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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.
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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Umm... so where is your linkage?
Not saying I'm on any side. It's just if you're gonna play URL poker you gotta ante up.
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.
Blasting massive amounts of pollution into the atmosphere seems like a very bad idea nevertheless. Remember acid rain? Smog? I do, even though I haven't been in a smog filled city for decades. It's not only about saving the environment for the sake of saving the environment. It's a quality of life question.
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.
"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."
Cloroflourocarbons (CFCs) are the stuff which used to be found in aerosol sprays and the like, which were found to be damaging the ozone layer. That is a separate issue to global warming.
"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!!!"
I can only presume you're joking, and that you don't really believe in this facile logic. As humans breathe oxygen, would more oxygen in the atmosphere result in more humans?
"Yup, it sucks, but we're pretty much at the mercy of our planet. Not the other way around."
I have to agree with that - we're probably a long way off the time where our normal activities present any real threat to the continuance of life on earth. However, this does not mean that these activities will not trigger environmental catastrophes which might otherwise have been avoided. These won't bother the earth much, but they will have a significant effect on human civilisation as we know it.
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.
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.
At the end of the day, the only people qualified to describe what's happening and where it's going over the next few decades have spent many, many years in the field. (I'm an interested lay observer, with a reasonable science educational background, & been following the debate, new findeings etc., for the last 10 - 15 years.) I'm sure the majority of the posts here (apart from the trolls and the jokes) are going to be arguing the case one way or the other. 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 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.)
Who are you going to believe - fat cats with strong financial interest in doing nothing to halt CO2 production, or imkpartial scientists whose career and reputation rests on the validity of their findings, models, and predictions?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Newton's theory of gravitation is 'just a theory' as well. I haven't fallen off the Earth for a long time though...
This seems pretty emblematic of the average Slashdot debunking of the work of a large number of scientists around the world who work on climate issues.
Peer-reviewed science is wrong, we just know it in our hearts, we don't know quite why, don't have hte exact information on hand, but I'm sure we can find it on the trustworthy internet if we just use google. Because, after all, if we can find a debunking on the internet, it must be true!
No, but an excursion of CO2 concentrations outside the range of the past million years over the space of a single century is indeed a geological event.
nor can you make the assertion that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming without having to prove it.
Waiting for "proof" is like waiting until after the fire to purchase property insurance.
Of course, you certainly need to amass a lot of coherent evidence before you make the increasing claims of plausibility, statistical significance, and generally accepted. Within the field of physical climatology, that's all happenned over the last twenty years. Of course, to read the libertarian press, which would find this piece of physics hard to reconcile with their politics, you wouldn't know it.
Unfortunately in the real world physics trumps philosophy every time.
mt
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."
This is a line of reasoning that has always baffled me. I'll quickly agree that we'll never be able to get rid of the cockroaches or the bacteria, no matter how many pesticides we spray or how many asteroids we smack into the planet. So what? Not every species is as tenacious as the cockroach.
Take mammals, for example. There is no species of mammal, humanity included, that could survive the sorts of climate changes that cockroaches could handle.
The trick isn't keeping some form of life around to repopulate the planet once we're through destroying it. The trick is to keep ourselves alive and do so in a way that leaves us all healthy and happy for generations to come. That doesn't mean squandering our natural resources in a two-century economic orgy. Nor does it mean everyone should slash the tires on their SUVs, switch to veganism, and start worshipping the Earth Mother. Just be interested in understanding the consequences of our current lifestyles, and willing to make adjustments when necessary.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
"We can't hurt the environment because we're part of the environment! Everything we do is 100% natural!"
This is a blatant attempt at distracting the debate from the real issues. The question of whether humanity's actions should be described as "natural" or as something apart from nature is more of a semantic debate, and it sheds no light on the real issues. Whether our behaviors are "natural" because we are a product of natural evolution is irrelevant. The question is whether we are doing damage to the environment that will degrade both the health of the ecosystem as a whole and to our own prospects for long-term survival.
There are plenty of examples of species' performing actions that undermined their own future. Locusts can overbreed, then feed and feed until everything edible is gone. The Ebola virus kills its hosts off so quickly that it doesn't have enough time to spread to others, inhibiting its long-term survivability. These actions are natural, but stupid and self-destructive.
Again, the real question is whether our actions are beneficial, not whether they can be defined as "natural."
Oh, and it's a self-serving and disingenuous argument if only because it's primarily put forth by right-wing Republicans who almost invariably believe that mankind is a special creation of God, not just another part of nature. To put it bluntly, the people who put forth the argument almost never really believe it. That's pretty much the definition of sophistry.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.