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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.
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.
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.
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
As a subscriber to SciAm, I was very disappointed in that article (or rather, series of articles). Many of them contained about a third or more ad hominem or "you aren't in the club, therefore you don't have anything to say" whines. Several of them spent time downplaying environmentalists' reliance on Paul Erlich--and then went on to quote him extensively. This despite science is supposed to be about testable predictions, and Paul Erlich has made several predictions (such as running out of most industrial metals by the mid-80s) that were demonstrably false and lost a famous bet with an economist (which to his credit he paid). Several of them spent a lot of masturbatory time self-aggrandizing, which is not unheard of in SciAm, but was worse by several orders of magnitude. Those articles needed a very good editor, and they didn't get one.
Ultimately, the articles convinced me that Lomborg had some severe problems in his methodology, but the way they did it left such a bad taste in my mouth that it will lend credence to people who are far more of a crackpot than Lomborg (Duesberg's HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS theories, for example).
In particular, environmentalists need to shut up and let the climatologists speak, even if they don't put things as strongly as GreenPea$e would like. Using Paul Erlich is becoming a criteria for baloney detection, and not admitting that the reason more scientists agree about climate change in general, and, to a slightly lesser extent, anthropogenic causation in particular is because science has come a long, way baby since a bunch of former commies became Green for propoganda's sake and argued we should emulate the eco-hostile economies of the dying communist world in 1990. The hasty action they proposed in many early "but we've got to DO SOMETHING" proposals would have worsened the problem, and they were rightly rejected.
Environmentalists and environmental scientists should stop poo-pooing everyone who has had doubts, and start engaging them in civilized debate. I'm now on the side of doing something about climate change, but doing so purely on the basis of a few (no-longer-used) computer models was a silly idea. I wanted science to come up with something more. Now they have, and we can begin to reasonably discuss how to do something without condemning billions of humans to eternal poverty or destroying freedom.
In short, let's emulate the 1/3 of those articles that didn't indulge in snide comments and self-aggrandizement and further communicate exactly how the problem is occurring, what effects it is having, and how things can be done in the short and long term--while still realizing that you're not going to get the soccer moms who send checks to GreenPea$e to give up their SUVs overnight (much as I would like to).