced neutrons can force it to fizz until it is no longer radioactive, while hopefully still generating more energy than the laser costs to run. A second benefit is that nuclear plants no longer need to maintain critical mass. Turn on the laser, and watch the nuclear reaction go, turn off the laser, and see it stop!
GPL Deconstructed
The temperature is falling! The temperature is falling!
Oh wait, no it isn't!
The temperature is rising! The temperature is rising!
Will someone please turn off these squak boxes. They're getting on my nerves. I will never trust anyone who changes their opinions like a politician.
At least Oil companies always have the same motives (makes them easier to track).
So an ice shelf falls. That's what things do when you apply gravity to them. The fact that it was "unexpected" simply goes to show that the scientists following this ice shelf are not qualified to research it. Nothing in science (especially stuff like ice melting or breaking) is totally unexpected unless there's either a lack of research into the subject (not likely -- people know what ice is and how it works) or the scientists involved didn't measure the phenomenon properly.
My main worry about pollution harming me doesn't come from this Global warming/cooling/changing/whatever it comes from smog making it hard for me to breathe on certain summer days. Now, fix that and I have no beefs with you -- this is an obvious problem that needs fixing. But do it in the name of global "xyz" and you're find a tough opponent.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
with data is that so many unqualified ppl try to draw conclusions
based on bad logic. Chemical Processes, and subsequent life ( or death ) are rarely exercises in 10-20 degree temps. They are normally 1/10 % difference. Consider a temp changing from 31 -> 33 F. This affects things greatly, yet it was a 2 degree difference.
The fact that we have 1% difference in CO2 is quite probably huge.
OTH, this will not kill the earth and life. It may kill Human, but this has happen throughout all of history. The only differences is that we would probably be the first species stupid enough to kill ourselves.
not getting BSE seems at the moment to be pure luck, you have the same practices that seem to have triggered it in Britain, and your current push to force everyone else to eat GM food (some of which has already had problems with e.g. peanut allergies) by outlawing labelling of GM food is against me. The EU is claiming to be pro-consumer whereas the US is always pro-producer because big companies pay for the political parties (the EUs claim is a bit rich wrt the CAP and CFP but that's another matter). For the record when I visited the US I threw up once from the food, which I have never done when visiting thailand for example. To be fair, british food sometimes has that effect on me too.
The tobacco is safe idea is of course out of date - philip morris has tried to claim that it saves the czech government money by killing people off before they claim their pensions, which offsets the health expense :-) which is a turnaround from post ww2 when you flooded europe with cigarettes (which nazi scientists had worked out were bad for you) and the cigarette company boards claiming it was safe just a couple of years ago. Go california!
You did let iraq take over kuwait, but complained about it afterwards. We could just blame that on the legendary lack of foresight of appointed ambassadors though rather than the folks at the state dept. You see israel being nasty, so you give them weapons and money to be even nastier.
rwanda was terrible (belgians dept.) but if you're giving examples the armenian one (by turkey) might be more appropriate. Thousands of miles closer anyway. And the kurds aren't too happy.
btw not all american laws suck - freedom of information is a good one.
Six months ago, a bit over half of the highly-modded comments on stories like this were scathingly skeptical about global warming. As I read at 4+ just now, the common sense here has shifted to over 95% of moderation favoring statements of prudent environmentalism.
What's changed? Is this one big enough to put denial of evidence - at least for the moment - out of style?
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
and buy all the margarita mix you can get your hands on. No need to bring salt. There's plenty on site.
I could sure use the Garbage approach to sort out the competing claims concerning global warming and other alleged crises. Does anyone else remember "Garbage"? Can you recommend a replacement in the same spirit? I support the Nature Conservancy, which I find very rational (unlike GreenPeace), but they deal only with species conservation.
> Finally, while man may not have created global warming, our industrial revolution has certainly contributed ..
I'm not sure what you mean by our industrial revolution, but it's commonly accepted to date industrial revolution back to the mid 19th century at its latest.
2c
3.243F6A8885A308D313
It's not about the shift, it's about the amplitude change. The average stays the same.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
and then tell me :-)
So this question has bugged me ever since I was old enough to grasp the problem.
The current life cycle of nuclear fuel goes something like; dig up a huge pile of rock and dirt with uranium deposits, refine it down to a small, highly radioactive fuel rod and put all the dirt back. Use the fuel rod for a year or so, then seal the slightly less radioactive rod in a barrel and store it somewhere - forever.
The question is this: Couldn't that spent fuel then be pulverized and diluted back into the same pile of dirt? Certainly it couldn't be more dangerous after it's used than before - it just spent a year fissioning itself off at near critical-mass so it's lost some of it's radioactivity. Granted - it would probably cost about as much as it did to mine it in the first place, but it would leave the environment no worse for the wear (well, except that it was strip-mined - but that's another issue).
Or, better still, why can't spent fuel rods be transferred to low-efficiency power plants. They may not be profitable, but it could be less costly than finding and buying land that's geologically rated for a million years of stability. The half life of a spent fuel rod may be 500,000 years, but if it continues to burn in a power plant, that time can be cut pretty drastically.
Can't it? This is really a question - not an invitation to flame me for my admitted lack of knowledge.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
The earth has been in a warming trend for a couple million years. This is quite expected. Scotese has paleocimatology for over a billion years.
His is a really good web site to study.
Excellent!!! I LOVE 2nd degree humor.
Try looking up ANYTHING on global climate change and cringe in horrer as you discover that the earths climate has chaged monstrously hundreds of times in the last 50,000 years all without the benefit of human activity!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
n/t
I don't want to say that everything is fine and we don't have to worry. However, we should remember a detail before jumping to conclusion: 2000-2002 is the peak of the current solar cycle, during which there is a slight but definite increase in the downpour of solar energy.
Just ask the Mir station what it thinks about the effects of solar maximum on the high atmosphere layers. The extra energy expanded the outer atmosphere layers and increased the aerodynamic drag on low-orbiting satellites, sending a few of them to their burning death. Granted, Mir's orbit was in a bad shape to begin with.
So it's not impossible that this Antartica event is the result of the current solar peak. We lack data to compare. We'd need at least 4 or 5 cycles (1 cycle = 11 years) to have even a rough idea. Alas, satellite surveillance is too new, we don't have 55 years of Antartica ice shelf measurements. So let's be cautious.
Also, don't forget that weather patterns are widly fluctuating. Europe suffered a record cold wave this winter. The Parthenon was covered with snow, the Cote d'Azur had snowstorms. You'll have a hard time convincing the people living there that the solar maximum actually slightly warmed up the Earth. :-)
Remember that there is something that would be even worse than ignoring climate changes, and that would be misidentifying them and spending all our time and resources barking at the wrong tree.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I think that scientists that are forecasting global warming are probably right in their calculations. However, I don't think that there is really a great cause for concern for the fact that the planet is heating at a higher rate than normal. People want us to believe that it is so that lobbying groups and political pundits can have their respective agendas pushed to the forefront. The only thing a climate model has ever really shown is how truly complex and dynamic the earth and its climate are. I still am holding firmly to the belief that we humans haven't been around nearly long enough to wreak the havoc that is supposed to be behind the earth changing temperature. Anybody with a dissenting opinion feel free give me some more data to sway my opinion. Or label me a troll, whatever floats your iceberg
Your argument is a non starter. When Europe and the US went through their industrial revolutions *THERE WERE NO ALTERNATIVES TO HIGH POLUTION*. These days, the technology is there, and the machines can be moved around the world in a matter of months. Why should China get a ticket to use cheaper, more polluting equipment to make shit that they end up selling to the US anyway?
I suppose this is your idea of "christian love", millions of innocent people dying and you're jumping up and down in glee about it. Fuck you, your Hebrew goat-herder god, and your sick religion.
You assume that our human actions are what is causing this. We are in a warming period between ice ages and this could very well be completely natural. Without data from the previous ages, we have nothing to base these opinions on other than direct data for the past few decades and some guesswork on geological surveys.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
a historian :)
Farther around Antarctica from there, several colonies of Adelie and Emperor penguins are endangered by breakups in the ice. The changes in ice have made it difficult for the adult penguins to get between their breeding grounds and areas where there are enough fish to feed them, and there's a substantial chance of a major population crash due to chick deaths.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That would be hard to believe, indeed, especially since the actual article at antarctica.ac.uk says: "Hard to believe that 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month."
But a factor of a million here, a factor of a million there, who cares, right? This is Slashdot! We don't need no stinkin' proofreading!
Another take from the Todd Mundt Show
Todd Mundt had on his show today a marine biologist purports the changes in global climate follow the decline of marine species, not the rise in other aspects of society, including logging. The marine biologist and paleontologist was Dr Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Another write up of his research is here
Never confuse volume with power.
I notice that the press used the phrase "the size of Delaware" to describe the ice flow several times. I recall that Israel is roughly the size of Delaware.
Somehow, I imagine that the story would have a different impact if they said that the ice flow was "the size of Israel".
=brian
Of course it is very comfortable to think (fool yourself) that no abnormal heating is happending, and that we can happily continue our wasteful lifestile without grave consequences.
But, how can you be so sure? Many experts claim the heating is caused by human actions. Some experts claim it has nothing to do with that (or that it is not even sure yet that there is global warming).
I too tend to be sceptical on very strong claims ("evidence") for human induced global warming. And I hope it is not true.
But also, it is very hard to rule it out, there is at least a non-neglectible chance that burning all fossile fuel that has been built up over many millions of years within a few decennia has bad effects on the earths climate. Given the serious consequences if it were true, I think caution is necessary.
Fooling yourselves because you don't want to give up your own egoistic lifestyle (at the expense of the rest of the world and of future generations) is not going to help. Even without global warming, is it right to use (waste) all fuel in a few decennia, leaving nothing for future generations? Is it right for some parts of the world to use 100 times more energy and resources per person than the rest of the world?
I keep hoping that this temperature fluctuation is normal and nothing to worry about. But alone the possibility that it might not, should suffice to cause a drastic change of behavior and lifestyle.
As though "environmental" groups don't have their own, self-serving agendas?
t .shtml#030899 )
The Sacremento Bee did a five part report on the environmental movement back in April, 2001, called Environment, Inc. The Bee notes that "Five other major groups -- including household names such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club -- spend so much on fund raising, membership and overhead they don't meet standards set by philanthropic watchdog groups."
I'm too ignorant to judge claims made by most environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They may be right. But the implication that their motives are above reproach is laughable.
Junk Science reported big chunks of ice back in October 1998:
Large icebergs not new
Submitted by Paul Jensen
On October 16, it was reported that an iceberg the size of Delaware broke free from Antarctica. Of course, this was attributed to global warming.
For a little perspective, we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as "The Bowditch."
The text reads "In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic."
Notice that this last iceberg was more than 4 times bigger than that little "ice cube" noted in the Washington Post story. And by some miracle, the world did not come to an end after the discovery of this giant.
So last week's iceberg was not so extraordinary -- except that it was perhaps the first linked to the dreaded global warming.
(Also at http://www.sepp.org/weekwas/1998/oct19_25.html and http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/environmen
The right-wing publication Scientific American, in an article about rising ocean levels in the August 1998 issue, noted that there is "some evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet may, in fact, have melted at least once before. Between about 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, when the last shared ancestors of all humans probably fanned out of Africa into Asia and Europe, Earth experienced a climatic history strikingly similar to what has transpired in the past 20,000 years, warming abruptly from the chill of a great ice age."
(This is by the same author who wrote the cover story of the March 1997 issue about rising sea levels. That article is not available online, and I don't have it here at work with me).
or should Washington (and perhaps even the english georges) be included in his title?
The NAS(USA) eventually sent out a public rebuke disavowing involvement and pointing out that it's own committee had reached the opposite conclusion.
--everytime you learn something a piece of your brain is replaced by something that someone else said
This argument really annoys me. Of course human activities are a partial effect. The climate is a very complex system.
But it's rubbish to use this as an argument (as many have tried to do) that the human impact is therefore less important. If anything, it just means that the research is more complex and requires more resources, and we need to live with wide error bars on our estimates.
Thought experiment to illustrate this point:
Assume that each degree increase in temperature is equally "bad". Imagine that the human impact of "current course" is +5 and "Kyoto targets" is +2.
Suppose the cost of a one degree increase is X, and the cost of implementing Kyoto targets is Y. Then the right course of action is to implement Kyoto if 3X is greater than Y.
Then imagine that there is a random factor R that varies between +N and -N degrees.
You now decide to implement Kyoto if 3X+RX is greater than Y+RX. I.e. the decision you should make is exactly the same. Note that the size of the random fluctuation is irrelevant in determining the correct decision. Hence using the existence of random flucation as an argument to do nothing is completely wrong.
The real model is of course more complex, non-linear etc. But the principle still holds - the key issue is to focus on the relative costs and benefits of the alternate approaches and argue around these, not some spurious waffle that fundamentally amounts to "it's been OK before so it will be OK in the future".
After many diplomatic disastrous decisions, and a terrorist attack (that turned a completely dumb president in a great stadist)
I think you meant to write "sadist."
-- thinkyhead software and media
the fuel in a fission reactor isn't anywhere NEAR critical mass.
If I remember right, the only breeder reactors we have are for weapon grade material making. I think there's one in the northwest, I forget where, somewhere in Washington I think. Theres a few more in Europe, but the "green" people hate 'em more than regular reactors; keep in mind no new nuclear reactors have been commissioned since like 1977 or something.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
.as there appears to be little Science being discussed.
This time I could be arsed.
Well, not like your tree huggers would have you believe. I do believe the earth is getting a bit warmer, but is it really caused by us humans? I personally believe it is a natural stage the earth goes through through its own life cycle. Seriously, if we are the cause of the earth warming up, then please explain what caused the ICE AGE! Did we not move enough back then? What would the tree huggers back then say? "We need to move more! Build bigger fires and stuff that produces heat!!!!!"
This is a classic way to present data to make a point without being backed up by the data.
This is plain and simple dishonest.
I suggest you go get a graph of that data that is zero based and see that this is really just a blip.
With all this talk about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and cheap energy, a certain question comes to my mind: What do we do if we find a source of unlimited free energy?
Nevermind the physics or politics of the question. The important part is that even if we had all the energy we wanted without any greenhouse gas pollution or nuclear radiation, we'd still be polluting one very large thing: heat. Given that a certain amount of greenhouse gas is in our atmosphere at any time, there will be a point in which using energy will cause a change in overall temperature.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
There are more trees now than there were 20 years ago. There are vast reforesting efforts in place, most logging involves harvesting repeat growth timber, not stripping forests, and most logging companies replant more trees than they take.
The biggest destroyer of forests isn't industrial concerns but slash and burn farmers in the congo. Go tell the primitives to stop burning the forests and leave the loggers alone.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
We are moving out of the Little Ice Age and back into the warm phase of the 1800 year cycle that saw the Medieval Warm and the Norse colonization of Greenland and other parts of North Eastern Canada.
And, it is late summer in the Antarctic.
There is -no- scientific evidence for global warming.
There is evidence that over the past 100 years, weather stations that used to be in rural areas and are now in urban heat islands, are indeed, in urban heat islands.
The agenda of the "global warming" debunkers is simply Truth.
The global warming alarmists have other agendae.
No matter who cuases what where, it all comes down to dumbfucks and their curved lines. People like to see curved lines when it comes to statistical analysis "look a curved line we must have gotten the answer right!". When confronted with data that doesn't fit a curve of some sort people go completely batshit saying the world is going to end. There is no mean fucking temperature on the Earth, saying so is just ridiculous. It can't rise or fall if it isn't there. Even druing the bigger ice ages in history not every part of the Earth was covered in ice. If you measure the temperature at one point and then at another point a hundred miles away and say the average temperature if somewhere between the two values, what exactly does that REALLY say. All it means that somewhere between those two points, close to the middle you hope, the temperature will equal that "average" value. What good is that?
This isn't meant to say the BAS folks don't know what they're talking about, they know a whole lot more than I do about this ice sheet. However the folks at Greenpeace and their incessant dumbfuckery have concluded the Earth is going to Hell in a neatly wrapped package. Whether humans are ruining the planet doesn't matter much, we can either fix it or cannot, even if we can an asteroid might crash into the planet making it a moot point. Nuke all the fucking unborn baby grey whales.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
All this talk about solar and wind power reminded me of something I'd seen just recently that combines the two, and I found the article here.
Basically the idea is to build a very tall tower (1km high) with a big greenhouse (20sq km or more) at the bottom. As the sun heats the air in the bottom of the tower, it rises, and gets pushed out the top, spinning 32 turbines for a peak output of 200MW as it goes. Each of these towers would clean about 920,000 tonnes of co2 emissions from burning fossil fuels from the air every year.
I think it's a great idea, if the Australian government buys in and it ever happens. Growing plants to produce clean energy that even improves the environment in the long run? Could it sound any more too good to be true?
Not that I am crazy about my environmentalism,
but to rely on the market as a savior seems a bit disingenuous.
Global warming is not perfectly supported by data, but science is hardly sophisticated enough to deal with relatively simple systems, much less the huge multivariable equation that is our climate.
Like any good coder, you learn about the code base you have before you start screwing with it.
The same with the environment.
The market doesn't take care of itself without some minimal regulation. This is the reason we have antitrust laws. I feel that the market won't take care of the environment either- not because it is evil, but because it isn't in its players' interests to do so.
Environmental regulation helps to keep us from screwing with something we don't fully understand. Good environmental legislation doesn't severely restrict choices in that pursuit.
A side note:
Framing our problems(such as global warming) in terms of strictly reductionist arguments ignores the larger systems at play.
to push an agenda driven by a bunch of hippies without much college education to back them.
There has been global warming since the last ice age. There is still no hard, firm, factual evidence saying we are making any difference in the pace.
We know that the climate of the Earth cycles between warm and cool, as it has happened many times over history.
The Earth has also gotten much warmer during the various cycles, so it only stands to reason that it will get much warmer before the next ice age.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that global warming is a bad thing. I'd like to point out that the greatest amount of fauna and flora existed during the Earth's warmest periods.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
In point of fact, the only thing we know for sure is that the environment is changing, and it appears to be doing so at a markedly faster rate than one would expect without the addition of a trigger like, say, an impact event.
That's all that we know. We do *not* know if this is a natural condition, an unnatural condition (i.e., human caused) or a combination of the two. Furthermore we don't know if there's any way to halt, slow down, or lessen the change, or what actions could be taken should such a thing be possible. Or even if such actions are necessary or desirable.
Now, the typical moron argument here on slashdot falls into two camps. Camp A consists of the Priests of Gaia, the folks who adamantly state that changes in the ecosystem are bad, that humans are the undeniable cause of all change, and therefore that humans are essentially evil and should be punished for their sins - according to the dictates of the Priests, of course (e.g., "reduce emissions of gas x to levely y, screw the economy"). Camp B is composed of the Ostriches, who insist that there's nothing to see, move along now, sticking their heads in the sand and insisting that everyone else join them in ignorant bliss.
Real scientists - those who recognize the basic truths in paragraphs 1 and 2 above - want to spend money doing research on the questions posed to see what the answers are. Why? Because if we listen to the Priests and take corrective measures without basis in fact we could end up wasting a great deal of resources, or worse - altering things in an undesirable way. If we listen to the Ostriches and do nothing then we could end up with a scenario which involves later having to build dikes around every port city in the world as the least expensive option for adaption.
The sensible thing is to ignore both the Priests and the Ostriches, conduct the necessary studies to see exactly what's going on, what the effects will be, and what we might do to stabilize the situation - assuming it needs to be stabilized. Which is precisely why you see very little of this kind of attitude on "science meets Jerry Springer" slashdot.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
And 1 million Zionist Jews.
We just wait ~50 years to run out of fossil fuels.
Greenpeace's other founder left to start Sea Shepherd, because he thought Greenpeace was too willing to compromise. All things are relative.
I confess, I don't understand why people use "follow the money" as an attack against Greenpeace yet don't admit that the same logic makes most of the "global warming is good for you" counterhype just as suspect. Greenpeace has donations to win by scaring you, but those donations are chump change compared to profits from oil companies and related industries.
Can you honestly tell me that you think Exxon-Mobil and Ford don't have a tremendous vested interest in convincing us that scientists warning us about global warming are all wrong? In fact, when you look back at the bulk of corporate history, there's a long tradition of being against anything that might cause a loss in profitability, from safety regulations to fuel economy requirements. They've done a really good job at convincing libertarians that CAFE is an an assault on personal freedom. Bullpucky.
And, again using the "follow the money" logic, your poster boy Patrick Moore works for an "astroturf" group called the British Columbia Forest Alliance. It's funded by logging industries and was set up by the PR firm Burston-Marstellar, a group notorious for this kind of work. It sounds to me like the real issue for Moore is that those "environmental extremists" can't scare up enough donations to pay nearly as well as the people they're campaigning against can.
Which kind of says something about which side has more of a vested interest to protect, really. Hint: it's not Greenpeace.
My office has a glass wall into which everyone entering this part of the firm can see directly.
Seeing their systems manager shaking with mirth whilst in mid lunch is unnerving to some of the staff.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Secondly, can we do anything about it?
Thirdly, should we do anything about it?
--- What?
"..most likely due to human activities,"
Activities such as farting perhaps?? They spend how much studying the effects of cow gas and not human beings?? Good God man, I bet I cause at least a fraction of the warming trend if that's the case!
all these people who still think we
,your soaking in it now.
cannot have a significant influence on our
environment.
First off life made our current environment.
we have an oxygen atmosphere because of blue-green
algae ( initially).
so what life can make , it can unmake.
True this happened over immense timescales, but
we have a little more clout than blu-green algae.
Life makes an environement that facilitates more
life and more suitable to the life that arises in
it.
so the car and the factory may make an environment that it doesn't effect it, but will
effect us.
It's really as simple as this, if you fart it
smells up the room.
It't time to retire the "who ?, little old us
homo sapiens, - the atmosphere's so big, and we
are so small- mind set.
Sorry, but God isn't going to belch or fart
air into the Atmosphere as we degrade the one
we have.
Global warming
Don't have the exact numbers, but ROT gives this:
The thermodynamic efficiency is between 65 and 80%; the transmission efficiency (generator to outlet) is about 80%. So, you have roughly 50-65% of the energy input converted to real power at point of use.
Heat recovery gives you another 10% on the low end of thermodynamic efficiency, maybe 5% on the high end. Best case, you end up with 60-70% efficiency.
As a Greenpeace member who's been following the debate for over a decade, it's hard not to feel aggrieved at those with their own agenda who have pushed the theory that global climate change isn't happening.
I would greatly prefer if the content posters and the slashdot editors would have the journalistic integrity to not insert their own views into newsposts. I visit slashdot to stay current on interesting bits of news, not to read poster X bash corporations and pass it off as news. Were a reported for any semi-respectable newspaper to write something like that, he would most certainly be repremeanded, if not fired.
I think I speak for a large number of readers when I say that until I start see signs of good journalism developing here, I will not even consider paying real cash money for a subscription.
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
check with NASA.
Every single time their cumulative weather satellite information points to no average increase.
Just like Hitler and Stalin. Tell the big lie
often enough and people begin to believe it.
Would it be bad of me to say that I wouldn't mind the temparature in Chicago to be in the 60s in December?
I am Slad.
No, it doesn't. Your source on that claim is probably Dixie Lee Ray's book _Trashing the Planet_, or Rush Limbaugh's frequent quoting of it, or somebody else's quoting (or mis-quoting) of Rush. Dixie Lee Ray unfortunately got a few of her facts and calculations wrong, and the resulting misinformation has been bouncing around the net ever since. For a correction, um, try this FAQ. Here's the relevant snippet:
I play Nerd-Folk!
I guess it's a good thing we got those nasty CAFE standards out of the way too. I really hate drinking clean water and breathing clean air.
To repeat a folkloric figure that I can't back up, a coal plant releases more radiation in a day than the entire three mile island accident. My third-hand source for this ran across it when he was writing a paper. He went out to both a nuclear plant and a coal plant with a geiger counter. He accidentally left it on, and it was going nuts by the time he reached the gate of the coal plant. He refused to go any farther . .
three mile island did, of course, waste billions of dollars, and everyone within a couple of thousand miles blamed everything bad that happened to them for the next couple of years on the radiation . .
hawk
Next time you head out to the woods to protest a logging operation, be sure to bring a roll of plastic toilet tissue with you in case nature calls.
~Karma to spare, karma to spare~
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
No fucking way will they bring back the double nickel. I am not slowing down to save oil for some SUV driver. Make the drivers PAY for their gasoline!
sulli
RTFJ.
This troll, I must feed:
Ice is less dense than fresh water at 0 degrees C. In fact, if you have floating ice, and it melts, the ocean level will go basically nowhere (it's already displacing volume according to its mass, just as it will when it melts).
If it goes anywhere, it will go down (because not all the ice in your 64 oz. cup is floating -- some of it is probably stuck to the sides).
Slash&burn farming has nothing to do with "primitives" and everything with population pressure and poverty. As for logging, I'll believe your statements when I see some figures on that which have not been released by those companies themselves.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Six billion people x 100 watts heat output / person = 600,000,000,000 watts worth of global warming.
Not to mention the farting.
and some other things that Greenpeace would rather you not read or comment on:
Antarctic ozone hole NASA TOMS satellite
Cosmic conspiracy. Cosmic rays could be a major contributor to ozone destruction over Antarctica. Cosmic rays may be enlarging the hole in the ozone layer, according to a study appearing in the 13 August print issue of PRL . Researchers analyzed data from several sources, and found a strong correlation between cosmic ray intensity and ozone depletion.
full article is at: http://focus.aps.org/v8/st8.html And while you are at it you might want to look at: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-55/iss-3/p35.html
reference was perhaps a little... reckless, dare I say trollish. Neverthless, I
continue to find the general attitude of scorn
and derision, backed up with half-baked, long-discredited pseudo science,
misunderstandings of half-remembered TV documentaries and ads paid for by the
oil industry, profoundly depressing. Speaking as a goddam limey, it's seems
to be that this attitude is far more prevalent amongst Americans that others.
And that's just skimming at +4! Gawd knows what it's like at -1... *wince*
Depressing to see such (accidental, presumably) misinformation and just plain
wrong "facts" being moderated up as "informative".
There are so many myths and straw men arguments... I'm going to go through
all the comments, isolate each duff point made and refute it. (Mail me if
you'd like to know when it's done. I mis-munged my email address in the
submission: it's cally, at zpok, dot demon, dot co, dot uk . I'll try to
draw attention to any genuine areas of disagreement, or doubt, or even where
there are some real science people who disagree on an area.
To everyone who pointed out that the sun has or is getting hotter or colder:
yes, of course the sun's output has fluctuated over time. How do you know that?
And don't you think that the climate modelling people might have thought of that,
too, and ALLOWED for it in their calculations? Well, of course they have, and
yes they have.
Lots of straw-man arguments about what "environmentalists" think. The IPCC,
the Hadley Centre, and all the other groups around the world working on
the fantastically complex area of (a) working out what the climate was like
in the past, (2) modelling it well enough to predict the present from the past,
and (3) make assessments about the probability of various outcomes - that is,
to "make predictions" - are NOT "environmentalists". They are reputable
scientists. They study data, test hypothesis, publish in peer reviewed journals,
argue with each other, test models, criticise other models, and all the rest
of the "scientific method" as practiced today, with all the crap that goes
along with it. This is the BEST WE HAVE. If it's good enough to make engrave
computers on slivers of rock so small that quantum effects start to make
themselves felt - and make the planes fly and drugs work and all the rest of
it - then the overall consensus is probably a pretty damn good guess. It's
the best we are going to get, for now anyway.
Whatever. I'm knackered (I have a 4.5 hour commute, gotta get up again in
7 hrs), and no-one will read or moderate up this comment, coming so late,
but I AM going to write that page listing the myths and broken arguments
that keep getting trotted out here. Then perhaps we can get on with arguing
about whether it's worth spending money to prevent socio-political problems
that will affect our kids, and, with luck, their kids...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I have heard many arguments that the US adopting the Kyoto protocol for the reduction of greenhouse gasses is too expensive, unsafe, or inconvienent. For example, BP has already met the conditions of Kyoto in 4 years and in fact is now saving money because of it. DuPont has made even better progress, reducing their contribution of greenhouse gasses by 50%!
Cutting greenhouse gasses is not necessarily that difficult. For example, last year I added more insulation to my home. I saw a 25% reduction in natural gas because of this, and with various other improvements I have made over the last few years I am sure my home consumes far less energy than it did in 1991. The net result of these improvements to my house is that I spend less money on heating and lighting and in only a few years all of the changes will more than pay for themselves. Not only that, but with the added insulation my house is more comfortable.
Everyone seems to think that increasing the milage of cars is the most important step. While it is important and I believe easily doable with todays technology, many other areas are even easier.
How many of your homes have old furnaces and sub-standard insulation?
Perhapse if we had to pay the true cost of energy things would change. Here in California where we are stuck with outragiously high electricity costs (my bill is over $0.20/kwh) and very high gas prices, many people have taken advantage of methods to reduce energy usage. The state has helped as well by offering rebates. For example, it is now not unusual to buy a 100 watt equivelent compact flourescent light bulb for less than $1.
One doesn't have to be a rabid environmentalist to see the benefits from reducing greenhouse gasses. It also makes sense in the pocket book.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Wolf wrote:
.72 AU (ie, Venus), there would be higher temperatures but not runaway greenhouse. -- at least not until the CO2 levels reached critical and the hydroxyls started boiling away into space. Keep CO2 levels low and you're okay.
There's absolutely no way that Earth can turn into Venus. For one thing there isn't enough carbon to make the carbon dioxide to push up the greenhouse effect to that degree. For another Venus is simply closer to the Sun.
And further, the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by man is dwarfed by the amount produced by volcanoes; by more than ten times. Even if we deliberately tried we can't influence the environment that much. Some, but nothing like you are implying.
Whoever wrote this obviously is too young to have been in a classroom where they used... chalk. Ever looked around you? The earth is layered in calcium carbonate and other retentive materials (wood, coal, oil, coral, krill) that extract carbon from the atmosphere and keep it locked up. Yes, volcanoes and other factors churn it out, but our biosphere has evolved processes for packing it away again... processes that we are increasingly interfering with.
The carbon cycle. Look it up. If you're some sort of computer weenie with no chemistry skills think of it as a finely balanced recursive algorithm with hundreds of inputs and outputs that somehow maintains environmental homeostasis. Knock this out of whack and you've got hell to pay. You can easily get Venus, or Mars (Snowball Earth).
Your supposition about Venus is also plain wrong. The incident stellar energy per square metre on the upper atmosphere of Venus is only incrementally higher than Earth's. If the Earth as currently constituted was at
Alone of all the planets the earth does not exist in physical equilibrium. It's the only planet so far discovered with a strong biosphere that resists change and maintains temperature and humidity levels. Dismissing that unique gift is dangerous and absurd. Have you heard of chicken little?
Try this on for size.
Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.
The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.
Da Blog
I see a lot of argument about whether global warming is a problem, whether humans have any effect, and should we do anything about it.
:-(.
Lets look at the best and worse cases:
* Best case is that global warming is either not happening, or part of a self-limiting natural process and not any sort of problem. In this case, if we keep doing what we are doing (keep increasing emissions), we are fine, and if we attempt to reduce our emissions, we go through some temporary hardship as we can't do all the things we are currently doing, but in the long run we are quite good at working around constraints.
* Worst case is that global warming is going to be a catastrophe, and we are playing a large part in causing it. In this case, keeping with our current course is a disaster, and we need to do what we can to try and reduce the level of the problem, or at least delay it to try and find some more options.
Looking at these, continuing our present course is a very large gamble with the whole ecosystem at stake, and attempting to reduce our impact on the problem might cause some real short-term hardship (particularly economic), but might also save us in the long term.
Given this, it seems clear to me that while we seek more knowledge and understanding about what is going on, we should play it safe, and try to clean up our act until it becomes clear whether what we are doing is a problem.
One version of the Precautionary Principle (http://www.biotech-info.net/rachels_586.html) states:
1. People have a duty to take anticipatory action to prevent harm. ("If you have a reasonable suspicion that something bad might be going to happen, you have an obligation to try to stop it.")
2. The burden of proof of harmlessness of a new technology, process, activity, or chemical lies with the proponents, not with the general public.
3. Before using a new technology, process, or chemical, or starting a new activity, people have an obligation to examine "a full range of alternatives" including the alternative of doing nothing.
4. Decisions applying the precautionary principle must be "open, informed, and democratic" and "must include affected parties."
I think this (particularly parts 1 and 4) applies to our situation - we have a reasoable suspicion (even if no proof yet) that what we are doing may be harmful.
Of course hardly anyone will read this because I've posted it so late in the discussion
In the real world, antartica doesn't float in a cup. It's a continent; a continent covered with ice. When the ice melts, the water from it, and chunks of ice broken off, fall into the ocean, causing the level to rise. The ice isn't already in the ocean, if it was there would be no change in sea level caused by melting. The ice is on LAND. You might have noticed that antartica hasn't floated into africa or anything else recently. So next time, check your facts and dont be so smug.
Your freedoms do not exist in a vacuum, and there are many very worthwhile causes that are not explicitly about freedom.
While replying to yourself is probably some form of onanism, I was wondering exactly how the difference in solar constant levels due to distance would affect temperature on earth and venus.
The answer? Not much -- it's really all down to CO2 and albedo. Without atmospheres, Earth would have a mean temperature of Earth (-12C) and Venus (-23C).
More here, and here is the key:
The atmosphere would finally stablilize at a still higher temperature and pressure after all the carbon dioxide had been driven from the rocks. In fact, we believe that if this sequence were to take place on the Earth, the resulting temperature and pressure of the atmosphere left behind would not be very different from that for present-day Venus: the atmospheric termperature would be hundreds of degrees Celsius and the pressure would be maybe 100 times greater than it is today. Thus, we believe that in the case of Venus the initial solar heating kept oceans from forming, or kept them from staying around if they did form, and the subsequent lack of rainfall and failure of plant life to evolve kept the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rather than binding it in the rocks as is the case for the Earth; thus, Venus has an environmental disaster for an atmosphere. The sobering warning for us is obvious: we have to be extremely concerned about processes such as burning of fossil fuels in large volumes that might (we don't know for sure because the scientific questions are complex) have the potential to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and produce on the Earth atmospheric conditions such as those found on Venus.
Da Blog
I agree with the guy who submitted the story that started this thread. Lots of "scientifically" inclined slashdotters seem to be unable to deal with what the climate scientists and their peer reviewed science is saying. Yes climate naturally fluctuates (and if current ice core evidence is true, sometimes very quickly), yes not all climate scientists believe in anthropenic components (fewer every year) to climate change, and yes the uncertainities get glossed over by the alarmist groups (of both pro and anti climate change persuasion). Yes its also true that climate is a non linear system with lots of negative and positive feed backs that are still unknown and/or poorly understood and yes lots of catastrophic events can and will happen (eventually) like big meteor impacts, flood basalt volcanism, etc that may dwarf the atmospheric changes that humans have made. But you know what? The research that has been done on this over the last 10 years or so is not zeroing on the no human influence on climate position. Just the opposite. It's funny how slashdotters celebrate human mastery of natural forces (ie quantum effects in chips), but don't want to face the possibility of human influence on climate, which could have tremendous negative (and yes maybe a few positive) consequences.
And why should climate-change skeptic Slashdotters be proud to be associated with the fossil fuel economy anyway? That's like an electrical engineer from the 50's and 60's disparaging the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors. Fossil fuels are yesterday's energy source, decentralized renewables are tomorrow's.
Now as for the aversion towards reducing energy use - again what gives? Energy wasting is yesterday's tech and yesterday's design and engineering. Energy efficiency is cool - it incorporates really cool tech along with innovative whole system design. There are some really smart people working on this. For a sample check out the Rocky Mountain Institute site (www.rmi.org).
Finally for all the slashdotters who think that the climate change alarm givers want to make your life uncomfortable and take away your fossil fuel driven lifestyle, and our country's "way of life" - Please. It's time to make the change to better technology - and less CO2 emissions. Pull your heads out and support real progress.
What people fail to see is, just because the Earth won't become another Venus, doesn't mean we can't make a lot of damage. We can.
And it's not like we are going to wipe out life from the Earth completely, because roaches, rats and weeds will survive. At the very least, some sort of unicellular organisms wll survive. But if we kill off diversity of lifeforms, our quality of life will go waaayyy down, we might even, well, die.
Let me just say a good word for vegetation: that's what made this wonderful richness of lifeforms (which eventually resulted with the appearance homo sapiens on Earth) possible. Form billions of years there were only unicellular lifeforms on Earth, and the temperature was really high. However, when the plants finally appeared (relatively recently in the history of Earth), they dramatically decreased and stabilized the temperature and metheorological conditions on this planet, and created the environment in which more complex creatures emerged.
I just want to reiterate: life will still be here, even long after the last zebra, dolphin, koala or eagle will be extinct. But ask yourself whether you want to live in such a place (provided we somehow survive).
Sigged!
Antartica is getting colder, thicker.
In my fantasy, UFOs land from which emerge tentacled and slimy but otherwise nice aliens who round up and charge various humans with Planeticide. Among them, George W. Bush, a sadly medicore politician lucky enough to be cast in the lead role of a movie in which he plays a hero President. And Aussie Prime Minister, John Howard (aka Howard Howard, Racist Coward), whose plan is to use Australia's massive coal reserve to flood those annoying pacific island nations run by "darkies".
Any suggestions for punishment for these two are greatly appreciated.
Go Tentacles!
... doesn't make it bad to reduce pollution.
I don't think anyone is denying that there was any effect; some people are merely arguing that the effect is insignificant. I.e. if of the current warming trend, 99% is the result of an increase in solar power output and 1% is the result of human activities, then you are correct -- humans have contributed to global warming -- but it's also irrelevant, because they've contributed so little that it might as well be 0.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
REPENT!!! The end is nigh
This is a very very bad sign.
The physical mass, of the ice in question suggests that this warming trend is not going to go away anytime soon, and is not a "hiccup" event.
Within 30 years at this rate of Ice elimination, the sheer size of it all is mind boggling, New York and coastal cities will have far more too worry about than terrorists attacks.
The worlds entire financial center is in New York, and the cost of a barrier to prevent the ocean from flooding downtown Manhatten is going to be enourmous.
I had NO IDEA that the data I was looking at 5 years ago, would actually be realized in so short a time!
This sheet is the size of the country Luxemburg and will totally disintegrate, becomming part of the Earths ocean.
If it gets caught in any sort of outgoing current, it will pose a great hazard to any sort of shipping in the those areas it passes through.
I still couldn't believe it when I seen the photos.
I STILL don't believe it. The size and enormity is incredible!
I guess Global Warming skeptics will say the pictures are artificial and they will probably say the shelf is still there all frozen up, like we see in the photos, just a mere 2-3 years ago.
I certainly HOPE they are artificial and part of some left wing plot by Green Peace!
Quite a shocking discovery, and one that does not bode well for a generic species such as homo sapiens which doesn't take to well to climate change.
World stability is already at a crisis level. Weather and climate changes at this magnitude if sustained will cause wars over crop failures, loss of key financial centers in the world economy, and worse, shift valuable political power to terrorists states, who may find themselves now commanding a large proportion of the worlds crops!
Whole cities disapearing in a suitecase bomb flash of white light all because no one can afford to buy beans at the local market.
What a way to end 100,000 years of struggle to get out of the cave...
It also is interesting to note, that we are now terraforming the Earth. We may not know exactly what we are terraforming it INTO, but you can be rest assured if it isn't good, we won't be around long enough to try it someplace else. (i.e. Mars.)
We have no idea HOW we are raising the temperature, so by the time it reaches a crisis, we probably won't know how to reduce the temperature either.
Not a pleasant picture.
-hack
Oh No, how high will it go?
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"The problem is that we'd be switching to reactors that use bomb-grade Plutonium"
WRONG,WRONG,WRONG!!!! The most economical way to run a breeder cycle is with Plutonium 240 (you can leave the original fuel rods in the uranium reactor longer), *not* Pu239 which is the bomb-grade stuff.
But your basic point is right; we need *both* conservation *and* development of all possible energy technologies. So why is the US govt so anti-energy conservation and why did it pull out of ITER (the next-generation test fusion reactor)???
Are we sure that big chunks like this don't occassionally break loose regardless of any alleged warming trends? Are we sure what part of real warming trends are and are not man-made? I think, in any case, that this event is a poor excuse to act as if all the "the earth is warming up and it spells your DOOM!" people were right-on all along and all others are blowing smoke.
You forgot the British prototype at Dounreay (sp?) which ran successfully for years. And let's not forget that the first reactor to generate useable amounts of electricity (the US EBR1 in 1953) was a breeder.
The problems come up when you try to scale them up. The French SuperPhenix, which was supposed to be the prototype of a full-scale power-generating breeder, because of (a) all its downtime due to numerous problems and (b) the necessity of supplying power to it during said downtime to keep the sodium coolant liquid supposedly used more energy to keep it going than it ever produced over 14 years! It ended up having to be downgraded to a research installation. I believe it's being decommissioned by the current French government. NOTE: the most pro-nuclear nation in the world has thus abandoned large breeders!
The only other large one in the "West" is Japan's Monju, which IIRC was shut down for several years after an accident in the mid-90's. There is talk of getting it going again but the locals aren't too enthusiastic...
AFAIK the only large breeder currently in routine operation is in Russia somewhere, but I forget it's name. IIRC it was about 600MW capacity (ie still relatively small for a power station).
Basically there is such a glut of uranium on the world market that there is no economic case for the huge costs involved in implementing a full breeder cycle for a nation's power needs. That said, I believe we do need at least one large experimental breeder system *somewhere* if we do need to go down that route (eg global warming is faster than expected, we need to go nuclear in a hurry, and the price of uranium threatened to go through the roof). Go Monju!!!
Wow. I didn't expect us to get into a costs-of-X-versus-Y type discussion, but hey, let's run with it.
Imagine that the random R factor is -3 degrees. Is there still a need to implement Kyoto since we now meet our Kyoto target of only +2 degrees? The point I'm trying to make is that no one knows what R will be.
Add to that the false assumption that each degree of increase in temperature is bad. How do we know that 100 years from now, there isn't going to be a significant drop in global temperature, like say, 10 degrees. Such a change might occur if the ocean current "conveyor belts" were to become disrupted (as has been theorized was the cause of at least some ice ages in the past). What would the cost be then? It would be: the cost of implenting Kyoto, Y, plus the cost of the "natural" drop in temperature Z, plus the additional cost of the actual affect that Kyoto had, W. Now what is the original cost, X? It's zero! In fact, it's better than zero -- it's negative. X is now a "good" thing, i.e. it reduced the overall cost.
A human-added 5 degree increase in global temperature might be a good thing in such a case, no? Perhaps thousands of different species might be spared extinction by such a course of events.
The fact is, no one really knows what the future holds as far as global climate goes. Whatever changes are down the road are almost certainly beyond our control. Not only that, but due to the inherent uncertainty of future global climate conditions, any minor changes that we might incur -- even intentionally -- may take us down the opposite path that we actually would have liked to have gone.
Furthermore, "actual" scientists agree that global warming would likely be catastrphoic. BUT, "actual" scientists also agree that the requisite data for knowing whether or not human activities have had any measuarable impact on global climate is simply not available.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Hey, I'm not even the one who made the assertion. The guy I replied to did. Ask him for the cite.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
During the past two million years, in very rough figures we have had 100,000 year spells of extended glaciation (mostly Europe and Canada but cooling more widely) alternating with 10,000 year interglacials.
There is simply no evidence to suggest that that pattern is broken and a lot of evidence that the "Atlantic conveyer" is the switch between those two phases.
Fact is we are about due for the current interglacial to end and anything that switches off the Atlantic conveyor is just about guaranteed to return us to the more normal state of extended glaciation.
It took until the current interglacial for an expansion of agriculture to trigger what has become human civilisation.
More speculatively, it looks as though our species may have separated from its since extinct cousins during the last interglacial. Exactly where in Africa we can only speculate, but I expect not on Danakil Island.
Personally I just wish I could live long enough to see the ice sheets suck 100 metres of water out of the oceans and open the door to some serious archaeology on the continental shelves of and around Indonesia so we might start to fill in some vital pieces of the jigsaw that represents the origins of human culture.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
One volcano affected climate by several degrees C over several centuries....
Humankind has (obviously) caused none of that, yet the earth still went up by several degrees.
Global warming over the past couple of decades appears real, but is likely to have a natural cause. (solar insolation increases).. Conjectured models that don't fit any of the observed data are not sufficient to predict that.
Buddy.. Humankind is *small change* in the world energy budget... Now in a century this may change, but not yet.
A simple search on google yields the thermodynamic limits on heat engine efficiency.
r mo /engines.html
0 18 0.shtml
http://oldsci.eiu.edu/physics/DDavis/1150/14The
Short Answer: There is no Thermodynamic limit on the efficency of a heat engine. There is a practical limit due to material limits, but it is considerably higher than 50%.
Long Answer: Efficiency = 1 - Tcold/Thot
Temperatures are in Kelvin, so Tcold (room temperature) is about 300K. Assume Thot is 500 C (800 K). That means efficiency would be 62.5%. This is a fairly low estimate of what high tech construction materials can withstand. A reasonable upper limit on materials temperature is 3000 Kelvins.
http://g-cubed.org/gc2002/2001GC000180/2001GC00
This would mean an efficiency of 90%. Granted there are mechanical efficiencies, but current coal plants can reach efficiencies of 45%. It is estimated that advanced gas plants can reach efficiencys of 60%
http://www.ieagreen.org.uk/efficncy.htm
It never ceases to amaze me that a post with so little research can be moderated to 5. I suspect mine will remain at 1 since I am posting this so late, but that is another rant altogether.
Uninformed ass. Interesting choice of words.
Your first two links were from a right wing front group dedicated to, among other things, printing anything to deny that global warming exists.
Your third link was from the "Reagan Information Exchange". Same deal.
Your fourth link was the funniest of all. It was from an outfit called the "Greening Earth Society".
Here's a bit from their About Us page:
Our climate focus expresses scientific skepticism concerning the potential for catastrophic changes in climate due to humanity's emissions of CO2.
Greening Earth Society is a not-for-profit membership organization comprised of rural electric cooperatives and municipal electric utilities, their fuel suppliers, and thousands of individuals.
Some advice, friend: next time you want to brag about how informed you are on the topic of global warming, try posting some links that aren't from GOP sites and energy utilities. You might want to consider some links from actual scientists. Unless you're of the Limbaugh persuasion and believe that scientists are all liberals with agendas who can't be trusted.
So, yes, volcanos spew plenty of greenhouse gasses. I don't have the exact information on hand and I don't have time to search for it right now, but if you jump to google.com and do some honest research I'm sure you can find it for yourself with little trouble.
What happened, was your VCR busted on the day that Rush did his show on volcanoes?
I also loved how you can hardly write a paragraph without bashing "greenies" and then you tell others to not trust those with agendas. That's even funnier than when you posted the link from a consortium of energy companies disproving global warming.
If it is a problem, we shouldn't compound the problem.. But..
Changes aren't free or costless.. As an example, gov't could ban burning anything for energy tonight, but that policy obviously isn't costless.. (And the gov't would be overthrown tomorrow.)
Thats the problem.. If the choice to avoid burning stuff was costless, I'd agree with you; the only thing I'd agree was worth burning was charcol in a BBQ. But changes aren't costless.
That was your funniest message yet.
You used the word "greenie" seven times, while claiming that it was a word you just added to your vocabulary tonight.
You said that if pollutants can't be reduced to optimal levels, then they shouldn't be reduced at all. What's a 25% reduction in pollution worth compared to the fiscal well-being of heavily polluting companies?
You said that climate research is usually done by crooked scientists trying to milk the system of research dollars. You said such people should find real jobs that "actually produce something". That would be real convenient for all the polluters you champion, wouldn't it?
Why bother with research, just blame it all on volcanoes. Nothing to be done here, folks, move on, and keep on pumping out those pollutants. Don't be taken in by those god damn "greenies" who express concern about the quality of land, air, and water we pass on to the next generation.
Must be that squirrat from 'Ice Age' again!
This whole page reminds me of that old Dilbert maxim: "Since when was ignorance a valid opinion?"
Human logic: 1) I can't so you mustn't. 2) I can but you mustn't.
There is irrefutable evidence that CO2 levels are rising in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.
There is irrefutable evidence that human -produced long-lived chlorine group chemicals are catalyzing the destruction the ozone layer.
There is ambiguous evidence that the mean global annual temperature is increasing.
There is an ambiguous semi-consensus of scientific opinion that temperatures are rising because of human activities.
There are statements from the US president and adminstration that global warming is not happening, and that no action is necessary.
The majority of funding for the presidential campaign came from Fortune 100 oil companies who have a vested interest in zero regulation.
No other G8 country agrees. See Kyoto protocol.
No other G8 country has election advertising funded by corporations to the extent of the USA.
Do you:
A) Believe nothing should be done,
B) Believe something should be done, but do nothing,
C) Believe something should be done, and do something.
Choose one answer.
Floating ice persists for decades. It persists long enough that the salt is squeezed out of it, and it goes fresh. Experience can tell you how many decades old the ice is, and how fresh it is, from the change in colours it transmits. Old ice appears blue.
The disappearance of ice from the passage is not a short-term, passing event. It is a deeply significant event. Larsen was a very experienced Arctic navigator. He commanded the St. Roch for almost twenty years. The ice conditions he encountered during the 1942-1944 passage were typical conditions of that period -- and hundreds of years prior.
Prior to her launch the RCMP, which provided the only Federal presence in Canada's north, used chartered vessels to supply far northern outposts, during the brief Arctic summer. The St Roch was purpose built for Arctic missions. Her hull was dish-shaped, and specially reinforced, so that rather than being crushed when frozen in, she would pop out of the encroaching ice, like a cork. Her hull was clad with an outer layer of some kind of Australian gumwood. The planks were about 6 cm thick, about 20 cm wide, with a gap of 1 cm between each plank. I can't remember the explanation, but this unusual construction detail was another adaptation to sailing in the Arctic.
I visited the Vancouver Maritime Museum, where the St Roch is on display, a couple of times. And I bought the companion book. It has very dramatic photos of showing the dangers of sailing in those waters. One photo shows a Hudson's Bay Company vessel being burst by the pressure of pack ice, a few hundred metres away from the St Roch.
Here is another biographical link to Henry Larsen.
Why am I going on is such detail about Larsen and the St Roch? Because those apologists who take every piece of evidence for global warming and dismiss it as a statistical anomaly, or just another harmless turn in a cycle we don't understand, really piss me off.
These are not statistical anomalies.
Yes, our planet's climate is a very complicated system. We aren't anywhere near to understanding it, or the full role human's play in changing it. But, even if some or all of the very clear evidence we are receiving of global warming are natural phenomenon, not caused by a side effect of our technological society, I can not agree to see them as harmless.
The ability to look at only a couple of hundred years and make a detailed geological judgement is a major advance. Normally geologists have to rely on evidence in context that is thousands and millions of years old.
So whatever these Greenpeace folks have that can determine that not only is it happening also determines that it is not natural.....well, this is quite a breakthrough I would imagine.
Way to go Greenpeace!
Now let's hope they will put their efforts to other worthy causes like finding less harmful ways to recycle paper products and generate electricity.
It's so nice when they are productive instead of combative.
In any case, I look forward to the scientific review of their tools and theories.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Georgia Forestry association is where I'm getting my numbers. They have no contacts with the logging companies that I know of and spend a lot of time regulating them.This link has the stats for georgia, including numbers on how many acres have been reforested etc... There are similar sites for most other states that show generally the same thing. You can also hit some rainforest watch pages that will give you the stats on who is destroying what and how much.
But I don't have any links handy for those.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Who pooh-poohs climate change and such topics
A stint on the ice
Of the pole will suffice
To convince them, when it heads for the tropics.
Greenpeace's own version of Slashdot is running a string of these.
No.... I'm just disputing the claims that its costless.
If something *is* costless and leads to long-term advantage, sure, lets go for it.
But if it does have a cost, then the decision must be *JUDGED* based on the costs and benefits.
Most environmental nuts seem to think that their policies are costless. (Say, like banning DDT), when in truth they have incredible costs (DDT, properly applied, is safe and has saved over a *HALF BILLION* lives)
Another blatant example... What are the costs of using 'renewables'? Given average insolation, it is going to take several hundred square kilometers of solar cells, or a line of 100-meter wind turbines 500km long. To power *one* state (cali). Ignoring the costs of manufacturing the equipment and power-lines. Those are the costs.. Now what are the benefits? Well, you can be off-grid and independent. You can please greens. It'll be a lot more expensive and encourage conservation.
Now, for those who live in the middle of nowhere, the benefit of works off-grid is invaluable. For those who eant enforced conservation, it also works..
But for most people and places... The costs far outweigh the benefits.
Its only when one doesn't have their head in the sand and one looks at the costs and benefits that one can make an informed decision. Most econut theories are far from costless, and they seem to have an inability to see those costs.
The point about the random factor is that is doesn't matter what it is. Even if it were -3 as you mention, then it is *still* worth implementing Kyoto as you get a net result of -1 which is better than +2. All this is under the stated assumption that a degree less temperature is good of course.
Naturally I agree that this is a simplification, all the equations are seriously nonlinear, and extra warming might therefore be beneficial at some points on the curve.
My whole point was that the argument that combating global warming is unnecessary because other factors affect global temperature is invalid because you can find a simple counterexample.
We need more information on this issue before we can come to a definitive answer, in particular whether the global climate is self-correcting or potentially unstable. Given the risks involved, I actually think we're mad not to take more precautionary steps right now.
Wouldn't we also be mad if we overreacted and did a lot of self-inflicted pain over something the eventually turned out to be nothing?
The point I'm trying to make is that we need to be reasonable, look at the facts, and make educated decisions, not knee-jerk reactions.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
If you're going to be an eco-freak, get your facts straight.
Rich