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.

Comments

The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.

[pcx]

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.

Re:The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.

[mwillis]

Actually, another ice age has been theorized. Europe could enter another ice age because of global warming.

Worldwide ecology is a complicated system, and Europe owes much of its warmth to actions of salty atlantic ocean currents. We don't know if the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation locations will move farther from europe... but if it did, let's just note that in Canada, there are polar bears at Edinburgh's latitude. Of course, it might also move closer, and europe could get even warmer.

Some more information: Natural Science Article, The Atlantic Online

ps - I'm not sure if I really buy all this, but the lack of certainty does inspire some concern.

Re:The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.

[ajs]

In this case, reputable scientist is defined how? Media coverage? There is massive debate in all of the sciences that this touches. A good friend of mine, a solar astrophysicist, has been pointing out for nearly a decade that we have HARD EVIDENCE in the ice records that a massive up-swing in temperature happened in the roughly 500-800AD period, and damaged much of the world's species (there are many human communities that were hurt badly by this).

This change in temperature could have had several causes, but the simplest explanation is that the power output of the sun fluctuates over time. We are most likely seeing the same sort of effect now. Will it get so hot that human civilization suffers? Possibly. Is there anything we can do about it? Probably not.

As the original poster said, it would be nice to think that we're so powerful that we can affect the climate more than the sun, but it's just not a very practical point of view.

I wouldn't tak eGreenpeace's word for it.

[91degrees]

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.

Re:I wouldn't tak eGreenpeace's word for it.

[pmc]

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.

Re:Oh my goodness no!

[general_re]

I'm in, then.

John Daly's massive clearinghouse, Still Waiting for Greenhouse
An article by MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen.

There's lots more, but others might want to play.

Two graphs to consider.

[e_lehman]

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.

Re:Two graphs to consider.

[Cally]

greetings, I'm the submitter.

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?

Devil's Advocate

[moonless]

The majority of the posts I've seen seem to scoff at the idea the collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf has any global signifigance, or that global warming is a problem. And they have some valid points - sure, the Earth's temperature has fluctuated wildly in the past; sure, not all of the recent increase in average global temperature is due to humans. But that doesn't make us innocent, or safe. The Earth and life as a whole may have weathered huge climactic shifts before - look at the end of the Ice Age. But such shifts tend to cause a lot of extinctions, and it is undeniable that the effects of human industry, territorial expansion, etc. have already caused many extinctions/endangered species/etc. So this climactic change is coming at a point when the global ecosystem is already stressed.

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.

For everyone looking at that book

[mikosullivan]

in which the author systematically demolishes most of the non-scientific arguments of the "green" lobby

... only for certain values of "demolish" and "most". Be sure to look at these opposing views as well as the book itself:

• UCS examines The Skeptical Environmentalist
• Nine things journalists should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist

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

Re:The earth changes..

[Zoop]

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).

Re:The Consequences? All HELL breaking loose...

[somethingwicked]

Dude, this is fairly drastic actually. If you don't believe me try this experiment...

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*

Re:Greenhouse Gasses

[suitti]

For any heat base power generation system, like nuclear, gas, coal, oil, the best efficiency that thermodynamics allows is 50%. So, a 1 Gigawatt power plant must produce at least 1 gigawatt of heat. We used to dump this into our rivers. But a 10 megawatt plant on the Connecticut river would raise the temperature of the river by 10 degrees F, forever. This is an ecological disaster, not because it's 10 degrees, but because it's instant. Ecosystems require more time than instant to adapt.

Dumping the heat into the air gets rid of the heat pretty well. That's what the hyperbolic towers are for. Most of the heat radiates into space.

A Nuke plant's pollution is thus mainly a little waste heat. Of course, the gigawatt of electrical power eventually is turned into heat, too.

Nuke plants are pretty expensive to operate. You have to be extremely careful, which costs money. The cost of fuel is quite low - nearly insignificant, like $10/megawatt hour.

There is a hidden cost, and I'm not sure that it has been paid yet. Once the fuel is consumed, it must be disposed of. At the moment, we're storing the spent fuel at the Nuke plant. This is a short term stopgap proceedure. We need a longer term solution. The current proposed solution in the US is very late, and way over budget. Since you must store the spent fuel for a million years, you must store it in a geologically benign place. Since a million years is a long time, I'd argue that no such place exists. So, you have to design it so that it is possible to move the fuel from time to time. This will provide us with an additional cost stream forever.

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.

The UK is talking about ramping up to 10% of their power derived from wind energy. It is expected to be competitive with other power types.

Solar power isn't currently considered viable, but should become so pretty soon.

At the moment, we heat our houses by burning more fossile fuels. We could heat them by using waste heat from electrical power plants. Purdue University runs it's own electrical power plant, and heats the campus as a side effect. It's not a new idea.

Conservation provided the US most of the way out of the 70's energy crisis. Reducing the highway speed limit saved about 15% in fuel. And, it happens instantly - despite what President Bush said.

We don't really have to drive gas guzzling SUVs. My primary car averages about 33 MPG. It's a 4 door sedan, about 14 years old. I'd like to replace it with something more efficient. Several products are available and affordable.

I've started replacing incandescant lights in the house with screw-in flouresant bulbs. These last longer, produce the same light but use much less power and produce less heat. I'm finding that I can't use them everywhere, but they work in most places. My electric bill is lower.

Re:Greenhouse Gasses

[crawling_chaos]

This argument is specious. I would suggest that you Google the term "breeder reactor" before worrying too much about limited Uranium supplies. If we were building fast breeders and a reclamation infrastructure we could go a very long time on the Uranium we've already extracted from the ground.

The problem is that we'd be switching to reactors that use bomb-grade Plutonium. Security around the plants (both power and reprocessing) would need to be draconian. You can also forget trying to transfer the technology to less stable parts of the world for this reason.

We're going to need a combination of conservation and judicious use of all energy technologies if we intend to get out of this mess.