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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.
In februari or march American Scientist (the magazine) had a huge article om Lomborg (the author of the book you mention). In the article a few important scientists on some of the fields he discusses say what they think about his research. He is critisized heaviliy because he's not done his homework well; he leaves out a lot of important facts, draws conclusions which aren't based on any facts and leaves out a lot of references. American Scientist basicly sais he's a crook. He's wrong. Buy the magazine. It's a better read than the book itself.
0x or or snor perron?!
" I remember reading somewhere that 2001 was the warmest year since 1653 (or thereabouts) which begs the question, exactly who or what was emitting CO2 at present day levels back then? "
I think you will find that 1653 corresponds to the earliest date reasonably accurate temperature measurements were taken and recorded, so the quote should probably have read "2001 was the warmest year in the last 350 years". Ironically, it is this misunderstanding of statistics that Bjorn Lomborg goes to some length to discuss in the book you reference.
To study before that we have to look at tests such as lake bed pollen sediment analysis, to see now plant species have migrated in response to changing local climates. Climatic change is definitely occurring at present at a much faster rate than the past 1000 years. However, the link between this and CO2 is far more complex and difficult to prove.
Contrary to Lomborg's assertions, very few of these attacks are ad hominem, and take issue only with his application of the scientific method, and selective, self-serving use of statistics.
Actually I read a random sample of them and most of them were, to a certain extent, ad hominem. Also the rebutals were not at all definitive. They left a lot of room for further debate, as Lomborg's reply in his website show. Quite strikingly, the magazine denied the right of reply to Lomborg.
All in all the scientific community has done a very shoddy job at debunking Lomborg (which is not to say he's right).
Cut to the chase: human population is rapidly rising. Everything else is just a byproduct. Seriously, just look at population statistics for the root cause. Now who'se going to stand up and advocate killing off a couple billion in order to improve the lives of those left? What's really ironic (if that's the proper word) is that it's modern greenhouse gas emitting industry that is extending life support to the growing population! We can't all revert to a pastoral, agrarian, earth friendly communal lifestyle w/o losing a bunch of folks. What's the limiting factor in population, particularly in latin america and asia anyway? Self control, or war, famine, pestilence, disease?
Anyway, I always view these chicken little reports as a communist "Lets screw the US!" ploy - reguardless of the facts about Mexico pollution (including continued production of ozone depleting freon there, while it's controlled in the US), Brazilian slash and burn, Iraqui oil well fires, Indonesian fires, etc etc etc. US industry is much cleaner than any developing 3rd world or former Soviet industry, yet it's always the US they want to screw over! Lets see Russia or Japan sign the Kyoto accords, don't hand us the hari kiri knife.
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Sadly, correlating any two lines may be amusing for agitprop, but hardly forms the basis of any predictive ability. A second example is the stock market boom of 1996-2000 -- people just followed the trend blindly because it looked like a trend. Whoops!
I also take issue with "betting the world." Firstly, it isn't yours to bet with. Its mine too, so please don't make my choices for me. Secondly, even if the global climate changed, it is hard to believe life on earth would be wiped out. Good grief, we can't even get rid of cockroaches, and the doomsayers get all in a tizzy about their favorite collections of spores, molds, and fungus (thanks, Egon).
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
they created a huge amountof havoc over plans to decommision an oil platform
Ah. A wonderful story of the triumph of show business environmentalism over rational thought. A search for Brent Spar on google will give the details.
Brent Spar was an oil storage platform in the North Sea used, in the early days of the development of the North Sea fields, for storage of oil before loading into tankers and shipping. It had been phased out by pipelines and was due to be decommisioned. After 3 years of consultation with interested parties (including environmental groups) it was decided to dump it in a deep ocean trench. The reasons were: occupational risk in dismantling it on land; technical difficulty; expense; and risk of contamination.
Enter Greenpeace. They climbed aboard and, according to thier scientific tests, the rig was riddled with heavy metals, oils (5,500 tonnes was the figure mentioned), PCBs, radioactive materials, and would be an act of extreme irresponsibility to dump it at sea.
The stage was set, and the drama unfolded. Greenpeace occupied the rig. Shell tried to get them off, petrol stations in Europe were firebombed and shot at, boycotts were started. In all, there was a huge media frenzy: David and Golith; a huge faceless bureacracy (and oil company at that) versus people who are trying to save the earth.
Shell decided to abort the sinking, and the rig was towed to a deep water fjord in Norway to await an alternative. Round 1 to Greenpeace.
Round 2 was conducted by a Norwegian Consultancy, who actually did a very detailed inventory of the rig. They published figures that agreed with the Shell figures, and were completely at odds with the Greenpeace figues (the actual ammount of oil, for example, was 50 tonnes). The only conclusions were that Greenpeace were either lying, or hopelessly incompetent. This was not so much a defeat for Greenpeace as a catastrophy. Their role was as a scientifically based environmental pressure group. Their main asset was a good relationship with the media, which they harmed greatly during the Brent Spar campaign.
Now, Greenpeace is certainly seen as a more fringe, hardcore organisation, and I think that it all traced directly from that campaign. They may have won a victory with Brent Spar, but it has turned out to be a Pyrric victory.
Those are short-term graphs when thinking in geological time. I think the National Academy of Sciences report to President Bush pretty much admitted that 1) people think something is going on, and 2) nobody knows if it is dangerous.
For example, suppose the warming averts another ice age. Do we WANT an ice age? At what point will the warming be dangerous? Hard to say given that the middle ages were warmer than we are now. (The recent trend prior to the middle of this century was a long-term gradual cooling trend.)
While we don't want to bet the world, it is far from clear that a 1 degree C increase in average temperature IS betting the world. It isn't even clear that the world is a worse place 1 degree C warmer than what we have now.
(Please note, re Antarctica -- polar ice is still melting from the last ice age. Unless we get much closer to ice age temperatures, it will keep melting, only the speed of melting is in question.)
Well, the problem is, as far as I have understood it, that nuclear energy is not a sustainable source of energy since it uses a fuel, uranium, that is limited and we have a very short supply of. If we were to exchange all the coal and oil powered powerplants to nuclear power plants, we only have about ten years supply of uranium left in the world that could be extracted in a reasonably economical way (and lets not forget that mining uranium is not easy and NOT environmentaly friendly). If you count the total resources of uranium we have maybe 15-20 years of supply. What do you propose we do then?
Even if we just count the amount of uranium that it takes to run the curren about 500 reactors in the world, we only have enough uranium to run them for 40-60 years. And lets not forget that no one in the world has a really good plan on what to do with the radioctive restproducts from nuclear powerplants.
We most likely have to switch to renewable energy sources. And the sun provides us with a lot of energy everyday. We only need to figure out a good enough way to extrac it and store it.
A pipe bomb in a crowded subway can kill more people, but it does not level houses, flatten trees, cause flooding, mudslides and all sorts of lovely stuff that a tropical storm does. nor does it release,
according to this page up to 6.0 x 10^14 Watts/day of energy. any idea how that stacks up to the hiroshima nuke?
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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.
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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.
"...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!
And your evidence for disagreeing with almost every reputable scientist who's worked in the field?
Actually, any reputable scientist in the field of meteorology or climatology will tell you that it's hard to pin down where climate changes come from. In fact, it's a working hypothesis RIGHT NOW that the increase in temperature right now is a return to a more natural state of the planet. You have to remember that the dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years in a climate that was thought to be tropical or sub-tropical at least as far north as mid-Alberta, Canada. Nothing has quite been the same since the K-T impact, and there's no hard evidence that our current climate is anything but entirely anomalous. It's very possible that we're RETURNING to a stable climate as opposed to living in one.