Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming To Leave North Pole Ice-Free
cwolfsheep writes "Tonight, Yahoo & AFP news are
reporting on a study, further backing up a
previous report, that suggests the North Pole will be ice-free in the summer by the next century. Oddly enough, they say the melting will not
add to the sea-level of the ocean (since the ice is already in the ocean) and that the extra water will help absorb more greenhouse gases. Maybe we need to start using more
aerosols."
Penguins live on the other side of the earth -- they probably won't care too much about this.
Cheers,
Alex
*Holding precious copy of Water World*. You mean Kevin Costner LIED to us?! But this was such a good movie!
I for one welcome our new polar bear overlords!
If the ice melts, the volume of water generated would be less than that occupied by ice, follows that the volume of the seas should actually decrease...
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
When will it be thawed? I really need to get down into the center of the Earth where Hitler has been hiding since WW2.
I've never understood why the media has always gone on about polar ice melting causing the oceans to rise....
If anything's going to cause the oceans to rise, it would be the heat expansion of the water that's already there.....
Advanced users are users too!
Santa on a houseboat?
I guess santa's gonna have to trade that big red suit and sleigh in for a tank top and a suv
NOw they won't be able to go outside in a 100 years or so and get fresh ice the way nature intended it. Maybe by that time no one will care since will we claim to be mother nature, or at least her creator.
Let me help clue some people in here. One of the wonderful properties of water (which helps to make earth more conductive to life I might add) is that it becomes less dense and expands when it freezes. It is one of the few natural materials that does so. Most things become more dense. (Hence, lakes don't freeze solid killing all the fish. The ice forms an insulating layer at the top because it is less dense than water and floats.)
As a result, the complete melting of the polar ice cap would result in, quite possibly, a slight reduction in sea levels, as the resultant water from the melting will take up less space than the ice did. However, since ice floats, some of it was above the waterline so it may end up a wash.
If the antartic melted, that would be very bad. You see, there is a land mass there. With ice frozen on top of it. If that ice melts, that is new water added to the ocean as a whole, NOT water replacing ice that was already in the ocean. A totally different animal.
As for all this? we knew that we were coming out of the last mini-iceage already. It doesn't shock me in the least to see what the ice is still receeding on the whole. Maybe if we warm things up slightly we won't see any more large-scale ice ages. As much as I delore some of the insane policies of the eastern ultra-liberal nutjobs, I have no desire to see New York covered in a glacial blanket.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I thought we were supposed to hate aerosols, and now they are our friends?
I am so confused.
The unofficial
So if there's no North Pole where will Santa live. And all the elves, and the reindeer! They'll drown!!!
Sure thing melting northern polar cap doesn't affect sea level, it's floating already.
;)
But melting Greenland ice will affect it. Probably also permafrost in Siberia and Canada would start melting, which will potentially release a lot of methane from the northern marshes.
And I have hard time believing that if northern ice cap melts, also southern ice cap won't get smaller (and that will rise sea level)...
Better watch out if you live by the sea... Lease the land for your new house for 50-100 years, don't buy it, and you should be fine
anyone noticing a conflict in this report? "Because the ice cap is already in the water when it is melting, you are not adding any mass. Only precipitation, discharge from rivers and the melting of glaciers can cause the water to rise," he said. The bigger the ocean is, the more CO2 it will be able to absorb," Johannessen said. call me crazy but if the melting doesn't cause the ocean mass to expand.. then how is it going to cause the ocean to be bigger? eh, maybe i just nitpick?
Sig not found.
Might not be good for the environment, but it will probably be good for all the shipping corporations. It'll cut a thousand miles off the commute.
I'm buying beachfront property in Point Barrow.
Hey, I need the water to rise so that my $20,000 beach house 50 miles away from the ocean will be beach front.
how at one point africa was a very fertile land. Was it because there was more or less ice at the poles. I cant remember but over a millenium or two wasnt egypt and the surrounding areas (including ethiopia and ethrate) the bread basket of the world? Would the melting of the ice caps help or hurt the countries in africa?
later,
epic
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
Anything floating in water displaces a volume of water EXACTLY equivalent to its own weight. If ice melts, the part that was above the water is exactly equal to the reduction in volume, and there is exactly no change in the water level.
On the other hand, if the non-floating ice on Antarctica or Greenland melts, since it wasn't displacing any water, the ocean levels will rise. And there is a LOT of ice on Antarctica.
The melting of floating ice makes little difference to sea temperature since it is water at close to 0 degrees, but melting glacial ice generally runs off into warmer water, causing sea temperature reduction with potentially catastrophic effects (e.g. stopping of the Gulf Stream).
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
How do they figure melting ice won't raise sea levels? even if the glacier is 20 feet above water, won't the excess buoyant pieces of ice melt down into the ocean?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
That's a good point, and with that point taken into account, here's another interesting twist on the story that's come out...
They're saying that the ocean would thus absorb more co2, but this won't possibly make an impact if the surfaces of the ocean aren't greater.
In fact, Harvard Magazine says, "The ocean absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere in an attempt to reach equilibrium by direct air-to-sea exchange. This process takes place at an extremely low rate, measured in hundreds to thousands of years. However, once dissolved in the ocean, a carbon atom will stay there, on average, more than 500 years, estimates Michael McElroy, Butler professor of environmental science" which seems to indicate that though we might be able to absorb a bit more co2, it won't make a difference.
The time constraints are very large, but moreover, the amount of co2 that contacts the ocean won't be high enough for somethign dramatic to happen before we destroy the precious things we already have.
Thus, I'd like to think that we should still be very careful about how we just arbitrarly throw co2 into the air.
Your post only applies to the north pole. Since the southern ice cap afaik sits on massive land, the water level WILL rise, if it melts. No Sig.
Mod me down as a troll if you like but I declare cwolfsheep the stupidest Slashdot article submitter EVER and he needs to know it!
"Let's climb mt Everest because it exists. Let's also melt the north pole because it exists."
I wonder if he considerer one second about what happens to the Antarctic and Greenland (and let's not forget all the ice covered mountain regions around the world, can you say "mud slide") while he is busy spraying CFC in the air (yeah, aerosols no longer contain CFC's, so he was wrong about that too).
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
I'm just a backseat environmental scientist, but what is the effect of losing the temperature-buffer that is the ice-cap? I mean, while it's melting, it will retain a temperature of 0 degrees, at least if I recall my physics/chemistry correctly. That means the icecaps provide a nice energy buffer for rises and falls in temperature. If they MELT, they obviously no longer do that. So, will global temperatures rise faster when the icecaps are gone?
Boy howdy. Did you read the CNN Article?:
"...Johannessen works at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway. 'This will make it easier to explore for oil, it could open the Northern Sea Route (between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans)," he said of the report, dubbed the Arctic Ice Cover Simulation Experiment. '"
I dunno, its theoretically possible (though pretty improbable) that there's absolutely nothing to worry about when our polar ice caps melt completely, but I'm of the mind that when the article is more concerned about the new oil drilling prospects and trade routes than climate instability, cancer-causing UV rays, and so on, maybe its time to get a second opinion.
From the article:
the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap would benefit maritime transport as it would create a new northern shipping route along Russia's northern coast that could save some 10 days in journey time between Europe and Japan.
I guess every dark cloud really does have a silver lining. And to think I was worried. Don't I feel foolish
----
Squirrel
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-56/iss-8/p30.html
Todays sea ice maps: http://www.seaice.de
But where the hell is santa gunna live if his homeland is melted??
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Don't live at the north pole, you insensitive clods.
The radioactive waste means you dont need lights any more, and the mutants chase off the terrorists!
What more can you ask for?
think about the children (TM)!
You explain the Archimedes Principle very well, but the threat to the Gulf Stream, which is one of the most serious possible effects of global warming, has little to do with sea temperature reduction in Northern waters. It is a general trend to increasing quantities of fresh water of any temperature being produced as run off in Europe which could stop this salt pump / conveyor belt effect. This has happened at least twice before with the result of major temperature drops in Europe.
There is an excellent summary here. One interesting quote "[the gulf stream] carries over 3 trillion KW of heat to Europe - roughly 100 times the world's consumption of energy"
How much ice (m^3) is present on the earth's land masses (Antarctica and Greenland mainly) and what effect would the melting of this ice (25%,50%,75% and 100% melted) have on global ocean levels?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Imagine Tallahassee, home of Florida State University, being a beach town.
How do they figure melting ice won't raise sea levels? even if the glacier is 20 feet above water, won't the excess buoyant pieces of ice melt down into the ocean?
Actually no. Water is more dense than ice (this is why it floats above the water in the first place). So so far this theory seems ok.
What they don't account for, and what makes this bunk is that it doesn't account for the huge amount of landlocked glaciers (The south pole, Greenland, etc.).
Someone kindly explain how you propose to melt just the floating ice and not the rest of it?
This crap is posted just to further the official slashdot agenda of:
"I'll do whatever the hell I want to and I'm sure it'll have no consequences whatsoever on the environment. And if it has, it's my lazy worthless childrens problem!
You'll pry the steering wheel of my SUV from my cold dead fingers, commie-boy!"
Now go ahead and label me a crazy environazi, if you like.
It doesn't make my point any less valid.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
The thing is, is that once all the cold surfaces (read: ice and water) get too hot, the heat will not stop there, but will start to get exponentially hotter, by then, it we have not used nanotech to slow down the solar radidation reaching earth and developed solar panels to collect energy (no oil use anymore) and build a more efficient future for ourselves, if we fail to heed the current warnings, our fragile civilization will collapse into a bunch of canibals eating each other...if the enviromental life-support system doesn't fail first and we virtually roast in the heat...like, who cares about stupid things like money and posessions if you'r dead!!!! We only have a few years before all hell breaks loose, right now, europe is roasting, what about 5 years from now???, will all the fish, wheat, and cows be dead??? Time to break out the soilent green...
Now if I remember right the ice is salt free right?? Well when this salt free water is introduced into the oceans wouldn't it lower the saltness levels. This in turn effect the cooling affects of the water. There was a post a couple of months on this. Basically it said the introducing of the fresh water(melting cap/s) well cause the planet to become cooler because of how salt water and fresh water interacts in the ocean in it cooling/warming process
In case of temparature rising further, people may start using air conditioning but I guess the natural wild life as we know it will be extinct and we will have the tropics movin northwards. Already Mosquitos and flies have started showing up in various places where they were never seen before
Also think about the tropical diseases to which the north folks have absolutely no immunity, epidemics anyone? The article is extremely shallow or too ironic for me to figure out. The possibility of new diseases, epidemics and extensive wildlife destruction is looming and the authors are concerned about maritime shipping routes!!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
> As for all this? we knew that we were coming
> out of the last mini-iceage already. It doesn't
> shock me in the least to
Ummm, those things happen on the scale of tens of thousands of years Buck Rogers, not 100 years as mankind fucks up the world at a far accelerated pace.
Wow, I've never thought of it before. I remember seeing all of those hyped up "year 2000" shows all throughout the 90's on TV. Many of them predicting the end of the world by the year 2000. They all seemed to have the common theme about global warming causing the polar ice caps to melt, and raising the water level, causing many major cities to be entirely flooded. It seemed pretty realistic to me at the time, and made sense. They melt, the water level rises.. right?
:/
Hmm, this article has got me thinking now. Water is strange in the fact that it actually expands when frozen. Now I remember from physics that a glacier would displace its weight in water. So if you take that amount of water, and freeze it, it gets bigger. And that extra volume is the volume of the glacier that floats. It displaces the same amount of space in the water either way. The water level would stay exactly the same whether its frozen or not!
I guess I shouldnt buy into simple concepts I hear on tv without verifying them myself
I grew up in Florida, have lived most of my life here, and will probably be here for years to come. And I hate hot weather, so I'm totally against this warming trend.
I'm in favor of a good old-fashioned nuclear winter to cool things down. As a bonus, I'm hoping it would decrease the tourist trade.
The only thing I hate more than hot weather is yankees.
Well melting ice caps are all well and good, but I've yet to see real evidence that it is related to "global warming" in the sense that the warming is caused by pollution, and not say, the fact that we are still emerging from an ice age??
Historically (geologically speaking) we are not in an ice age when there is, essentially, no ice!
There are many reason purported to the rise in global temperatures, from greenhouse gasses, to sunspot activity to to earths position relative to the sun (Milankovitch cyclical variations) etc.
Also with the removeal of bulk of the ice glaciers, much of the land that was under the weight of the ice is actually rising.
So I've yet to be convinced that we are in any real trouble that we have brought upon ourselves.
CJC
Where will they move to? This is terrible.
"In other news today, the United States liberated all Ice from the North Pole..."
"Derp de derp."
Maybe we need to start using more aerosols.
See the _main_ problem is the graffetti undertaken by the polar bears. Some of it is really good - the trouble is they can only get their paws on white, cfc based, spray paint.
Jaj
THank god I chose the Kenmore A/C with the extended service plan.. It was only a mere 116 this last weekend here in Tucson.. I got 5 1/2 ton's of ac on the house now... Ahhhh
This is computer simulation play just like the Club of Rome simulations in the late sixties that basically started the "limits of growth" hysteria. According to those, the mankind would be all but suffering in poverty by now, after depleting all the resources and destroying the nature.
Predicting the weather is difficult. It is difficult locally for this week, and even more so for global long time predictions.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Maybe I'm tripping, but isn't the frozen water at the north pole being artificially held there because it's frozen? When thawed I would imagine it would rise the sea level near the equator because of centripetal forces from the earth's rotation.
-metric
Generally the cold (gas absorbing) waters of the poles, sink to the ocean floor carrying large amounts of CO2 and O2. This dissolved oxygen is critical in keeping aerobic conditions in the deep sea (several early mass extinctions have been attributed to anaerobic organisms flourishing in oxygen depleted waters) and the dissolved carbon dioxide is attributed to the lower than expected climatic changes from greenhouse gas emmissions.
Why are we not freaking out about this??
This is the great engine of Earth (forget Deep Thought). It is responsible for the majority of heat storage and transfer in our environment, allowing disparate areas to acheive a modicum of energy equilibrium.
Without this "smoothing" force to even out the bumps - storms will become more violent as the coriolis effect is reinforced by the increasing density of the atmosphere as you travel towards the poles - sea currents will alter drastically, causing mass extinctions - seasons will be more extreme hot or cold.
All in all, this issue in no way deserves the (more than usual) flippant, offhand and dismissive treatment it is receiving.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Yeah, if you assume that the liquid phase and the water you get from melting the cubes has the same density, then you're right. You can have freshwater and freshwater ice cubes melting in it and the water level will not rise. The same thing happens with saltwater and saltwater ice cube.
However, if you have freshwater ice (the bulk of the polar cap is not saltwater but snow that has compressed into ice) and saltwater (sea water) you will get an increase in the water level.
It's not the weight but density that decides if the melting will change the water level. It's easy to do the calculations yourself; just apply Archimedes' law and break the mass into density and volume without assuming the same density for the water in the glass and water from the ice cubes.
BOO! TERRO
Maybe we need to start using more aerosols.
CFCs from aerosols deplete the ozone layer, allowing through more UV rays, causing more skin cancer.
Global warming is caused mainly by CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
The two are pretty distinct, but often get confused.
- 1 litre of water weighs 1kg.
- 1kg. of ice when melted gives 1kg. of water. {there are still the same number of molecules; they just aren't stuck so rigidly to their neighbours anymore}.
- Water expands when it freezes, so 1kg. of ice occupies more than 1 litre of space.
- A floating object displaces an equal mass of the fluid in which it is floating.
So suppose we have a bucket of water, and we put 1kg. of ice into it. The ice floats, because it is less dense than water. As a result, exactly 1kg. of water is displaced. 1kg of water occupies 1 litre of space, so the level in the bucket has apparently gone up by 1 litre.After awhile, a quarter of the ice has melted. Now there is 750g. of ice and it is only displacing 750g. of water. But there is an extra 250ml. of water in the bucket. Therefore, the level has not changed.
By the time all the ice has melted, the water really has gone up by one litre.
Now, we never mentioned exactly how much water was in the bucket. All we said was the ice cube was floating. It will work with any amount greater than the draught of the ice cube.
In the case where ice is sitting completely on land, rather than floating on the water, then it will increase the water level if it melts. However, there is trapped air in the ice making it even less dense. That air won't add to the volume of water. Also, melting ice absorbs a lot of heat while not actually getting any warmer {work is done breaking the intermolecular bonds which hold the solid together, and stored as potential energy. This energy is released as heat when the liquid resolidifies. Anyone who has ever used a hot melt glue gun will know about this. If you get hot glue on yourself, it really canes}.
If more heat is reaching the earth, or if the atmosphere is becoming better at trapping heat, then the melting of large amounts of ice is a good buffer to store some of that energy. It certainly should last long enough for someone to work out a way of getting rid of some of the excess. Of course, certain elements within society are going to use ignorance to spread fear and wield the Guilt Stick
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Global Warming and the End of England
Water level won't rise, but we get full 12 months per year of winter here in Scandinavia. Well what a relief. I already thought we were doomed.
Easy. He'll move back here.
Global warming is a liberal myth. There is no evidence the world is warming up. The complete melting of the polar ice caps this summer is just anecdotal evidence.
Does this mean that there may one day be the "temperate ocean" near the pole predicted by so many British naval explorers (many of whom are now British naval corpsicles)?
All Franklin needed to is freeze in for 140 more winters and he'd have been proven a hero! Of course, that scurvy *is* a bitch...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
The snow and ice is white. It follows that it's reflecting most of the received sunlight right back into space.
Water and land, on the other hand, being non-white, absorb a lot more of the sunlight, at least in the visible spectrum.
Viewing this factor alone (which of course is a stupid thing to do), it points to an accelerated process of trapping more energy from the sun within Earth's athmosphere.
Melting more ice -> absorbing more energy -> melting more ice...
Or am I wrong about this?
It's neat that the ice caps are one of Earth's CO2 regulating systems.
I wonder if the Latent Heat absorbed by the melting process will significantly reduce the worldwide average temperature?
If yes, then the ice caps are also a temperature regulating system.
In particular it would probably mean the disappearence of snow from the alps and possibly some other mountain ranges, possibly including the resorts in the US and Canada. Essentially, it means if I want to ski, then I had better do it on water!!!
Seriously, there are many alpine valleys which do not make enough from farming, so instead they rely on an influx of winter sports enthusiasts. The summer hikers don't seem to come in the same quantities and many don't spend as much.
See my journal, I write things there
With the northern ice cap gone, the Earth's overall albedo will be lower, hence the planet absorbs more heat from the sun, the temperature goes up, Antarctica starts to melt, the Ross ice shelf slips down into the sea, then sea level DOES rise, then with the southern polar cap gone, the albedo falls even further... I think you see where this is going.
Pass me the sun cream.
If the north pole melts, earth absorbs more heat (at least in the northern summer), speeding up warming.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Global Warming has not even been proved. Leading scientists in this area claim that the very natural temperature/climate levels swing like a sinus-curve through the centuries, and we just happens to be at the peak of one now.
Melting Glaciers everywhere Maybe when George goes back to the Texas ranch and finds it is too hot to spend time outside and then has a big drought and has to hand feed and water all his lifestock (does he have any?), that he might feel the effects of environmental abuse.
It isn't so much that climate change is new, it is just that every time it happens quickly, weather disasters and species extinctions go with it.
Eg the el nino, el nina current cycles didn't used to swap over so quickly. Things coped and survived. Now whole species are under threat along the whole west coast of South America, not to mention icons like the Great Barrier Reef
Couple quick climate change with a "mini-nuke" winter that the pentagon seem so keen on and our way of life could go the way of previous big resource hungry civilizations. Eg Egypt then Rome.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I know there's a kink in the volume/temp graph for water at 4C or so, but doesn't this point to an increase in the temperature of the oceans in general, which would presumably then increase its volume by a reasonable amount?
All I'm saying is, if we lose Venice I'm going to be very annoyed with all you carbon overproducers.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Thank you W. Bush Jr. for destroying the Kyoto treaty...
You are partially responsible for the fires and the deads in Europe now.
The observation of decreasing ice-covered area does not mean that the ice *volume* has decreased. In fact, more ice-free areas *enhance* ice formation because there is more open sea that can freeze. The ice acts as an insulator that prevents new ice to form. The ice volume does not depend so much on ice-covered area, but more on the type of ice (if it has lots of ridges - that extends deep underneath the surface, or if it is a thin, even ice-cover).
As yet there is no reliable way to obtain ice-type from satellite pictures.
Also, we in Scandinavia are already freezing so we're totally *pro* global warming!
fart/faart/(coarse) (v.intr.): emit intestinal gas from the anus. (n.): emission of intestinal gas from the anus.
1 pint of water weighs 1lb. 4oz.
1lb. 4oz. of ice occupies more space than 1 pint of water.
All the rest makes sense. Just remember that 1 litre = 1pt. 15fl.oz. and 1kg. = 2lb. 3oz. As near as damn it is to swearing, anyway.
To understand that we do not yet understand climatic change and radical environmental change is key. Put all that aside and look for explinations of the geo-magnetic and climate record. It is possible that after a melting of the North pole might come the oceanic expansion of the south pole which would then assume the polarity of North. Not the Earth flipping on it's axis but a polarity change caused by the magnetic effects of increased ion streams on the Van Allen belt. Move the Van Allen belt around and you move the magnetic poles. This could be the start of a major 100,000 year cycle. If this is so then what is now the Sahara and all the deserts will bloom and become a watered land. Sorry Austrailia you will become a frozen desert again. Central North America, Europe, and North Central Asia will become deserts. This all could happen within 1000 years,if there are major Solar cycles that can effect the Earths polarity. This would also explain much about the geo-magnetic record and the climatic record. The now frozen North would then become a very attractive land again. As would the equatorial regions, and the southern temperate zones, Cape Town might become almost like Helsinki, and Southern Africa like Northern Europe. Time to write a Sci Fi novel.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
... and the treehuggers:
Half the N-Polar icecap melting will have an effect and that effect is to decrease the salinity of the N-Atlantic. Precisely what happens when the salinity is reduced is not clear but there are strong indications it could cause shifting of the gulfstream or even cause it to stop flowing, which would cause a major cold period. Which in turn would cause the collapse of western civilization which in turn means we would be left sitting on a block of ice freezing our joysticks off.
Of course it is also possible that the followers of this teory are wrong and the evil Conservatives are right:
In that case the only effect will be the rise of sealevels, due to melting not of the N-Icecap but the Antarctica, the Greenland glacier etc. and of course it will be a great boon to the economy due to new traderoutes opening, huge untouched fish stocks to eradicate by overfishing and last but not least, lots of oil to drill. That last bit should make Dubya smile as he invades Canada to liberate its people (aka. oil) from oligarchic opression. This will in turn marginalize the southern hemesphere causing a huge global war that would cause the end of western civilization and we would be left sitting in the ruins pondering what our unborn kids will look like because our joysticks have been irradiated by nuclear weapons.
Take your pick, of course I exaggerated hugely in both cases but that is just because sarcastic ranting is one of my numerous human weaknesses. In the end nobody knows exactly what global warming will lead to because the mechanisms involved are so increadibly complex. Of course that stops nether the Scientists from pretending that their little theory explains everyting nor does it stop the Conservatives and capitalists from gleefully expecting global warming to free up new resources for them to exploit. Myself? I expect them both to be disappointed.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The water beneath the ice has already migrated towards the equator to make up for it's fixed position on the pole.
I'm sure you knew that already.
-metric
won daze you're the doggIE, the next it's mynuts won (threatening to corepirate nazi sponsors). sheesh.
morons continue to monitor unprecedented evile.. (Score:1, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13, @10:56AM (#6685759)
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Maybe we need to start using more aerosols.
Aerosols here doesn't mean aerosol spray cans, which (if they contain certain chemicals) can be environmentally dangerous. Aerosol here means "a suspension of solid or liquid particles in a gas". These are often produced by industry, and they cool the Earth by reflecting some of the Sun's radiation.
What's going to happen to the pole, man?!?!
The are some groups who say that global warming isn't happing and some that say it is. Wether or not it is I think I'd rather err on the side of caution. Seriously we have no where to go if we stuff this planet up. You don't walk through dodgy areas at night not because you know something is going to happen but it might.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Oh yeah it was pretty awful... 100 degree fahrenheit at some places. Many people died, including one child left in the car by his parents (they should be removed from the gene pool for that :(
:) I read in a news that this guy was jogging (in that heat ? wow) and the tar just stuck onto his shoes.
People just fainted on supermarket, and other places, because of the heat.
One kid burned himself pretty badly on the beach.
Even tar on the road melted because of the heat
To top it off, the trains were ordered to go at very slow speeds. This is to avoid the overheated rail tracks to bend and causing the trains to crash. I can just imagine how hot it is to be stuck for hours on the train, while there's almost no wind around to fend off the heat.
And they said that it won't be the last.
Looking forward to it (not!)
Come on USA, sign the Kyoto treaty already ! Stop terrorizing the rest of us !
GG Papers: Full Papers ... Pika, J. and Rothlisberger, H. 1988 Core drilling through rock glacier permafrost. ...s .html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages
... at the margins of four glaciers in the Jotumheimen Massif, Norway. ... The Beinn Alligin ... wasting by rock glaciers in alpine permafrost environments ...
V International Conference on Permafrost, Tapir, Trondheim, Norway, 2, 937
boris.qub.ac.uk/ggg/papers/example/reference
A Late Devensian rock glacier
'rock glacier'.
boris.qub.ac.uk/ggg/papers/full/ 2001/rp012001/rp01.html - 61k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from boris.qub.ac.uk ]
"Here in the Uk (where ia m living at the mo) we just had the hottest day on record"
And the coldest day on record in the UK was in 1995. Therefore we must have had Global Cooling, like they were warning us about in the 70s. Right?
Hint: localised temperatures tell you nothing about global trends, and the global trend since 1979 as measured by the satellites is tiny. Not to mention that the theory predicts that most of the warming will occur at the poles, since the CO2 bands are already pretty much saturated in warmer areas. But I'm sure you know that, right?
"and 6 of the hottest years have been in then 90s."
A lot of which is due to bogus measurements and urban warming: Britain, particularly the south-east, is so densely populated that little of it escapes such warming effects, but they're nothing to do with CO2 or global changes.
I was reading, for example, a news article about a >38C temperature record at... Heathrow Airport (not the official record, which was in Kent, and is probably less bogus). Hmm, an airport, with 747s taking off every couple of minutes, with huge amounts of concrete to reflect heat around, with vast numbers of cars, taxis and buses driving in and out stuck in often stationary traffic. Yes, I'm sure that's really representative of Global Warming temperature changes!
I'd also add that, having had the misfortune to live through the 70s in the UK, that while the current year may have broken the odd record, some of the warm summers in the 70s were much worse than this. And that was when Global Cooling was going to kill us with a new Ice Age!
wow! After reading all of the posts one thing is painfully obvious, we should probably keep the topic on subjects that we have a clue about, computers. Just for shits and giggles I would love to log on to a geologist or climatologist discussion on computers just to see if they are as clueless on computers as we are on the climate. Their conversation might run along the lines of which is better Micro$oft Outlook or Micro$oft Outlook Express. This could parallel out discussion on why melting ice in water does not raise the water level.
"who better to poke fun at than yourself"
From what I've read, the massive increase in fresh water flowing into the oceans will slow or even stop the oceans convection currents. This is what keeps the northern lattitudes temperate. Ironically, global warming could throw us into another ice age.
Then you'll be glad to know that it's well-established that the Antarctic is _cooling_. Greenland is also rather cooler today than it was during the 30s/40s (though warming again from the unusually cool period during the 60s/70s).
So how worried should we be?
How lucky do you feel?
How old will I be?
Will it change faster than humans' ability to adjust?
Will the future generations care, just as I don't care that the Illinois River doesn't freeze?
Will they feel any more jaded at us than we do at our ancestors for destroying the dinosaurs and Atlantians when they arived here from Mars on the land bridge?
Forget about it.
Here's why: water absorbs greenhouse gases -- but gives them up all at once, in large hiccups, when jolted. The Mexican volcano "Chichon" (chicken) had a lake that did this, if I remember correctly, and gased an entire town to death.
Yeah, the amount of greenhouse gases that the water can hold are tremendous -- but we're putting tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"Dry land is not a myth!!!!"
it's the present and the future.
If only we had done this sooner, we would not have had to endure this wonderful movie
This was a jornal entry I made two months back that relates to this topic.
I saw a story on CNN this morning about Greenpeace saying the polar ice caps have melted and that the water levels in the oceans have risen 2.5 - 2.75 inches in the last 25 years. This is supposedly beyond normal and clear evidence that the polar ice caps are melting.
I had two "seemingly absurd" at first glance explanations for water, or tide levels rising, but possibly peaking right about now. (Now being the year 2000+)
First, what sort of water displacement has occurred due to cruise ships, barges, subs, oil tankers, oil rigs, and other man made water craft? I know the ocean is huge and it's not like my bathtub, but it HAS to be at least a minute amount!
Second, if the theory of plate techtonics is true, couldn't our land masses have shifted/grown substantially (in the case of Hawaii) also causing significant water displacement?
Third, hasn't some sediment/diatomation/oceanic (organic/volcanic) growth also occurred & also caused water displacement
I have seen a Canadian study (forget where) that there's more ice in the upper regions of the country than ever. So rather than the poles melting, is ice just shifting a little? As glaciers move and "ice masses" float, won't they melt anyway?
In a way, this relates to my earlier "statistics, shmatistics" post below. It just really annoys me for business's and especially charity/non profits to use "Beyond FUD" to scare up money.
Whether global warming or erosion of the atmosphere is happening or not, conservation and world health organizations should be worried about just that and focusing their funds on research rather than paying for stupid studies to be run in the liberal media. The study about tides rising cost 15 million dollars to Greenpeace! Do you know how much that would have advanced solar energy research or subsidized solar home construction? Or how many wind mill and turbine powered generators that could have built?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
First of all, Sahara was at one time reasonably fertile. Or at least parts of it were. In a similar way, we could point out that the America's Midwest is potentially a desert: those are sand dunes we're farming on, and we'd better take care of it if we want to keep on farming it.
And yes, political strife makes it so people, desperate to eat today, don't take care of tomorrow. And the Saharan region *did* go through political strife: the conquest by Islam. [and no, not all religions are equal, or as you seem to think, equally bad. Some shed more blood, some less. Some have peaceful periods, some don't.]
You're also wrong that there were no dictatorships. Some of the dunes have completely covered old Roman forts. Rome was definitely a dictatorship.
But I don't think it was politics or religion that did the Sahara in. I think it was the introduction of grazing animals. You see, the earlier (Christian) and primitive (animist) cultures that existed in the region before that were mostly farmers. But grazing animals represented wealth to the incoming Islamic "missionaries". So they brought that in with them (but not because of their religion; just because of their culture.)
The grazing animals overgrazed the land, and destroyed the plant life, freeing up the dunes.
Further, plants tend to regulate the water; so the Sahara then had no further regulation.
But no, this also isn't Western capitalism that did it. This is an extension, if you will, of the Mongol invasion, and the imposition of a new culture upon a region that was not suited to it.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You said, "Already Mosquitos and flies started showing up in various places where they were never seen before."
Really. I'd like to know what place that is. Mosquitos are up in Alaska, and boy are they vicious. Mosquitos are in Belize, and rock around the clock. Washington DC was known as "Malarial city" when it was first built. Malaria, indeed, stretched into New York and beyond. Mosquitos are standard in the Baltic region. Mosquitos are about as hardy as any air-breathing animal I can think of.
You want to get concerned about animals, and fish... fine. It's often justified. But as for the spread of Mosquitos, my list only leaves underwater, and up in the stratosphere. Pray tell, which?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
There was a report on Marketplace (public radio show) this morning that raised an interesting issue related to the melting ice caps. Less ice will make it easier for oil companies to explore the Arctic for new oil sources.
Maybe all this global warming is just part of a plot by the energy industry to melt the ice caps so they can find more oil?
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Just remember that the ice over Greenland will also melt, as will the ice over Antartica.
And most polar ice is over antartica, over land!
I highly doubt that if all this ice melts, there will be no problem with coast cities (as the one i live in, wich is bellow see level).
-- SouNerd.com
I am 39 and remember all of the hoopla in the early 70's (yes I wore bell bottoms) about the coming "ice age".
There were lot's of "facts" to prove it.
Since we only had about 20 years of oil left in the ground, and burning petroleum products contributed to "global cooling", we decided to lower the speed limits in the U.S.
Some things are just cyclical, natural things.
I am doing some minor googling and not coming up with much about global cooling.
That is not surprising since most of it occured prior to a widely used internet.
And since the groups that were behind the global cooling fad had an agenda which has now changed to global warming, they don't want to be seen as hypocritical.
I remember some widely circulated magazines carrying prominent articles about it like Time and Newsweek.
All I am saying is this may be like the ozone thing where we find out that man contributes 2% to the problem and it is natural and cyclical.
A couple of sites that I found without too much trouble are this one with a Newseek article from 1975 The Cooling World
And this one from 2002 The New Ice Age
DanH
"If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?" - Steven Wright
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Good news. This will provide an ample new area for whale hunting.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'll leave it to others to explain the politics (leftist) and religion (gaia) behind the environmentalist scam.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
If the melted water will help absorb more greenhouse gases, that means that the world will cool down, and the ice will form again.
Sounds like a natural thermostat that dampens the ice-age / draught cycle -- Nature is clever.
It's not the right time to be sober
Now the idiots have taken over
Spreading like a social cancer, is there an answer?
Mensa membership receeding
Tell me why and how are all the stupid people breeding
Watson, it's really elementary
The industrial revolution
Has flipped the bitch on evolution
The benevolent and wise are being cornered, ostracized, what a bummer
The world keeps getting dumber
Insensitivity is standard and faith is being fancied over reason
Darwin's rollin over in his coffin
The fittest are surviving much less often
Now everything seems to be reversing, and it's worsening
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool
Now angry mob mentality's no longer the exception, it's the rule
And I'm startin to feel a lot like charlton heston
Stranded on a primate planet
Apes and orangutans that ran it to the ground
With generals and the armies that obeyed them
Followers following fables
Philosophies that enable them to rule without regard
There's no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated
Political scientists think the same one vote that some monkeys are inbred
Majority rule, don't work in mental institutions
Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions
What are we left with?
A nation of god-fearing pregnant nationalists
Who feel it's their duty to populate the homeland
Pass on traditions
How to get ahead religions
And prosperity be a symbol to culture
The idiots are takin over
-NOFX
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
From your own New Scientist link:
Are there any other cataclysmic events in the offing?
One fear is that the entire West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets might disappear into the oceans raising sea levels by seven metres or more. Even the most pessimistic experts say this is only a worry if the world warms by about 4 C, which is outside the range of mainstream predictions for the next century. And a glacial collapse is such a slow process it would take several hundred years for all the ice to slide into the sea.
So yes, if the world warms up enough, the ocean levels WILL rise.
If people have been watching, they'll have noticed a heck of a lot more than that!
There have been an unprecedented number of events this year! --Including heat waves leaving a few hundred dead in the UK and Continental Europe, screwed up weather patterns, huge storms and flooding. --All complete with hail stones as big as cantaloups in Nebraska. --Not to mention crazy levels of seismic/volcanic activity abounding! There have been recent quakes in Japan, Taiwan, and
Iran. --Just in the last week. There have been dozens of earthquakes all over the damned place this year.
Those who say Global Warming isn't real might want to consider that this tourist glacier observatory built in Alaska in 1986, now overlooks nothing but water.
Mount Etna is spewing lava in Italy. And it looks like Yellowstone park is preparing for trouble, (though I seem to have lost my link to that. But think, 'Swelling ground mass and Old Faithful being unreliable.')
These scientists talk about changes in 100 years? Try in the next 8 or so.
Oh, and comet activity is going through the roof. (Sorry, that should be, coming through the roof.) Not One, but Two stories in the last week alone of meteorites smashing craters into tarmack. --The first one almost hitting a kid!
This is it, folks. These next few years are really shaping up to be amazing ones! Get your heads out of the sand now. This kind of show only happens once in a great many life-times! Comets and ice ages and the end of the world as you know it, man!
In the words of the great muppet president, "Bring it on!"
-FL
I've read somewhere (the scientific american -- french edition) that the fact the gulf stream make the climate of europe warmer is an urban myth.
Recent models apparently proved that the inertia of the ocean is enough to explain the nice winters we have in Europe.
Does anyone has a reference on this ?
I googled a little bit but could not find any paper.
I suggest everyone read this article before actually forming an opinion on this garbage.
You can't really predict long term climate from looking at events in the short term. For instance, if you look at the current temperature compared to the temperature of the world from around the time we started to get the idea that this whole two-legged walking thing was keen, you'd note that the world has been positivly CHILLY as of late.
You can sit there and complain about global warming and greenhouse gasses and the like all you want.
Keep in mind, the current, chilly weather on Earth is NOT indicative of the overall climate trends of the planet in the past. It's quite possible that at some point in the future things will start to revert to the much more hot & humid patterns in the days of old.
This is a thorny issue, and you can't poke your finger at any one 'cause' and give it the blame. It could be industry. It could be nature. It could be that people are misinterpreting the data entirely.
Or it could just be unseasonably warm this time of the millineum.
Or perhaps we'll get a fly-by from Unicron tomorrow and the point will be moot.
Take it with a grain of salt.
Don't give into alarmist reactions.
Wait.
And watch.
Maybe we need to start using more aerosols. Maybe we best stop trying to pass off unproven theories such a global warming as proven fact.
Dawn of the Dead
Do a google search on "NADW formation" and you'll find out why Europe's climate is moderate.
The general idea is: warm salty water delivered to the North Atlantic (ie, Gulf Stream) sinks; salinity is directly proportionate to density. As the denser water sinks, it cools, exchanging heat with the atmosphere. An additional factor that influences NADW formation is sea ice formation. When sea ice forms, most of the solutes are left behind, so salinity increases in the North Atlantic with increased sea ice formation.
Any climate changes that decrease salinity will have a negative effect on ocean-atmosphere heat exchange. So, paradoxically, as atmospheric temps rise, less sea ice forms and evaporation increases resulting in less salinity differential and thus decreased NADW formation. Instant European ice age.
This has happened before as the northern hemisphere exited the previous ice age. Meltwater from retreating glaciers was dumped into the North Atlantic, decreasing salinities and shutting down NADW formation. Instant European ice age. This is referred to as the Younger-Dryas event, and it lasted roughly 500 years.
put the aerosol can down, american pig! :p
when all that ice starts to melt huge chunks of ice will break off and start to drift south into the golf stream, if the golf stream gets cooled down the weather over here in europe will drasticaly change for the worse (alaska is on the same degree as sweden but sweden is way warmer due to the golf corse)
Solid Splash design
Since the ice at the north pole is floating, it's melting won't affect sea level, but what about the glaciers covering Greenland, or Antarctica? That water will flow off land, and into the ocean, raising sea level.
Eat at Joe's.
Peter Malin, the designer of the Mars Surveyor camera, said at his Denver lecture last night that three years of photography have observed the Martian polar ice caps are melting away. Each year they are smaller. This suggests there could be a solar component to global warming if it affects two planets.
Since Ice reflects solar energy back into Outer Space better than liquid water, melting the polar ice caps should result in more warming of that area, though being at an oblique angle to the sun's light means not much light actually strikes the north and south poles, so it might not matter much.
Eat at Joe's.
He is a republican.
Ever wonder why it is called the Right wing?
Why yes, I do wonder if it is not a case of saying it enough.
While it may well be that the ice in the arctic ocean will melt, I find this study highly suspect.
First, it assumes that a rise in temperatures since 1978's constitute a trend. There has only been two and a half decades since, 2.5 datapoints, that is not enough to establish a trend IMHO.
Second, it makes a direct correlation of rise in temperature to CO2 emissions. But to the best of my knowledge we don't know for certain that CO2 indeed plays a direct role in Earth's temperature, and I think that to assume that human population can single-handedly affect amount of CO2 being emitted on the planet, much less have any control over climate is incorrect.
I think the main thing about studies such as this, is not to "freak-out" as someone suggested. The scientists are working on learning more about our planet, and that is a good thing. The the press and politicians signle out studies that can help them push their agenda and publish them as if it's the absolute truth, and that's a bad thing.
Why is it, for example, that any climate change is percieved as something to be fearful of? What if it's only going to be for the better?
I also wish that the environmental powers that be focused more on pollution in large metropolitan areas. More and more people are sick because of terrible air and water quality as well as improper disposal of all kinds of waste, especially in countries with weaker economies (e.g. eastern europe), but because it is not something of global proportions, we don't get to hear about it.
grisha.org
Why arent I freaking out? I think the human effects might be large, but the earth is a dynamic thing. Climates changed abruptly and dramatically WAY before we showed up, and they will continue to do so well alfer we are gone. I'm not worried about temperature changes or sea levels, I'm worried about straight-up toxic pollution, because that's what'll end up being our demise. Already fertility rates are down and indicative diseases of long-term toxicity are up (obesity, cancer, and diabetes anyone?). If the sea levels go up we can move inland or adapt, if it gets got or cold we can move more indoors. If the rains burn the soil and make it so plants can't grow and the ocean is devoid of all but jellyfish bacause we filled it with poison, we're really done for!
Seriously, this global warming shit is a distraction from the real enemy, it's something we CAN'T do anything about in the long term; WE might stop our part, but the earth will make it's own rules. Meanwhile, why we all sit around trying to figure out how to burn coal without putting up 'greenhouse gasses' the farms are dumping tons of poisons into our GROUNDWATER!
I'm not saying we should all drive SUVs and leave the lights on, but there's only so much we can do about the climate. Trying to keep everything the way it is would be the most expensive, destructive, and futile effort mankind has ever assumed. Do your part to live 'green', but not to prevent global warming, do it to reduce the poisons you put into the earth and to help us be less energy-dependant.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
It's more than "several people", news now repport as much as 3,000 dead for France only...
Evian.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Despite common misconception the northern ice-pack IS partly above land. See Greenland, Baffin Island, and the Queen Elizabeth Islands. These are about the size of the western United States. I find it extremely hard to believe that if the ice packs above all this land melted it would result in no sea level change.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
There is an excellent recent article on this subject, including information about melting of the Arctic Ocean ice and the Younger Dryas etc. in the latest issue of Physics Today
...What happens when Earth decides that it's ready to head into another ice age? Considering that we are due for one any day now, I'm still skeptical that "global warming" is an issue. When the planet starts to cool as part of it's normal cycle, what will the scientists say then? Knowing them, they'll try to bring back "global warming" to combat the cooling of the planet...
Phil
I have to wonder, what about all the studies showing that the ice cap is getting thicker?
Check out an article on Greenland and on the ice pack itself. There are others about the antarctic ice thickening too. Can't we, the /. community, perform a basic reality check before spreading chicken little stories? ( I also found it funny/sad that google is prejudiced against the idea that the pole ice is thickening. )
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
Even if it does, isn't the extra water caused by more greenhouse gases? That's like saying the extra smoke will help put the fire out.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
There is no way to prove global warming exists, or if it doesn't exist. Certain factors such as solar radiation AND the impact of different types of clouds have yet to be accurately modeled.
One of my good friends is a masters student in meterology at the University of Oklahoma (the best in the country for meterology.) We were discussing this the other day. All models used to prove or disprove global warming completely ignore the impact that different cloud formations have on climate change. This is just one of many hundreds (or even thousands) of variables that cannot even be measured let alone modeled.
I take this global warming with a grain fo salt. Remember the Ice Age and the "Little Ice Age"? Those were natural phenomena. This warming (if it even is warming) could also be natural.
Scientists have only kept decent records of temperature for the last 100 to 150 years. Accurate studies of other factors (sea surface temperature, solar radiation, etc) have been taken for even less time. There just is not enough data to draw any conclusion about these so-called "drastic climate changes",
well they were predicting climit changes that wouldn't happen for another 25-50 years, but those predictions are here today.
the predictions were "worst case" "nightmarish" type stuff.
I'm referring to the climate change we are just starting to see now, in europe and other places.
Ok, it's hot enough in germany, england and bavaria that the train tracks are actually WARPING.
Uhm.... hello? its time to wake up people, the planet is fucked. What I mean is, sure, if we stopped "today" in about a decade it would start to revert to normal.
But we're not about to stop polluting "today" are we? Nor are we likely to tomorrow, next month, next year, a decade from now, or maybe even 50 or so years in the future.
It was 42 degrees in spain yesterday, 40 degrees in england, 41 in bavaria (when I checked the numbers anyhow). And in my home town it was 38 degrees (ontario), dont believe what they told you, I was watching the digital thermometer (so I cant spell), and yes, it did get that hot.
the point is, if we are NOW where the "worst case" predictions said we wouldnt be for another 30-50 years, then where do you suppose we will actually be in 20-50 years ? hrm? how about majorly fucked?
I mean, if we have seen a literal 5-10 degree change in areas we know (and the summers not over yet folks) then in 20-50 years, I'd say we probably see another 10-15 degree (or 20) change. so in 20 years we'll be at 52 degrees in spain, 50 degrees in england, and my home town will be at 48. what does that say about the rest of the ecology ?
not that it matters folks, because by then the powers that be will have fucked the economy and we'll all be out of work. the next shift is likely to make the crash of 29 look like a sunday picnic. Oh yeah, 29 was the US fault too, way to go. we can all thank Mr. Bush...
we could really use an alien invasion some time soon, worst case at least some of us would have a chance to get off this rock before its too late...
...Santa Claus is not real.
North West Passage here I come!
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
Actually, there is much evidence that the world has been gradually warming for centuries.
I'm not willing do the research to provide exact numbers but we regularly go through cycles of cooling and warming. A thousand years ago we had a mini-ice age.
The latest bought of warming can be verified through things such as river navigation records in Japan. One such set of records has clearly documented that the river was freezing less and less every year. Of course, that started more than a couple hundred years ago.
There is little doubt global warming is happening. There is only doubt about whether we have a serious contribution to it.
Regardless to the degree we contribute to the warming, I think its ridiculous to believe we stop it. What we need to do is start planning for it.
You said, "Eg the el nino, el nina current cycles didn't used to swap over so quickly. Things coped and survived. Now whole species are under threat along the whole west coast of South America, not to mention icons like the Great Barrier Reef"
Which planet do you live on that hasn't had multiple *mass* extinctions? That wouldn't be Earth. There have been *mass* extinctions on this planet going all the way back to before anything walked on land.
Whole species under threat? They'll die or adapt like every other species before them. This planet isn't some well tended garden of eden. Look around you, it's a brutal place to live for all species.
We call it evolution.
Now please take your uninformed pseudo scientific opinion to some place with less educated denizens.
I know you're a troll but some things need to be said anyway.
I'm also a global warming skeptic and that's the only argument I buy. Hedge on the side of assuming it's our fault, because by the time we're sure it's going to be way too late.
The scientific consensus is strong. Perfect, no, but outside of right-wing talk show hosts and oil company shills, there is no real doubt that human activity is altering the climate.
Having studied this issue intensely, that is flat wrong. There are two effects going on. First, modeling climate is exceptionally difficult, and the most difficult aspect is predicting the activity of clouds. On one hand, they reflect light (cooling), but on the other hand, they act as a blanket (warming). Depending on the thickness and density of the clouds, these parameters are traded off. So scientists have to predict more than the levels of CO2 produced. And it ain't easy.
The second effect is the "grant effect." All grants are peer-reviewed - that is, when you apply for money, people in your field decide if your current and prior work makes you a valid candidate for getting $$$. Now, obviously, this gets very cliqueish, and if you consistently advocate a contrarian position (ie, global cooling or stasis), you will have a very hard time getting money. In other words, if you are a climatologist and you don't predict warming, have fun getting funding. In this way, the "answer" in the global warming debate is shaped by who can still get funding, and this is a very dogmatic, polarized field. And on this, the liberals are every bit as biased as the oil company asshats. The people I would listen to are the ones not blustering on either side, but who consider cooling/stasis to at least be a possibility. They're rare, but they exist.
So bottom line, there is very much debate as to the origins tot the current warming trend. Especially when you consider that a single decent volcanic eruption releases more greenhouse gases than man does in a year. Like I said though, I'd rather not find out the hard way either.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Read it: http://www.discover.com/sept_02/featice.html
reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to go nuclear. The French receive most of their power from nuclear fission reactors and they have dramatically reduced greenhouse gasses because of it. The reason why Kyoto would never have been workable for us is that the greens won't let us build any nuclear power plants, so we have to depend on coal, oil, and natural gas. It's time that we convert to nuclear, just like the earth-loving, peace-loving French.
the earth is a self correcting system. There's not a damn thing we could do to her that she can't recover from. Us surviving the recovery is just a happy coincidence.
It's all about earth+plastic.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Why are we not freaking out about this??
... their own mortality, if nothing else).
Because it happens natually no matter what we do. It's happened many times in the past, and will happen again and again until our solar system itself dies...
Perhaps, but I think it has far more to do with our capacity for living in denial. It really isn't just a river in Egypt, it is something we all do, almost all of the time.
Whether it is Republicans denying they stole an election, Democrats denying their political incompetence and lack of backbone in recent years, Arabs denying their own complicity and causation of the vast majority of their own probems despite unprecedented wealth flowing into their pockets, Israelis denying their cruelty to Palastinians, Palistinians denying their cruelty to Israelis, Europeans denying their incompetence at handling world affairs (remember their less-than-impressive track record in stopping the Genocide of Yugoslavia), Black Americans denying their own responsibility for many of their problems, white Americans denying the very real, continued existence of racism amongst the fringes of their own kind (all too often finding those fringes in positions of significant power and influence), or Americans in general denying their incompetence in handling world affairs (Somalia, Liberia, Ruwanda, Iran, Iraq, N. Korea, Libya, etc), or all of us in the developed world denying the very real and negative impact of our conspicuous consumption upon the environment which sustains us, we are all, each of us, engaged in any of several acts of denial practically every waking moment of our lives. (If I haven't hit on one of your pet denials and thereby both offended you and illustrated my point, then perhaps you can think of something else someone once said to you that made you react in a very knee-jerk, defensive, and probably highly emotional manner. I doubt there is anyone alive who isn't living in denial of something
Denial seems to be one human trait that transcends cultural, political, ethnic, religious, and philisophical differences, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that those who do not wish, for whatever reason, to believe we could be altering our environment to our own great detriment will happilly deny it is happening, or spin it as either "this isn't such a bad thing" or "it would have happened anyway."
Historically, those who point out things we don't want to accept tend to be killed, imprisoned, or at the very least ignored. Rejecting unpleasant facts is, at the end of the day, a very human thing to do, reality notwithstanding. To our credit, we do as a species tend to accept and confront unpleasantness at some point. When we do it in time, we tend to address the problems and our civilizations tend to flourish. When we do it too late, our problems tend to address us and our civilisations fall into ruin. It will be interesting to see which is the case here, whether it is Global Warming, or any of a host of other issues which confront us, and which we studiously try to avoid, ignore, or deny.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Can't be.
Georgie said it ain't so. And ain't never gonna be.
Oh, and it doesn't matter anyway. Our latest project aims at bringing all that fresh water down to where it's needed. Them pipeline boys got families to feed, after all.
I guess this will make finding the enigmatic Northwest Passage a little bit easier for explorers.
NMG
Just divert the exausts to a few 1000 ft or m under.
Now, why did'nt I think of that ?!
Like George Carlin said...
"The Earth is going to be fine. It's the people who are fucked."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So get used to temps going up and down... After all, the polar regions were pratically jungles at one point in time. It'll happen again eventually.
What there is no evidence of is global temperature stability. However the implications of this for how we organize our society are even greater than the implications of global warning.
I think what you meant to say is that there is no evidence of anthropogenic global warming.
Until there is a way to contrive having a control planet, there is no way to reliably measure our actual impact on the planet, or lack thereof. What we do know, however, is that in an extremely unstable situation, we are consistently pushing in a single direction. We may be a fly landing on the Great Pyramid, or we may be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
However, since we are unprepared to accept the implications of temperature instability, it would be wise reduce our impact on the situation. This is especially a good idea because greenhouse emissions come packated along with lots of other "bads" range from pollution issues like particulates, CO, acid rain to societal issues like localized warming, traffic jams, and interfering in other countries' politics.
Localized pollution is a serious issue. It is well documented that a temperature inversion event in 1952 killed perhaps as many as 12,000 people, probably due to particulate pollution.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There was a paper out by a physicist at the University of Toronto in the last year or so (does anyone have the reference on this? I can't find it) pointing out something that the weather science has been missing.
Basically the idea is:
1. ice melts at the polar regions (and while the pole itself is over water, there's a lot of ice on land up there too)
2. the mass, now in the form of water, is free to flow elsewhere, which it does - and at 1 metric ton per cubic meter, and many square kilometers of ocean surface, even tiny changes in water levels imply HUGE mass shifts
3. this has effects on the shape of the planet's gravitational field! not huge, you won't notice personally BUT...
4. all that mass is currently pulling the oceans towards the poles - not strongly, but remember tides are caused by lunar gravity - redistribution of this mass means this effect is eliminated, and not only is the global sea level going to rise, but it will also slosh (slowly) towards the equator, meaning water levels in the tropics (where they will do the most damage) will go up even more than you will predict from amount-of-water melted alone
GRATUITOUS PREDICTION: you will recall how the U.S. gov't was totally unprepared for Sept. 11, no agents in Afghanistan, no feel for Middle-East politics, etc - to allow them some lead up time for the next event, I will tell them how to predict the next group of people who will have a grievance with good old uncle sam - buy a world map with elevations above sea-level marked on it...
...such a massive amount of freshwater pouring into the open seas from this hypothetical ice-melt would paralyze the salt sea heat transfer and actually COOL our planet.
Indeed, there are many other theories to explain the apparent rise in global temperatures over the last years. For a good read about alternatives to the widely held the-oceans-will-rise-and-the-sky-will-fall belief, see Intellicast's Climate Watch/GW
The increasing temperatures around the world are caused by something very simple: The Earth's orbit.
The Earth does not go in a circle around the sun. It goes in an elliptical orbit. This ellipse does not maintain its major and minor axes over time: It slowly but surely changes. Over many thousands of years, the ellipse becomes more like a circle, bringing the Earth closer to the sun for longer periods throughout the year, and then for a few thousands of years more, the orbit gets increasingly elliptical again, taking the Earth farther away from the sun for much of the year. This is quite natural and nothing you do with aerosol cans is going to change that.
Want to fight air pollution? Then just say that you want to breathe clean air and not a bunch of smoky grime. That's simple enough. But don't go around saying, "The water on the Earth is going to cover all the land and we're all gonna DIE!!!" That just makes you look like a wacko.
And if you really want to clean air pollution, then instead of going after something small and insignificant like an aerosol can, go after something big and polluting, like eliminating the use of fossil fuels to power cars, trucks, airplanes, trains and everything else out there. There MUST be another way to power these things and someone is gonna find it. But don't go around complaining about aerosol cans. Because by eliminating all the fossil fuels, you'll make a 95% difference (so that all other air pollution becomes insignificant enough that it can be completely ignored) but by eliminating all the aerosols in the world, you'll make less than 1% difference in the overall scheme of things.
At best 50% of scientists in this field believe the premise of global warming. But let's just overlook that for a moment and assume that the polar ice caps are going to melt. So what? There is plenty of documentation that shows that as little as 800 years ago they had no ice on them anyway.
The reality of the situation is that computers cannot accurately predict the weather for a small area beyond 3 days. The goal of such FUD, and that's exactly what it is, is geo-political in nature.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
And remember, it has been much less than a century that we have had the technology to actually spend significant time at the North Pole studying the area. The first known human expedition to the North Pole was in 1909. Even today, getting there and spending enough time to gather a lot of data is very hard. No one has ever spent an entire year there, so we really don't know what the long-term behavior of the polar ice cap is.
So he can save our communities from wild fires by destroying and "thinning" millions of acres of treasured forests. Yes, indeed, this will save our homes, AND improve the environment! Because, as we all know, if the forests can't burn out of control to begin with, then global warming will be slowed down. But this initiative will only last a shot time, as George "Dubya" will see the gains of not having uncontrolled forest fires as a justification for burning more oil to replace the carbon dioxide that would have otherwise been dumped into the air by the forest fires.
Shucks, and you thought George "Dubya" wasn't environmentally friendly. Shame on you.
I applaud the faith in humanity that the proponents of nuclear power have, but to believe that we'll be able to safely handle the waste for the next 200,000 years is just going too far.
Furthermore, you mention using breeder reactors, in order to make the most usage of the fuel as possible. No doubt you're aware, but fail to mention, that the final product (beyond electricity) of a breeder reactor is Plutonium.
I don't think it is ethically responsible to advocate the creation of a power source that will create thousands of tons(*) of plutonium each year, and expect that all that plutonium will remain unused, contained, and out of the "wrong" hands for the next two hundred millenia.
There are options apart from nuclear (fission) that we can explore (wind, waves, sun, conservation).
To be pithy, I'd rather risk global warming than nuclear winter.
-Zipwow
* tons of plutonium: Taking the Gipper at his word that all the waste from a reactor in a year will fit under his desk, lets say that's a cubic meter of plutonium. We'll round down the number of plants in your estimate to 500 for easy calculations. That's 500 cubic meters of plutonium, per year. Webelements says that plutonium weighs 19816kg per cubic meter. 500 * 19816 = 9908000kg. Google says that 1ton = 907.18474 kg, so we're talking about 10,921 TONS of waste, per year. For the united states.
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
The second effect is the "grant effect." [...] n other words, if you are a climatologist and you don't predict warming, have fun getting funding.
You might also find difficulty finding funding to research cold fusion from your peers if you are a physicist. That does not mean that cold fusion is correct. Please argue on the basis of evidence, not on throwing unsubstantiated allegations of scientific corruption.
Especially when you consider that a single decent volcanic eruption releases more greenhouse gases than man does in a year
If you had indeed "studied this issue intensely", you would have discovered that this is a myth. CO2 released through human activity dwarfs that released through volcanoes (see here for example).
Please, in the future, don't talk bollocks, don't throw baseless accusations, research your claims, and don't claim to be an authority on something you clearly know little about.
Um, I'm pretty sure the sea levels would indeed rise, as the ice caps are not in the ocean, they're on land.
Ice caps occur when continental crust moves into the polar regions of the Earth. Land gives a place for the ice to form. Otherwise, the North and South Poles would be nothing but cold oceans.
The rate of change is what scares me the most - I'm only 32 years old, yet I can easily see how our environment has degraded since I was a child. I remember swimming at local beaches without fear of infection or worse. Now most beaches are presumed closed all summer. I remember all the time I used to spend walking through the meadows and exploring the creeks at my grandfather's house, just on the perimeter of the city (he used to be a farmer, so most of his fields were already sold off by then). Now, this tract of land is commercial property, mostly concrete, lawn and sprinklers. Ironically, his house is now a local lawncare/pesticide/herbicide retail outlet.
It's easy to blame large corporations for their greed - they continue to destroy the ecosystem in their quest for coal/oil/trees/development all in the name of profit.
However, we have to start looking within as the source of the problem - our collective greed, apathy and ignorance is what feeds the profits of these large corporations. We buy the new houses in the developments that were once native meadows/wetlands/woodlands. In turn, we transform our properties from a diverse ecosystem to a non-native, monocultural lawn that requires excessive care, water, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides because it is beaten into our skulls by lawncare companies that a flawless, green lawn is the only acceptable look for our yards. Then we bitch and complain that the summers are hotter and muggier every year and that our hydro and water bills are rising. Meanwhile, we crank up our air conditioners and install wasteful irrigation systems in a vain effort to keep ourselves cool and our grass green.
Wake up! Trees keep you cool - plant some. Grow some gardens (preferably using native plants/trees/shrubs and grasses) instead of a monocultural lawn. Not only is it beneficial to the environment, but it is actually less time consuming once established. You won't need to join the local lawnmowers club every Saturday morning. Did you know that your lawnmower provides more pollution in one hour than your car does in a week? You can turn off your water sprinklers (native plants thrived where you live before you can along and installed an irrigation system). They need no fertilizers or pesticides (native plants are naturally resistent to pests and disease. The birds and other critters that will return once you provide them a habitat will also help keep the ecosystem in check.
We criticize countries such as Brazil for clearcutting their forests. Did you know that Canada has eliminated a larger percentage of it's natural environment through land development, most of which has been converted to either concrete, asphalt or lawn (the worst of the three because of the water and chemicals it feeds on to stay alive). Add to this all the forests that have been clearcut by the companies that feed such development.
As consumers, we can make the biggest difference. Make smarter and less selfish purchases. Make your next car a gas-saver or even a gas/electric hybrid instead of a V8 gas guzzling SUV. Adjust your thermostat a couple of degrees to save either on hydro or gas/oil. Most importantly, I strongly urge you to consider replacing your lawn and restoring all or part of your property with native plants. Help restore a small part of what used to be there before your environment was cut down, bulldozed and sodded.
Please, go to Google and do some research on Naturalized lawns or gardens. Check out some books by some well-known authors on the subject:
"Noah's Garden" and "Planting Noah's Garden" by Sara Stein are excellent, as are "Ontario Naturalized Garden" and "Grow Wild! Native Plant Gardening in Canada" by Lorraine Johnson.
Here, I'll even throw in a couple of interesting links:
Oddly enough, they say the melting will not add to the sea-level of the ocean (since the ice is already in the ocean)
How is this considered odd? Isn't this a well-known fact? When water freezes, it expands, thus it is less dense, thus it floats. The extra volume is pushed up out of the water by the water.
My 9 year old daughter knows this concept. Don't they teach anything in school anymore?
But this is bullshit. The temperature goes up and down every freaking year and every freaking year, the scienctists come out of the wood work spouting the Earth is melting, the Earth is melting. Last year the drought was the worst ever and it was going to continue until the whole US was a desert. Now it's rained enough to Noah happy and its "OMG, what are we going to do with all the flooding?!?!?" Bottomline, don't mess with Mother Nature. She knows what she is doing and will take care of it herself.
MMORPG Fan? Prove your worth!
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (remember Alvin the sub?) has done lots of studies on the ocean circulation system, dubbed the "The Great Ocean Conveyor".
t topics/ abruptclimate_joyce_keigwin.html
:(
They claim that as the oceans salt level decreases (via the ice packs melting), the heat exchange via the "The Great Ocean Conveyor" will dramatically change the Earths weather climate.
Read about it here:
http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/curren
It's a sobering read.
Thanks. -- MickLinux
*The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. -- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971) The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968) *I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 -- Paul Ehrlich in (1969) *In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970) Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion -- Paul Ehrlich in (1976) *This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century -- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976 There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it. -- Newsweek, April 28, (1975) *This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976 *If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age. -- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970) Since 1978, the ice cap has shrunk by nearly three or four percent per decade. At the turn of the century there will be no more ice at the North Pole in summer," Ola Johannessen (2003)
That's quite a claim. Any reason why you declare these results to be 'bogus'? If it is your urbanisation claim, I'd like to note that since 1979, trends in worldwide land-surface air temperature derived from weather stations in the Northern Hemisphere, in regions where urbanisation is likely to have been strong, agree closely with satellite derived temperature trends in the lower troposphere above the same regions. This suggests that urban heat island biases have not significantly affected surface temperature over the period.
> Britain, particularly the south-east, is so densely populated
Although some residents of London may not notice the existence of anything outside their city, the south-east of Britain is not the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Just think, this could open up new vacation opportunities! "Explore the Siberian Outback!"
A solar shade like in the Simpsons or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri would do the trick.
Colorado reports a record number of housing starts.
As others have noted, even if sea levels don't rise, this could be bad news, especially for those of us in the eastern US.
If the Gulf Stream stops because the salinity of the water has decreased, then not only will northern Europe get colder, but the maritime provinces of Canada will too.
The real nightmare scenario could be if the St. Lawrence river freezes to the bottom. I've heard (no references available, sorry) that this could happen in less than a decade if the Gulf Stream stops.
Then the entire Great Lakes system backs up and has to drain down the Ohio Valley. Instant inland sea. Oops...
Typical load of bullshit...
http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/EnvFacts/facts/deserti fication.htm
You're kidding, right? There have been routine tests for years wherein 'assailants' attempt to overrun and take control of nuclear plants.
Every time they win. It got so embarassing that the nuclear industry asked the DoE to stop requiring them in the wake of 9/11, so that they could claim their plants were safe.
If you've got control of the plant, you can destroy it. No 747 required.
Yes, and then you wouldn't get published or tenure. That's not an option. If it were, don't you think someone would take them up on it, even to do spurious research? The fact that it's not happening should say something - and it's not regarding the ultimate answer of global warming.
Look at anybody who has written a book arguing against global warming.
Books mean shit. They're not peer reviewed. In the sciences, writing a book does nothing for the career of an academic. Those books, from either side, aren't research, and they're not accepted as such.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
exactly. when you heat ice it remains solid until its temperature reaches +273 K, at this point, the ice stops getting warmer and it begins to melt... and the reason the ice stops getting warmer is that the heat which was causing the ice to get warmer is absorbed by the phase transition to a liquid.
the latent heat of melting is the amount of heat needed to transform a solid into a liquid without changing it's temperature.
ice has an enourmous latent heat of melting. it takes almost as much energy to melt an ice-cube as to warm the same amount of liquid to boiling.
it is the latent heat of melting which explains why you add salt to the ice bath surrounding an ice-cream churn - the melting ice absorbs heat from the ice-cream lowering it's temperature to below freezing. (well, that's the theory in any case. mine always turns out sloppy.)
as counterintuitive as it may seem, under certain conditions, ice sheets will (under certain, but not unusual, conditions) continue to thicken even when the ambient air above them is above freezing.... convection on the surface being less efficient than conduction of heat from the bottom to the surface of the sheet.
this is common knowledge among the long distance ice skaters here in the stockholm archipelago that winter days when the temperature is +2 or +3 are the best days for skating.
No it doesn't. First, any group can buy some scientist on any issue. That's a given - if Shell wanted, they could buy a scientist. The problem is that this person would not get published, and would not get tenure. You forget that the same groups doing peer-review for the grant process are the same ones doing it for the publication process.
So if I take Shell's money, I'm obviously not going to cite that fact in a publication I submit. If I claim no global warming (or even cooling!) and I don't have any governmental funding agencies in my acknowledgements, they'll figure it out. And have fun publishing in the Journal of the Lithuanian Climatological Society. Because nowhere else will take you.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Now that I think about it, everyone who claims that the north pole melting will flood the planet doesn't know the geology of the North Pole (or the Physics of Ice, for that matter). Ice floating in water has MORE volume than if that ice were a liquid. This is because Ice expands when it is frozen (versus most other liquids which shrink when they freeze). So Sea level would potentially lower if the north pole were to melt. Combine this with all the continental ice of the south pole, and it just might not move at all.
Many people are not aware of this, but a penguin-like bird actually did once live off of what is now canadas coast of labrador. Its name was "The Great Auk" (ontario site) aka pinguinus impennis. It was actually the original penguin and was pretty much hunted to extinction. some other sites include (birdsofna.org you can find many links with a search for great auk on google
Makes sense. However, doesn't water expand when in becomes ice? If so, then the ice is actually taking up more volume in the water. Assuming that most of the ice is under the waterline (we only see the "tip of the iceberg"), would that mean that the ocean levels may actually drop due to the contraction of volume when the ice melts?
= 9J =
Don't get me wrong - I think nuclear power is a good thing. But you've left off some considerable costs - including ongoing maintenance and repair of the plants, other operating expenses such as the salaries of the plant operators, costs associated with storage, transport, and disposal of waste products, and costs associated with the shutdown of the plant when its life is over. You need to account for the entire life cycle of the plant when coming up with the costs, not just construction.
Also, to compare apples to apples, you'd want to think about the comparable costs for conventional/fossil fuel sources... those include expenses nuclear plants don't have (the fuel costs you mentioned, plus smokestack cleanup, etc), and similar expenses to nuclear (building and running the plants), but they avoid the costs associated with nuclear waste disposal.
While I agree that nuclear power probably turns out to be a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuel power, I think your cost analysis of it is invalid.
Sean
The French ministry of health now reckons it has killed 3,000!
Geez, where to begin. First of all, IWAGP (I was a geophysicist), so I'm not purely talking out my behind here. Yes, you are correct, land DOES rebound after glaciers recede... after about 10^5 years. Formerly glaciated parts of North America and Europe are STILL rebounding from the last glacial period. If Greenland got de-glaciated tomorrow, I've got news for you... the sea level would rise, well, tomorrow, and the land under the former ice sheet wouldn't rebound for many, many years, and in the meantime, coastal areas would be inundated.
Name one place where this has happened. Provide references.
Yeah, over a timescale of about 10,000 years. A great comfort to our families whose houses may be flooding 50 years from now.
And?
The warming is echoing back on us? WTF does that mean?
Geez, what can I say. Watch out for black helicopters.
Sean
I got so wound up before that I forgot the most important point. Say Greenland's icecap does melt, and the land rebounds due to isostatic adjustment. This does not compensate in any way for the additional volume of water in the ocean. This is because Greenland's crustal mass held down by the ice sheet isn't spread out underwater... it's down in the mantle. The volume of rock that displaces water won't change significantly as a result of the isostatic rebound... hence, once the sea level goes up from melting ice sheets over land, it stays up.
Sean
Ice is less dense than water, remember? The sea levels theoretically should not change since the volume of water displaced by the ice is as large as would be needed to have the same mass as the ice.
Global warming has not been conclusively proven to be soley anthropomorphic in nature. There's a great body of scientific and historical evidence that says we're coming out of a cooling cycle, and there's even more evidence that says anthropomorphic activity is far outstripped by geochemical processes in terms of regulating CO2. This says nothing about the shortsightedness of resource wasting, but you can't go around thinking the human race has any great warming/cooling effect on a planetary environmental scale. Pretty anthropocentric. The rocks will dominate in the long run, long after humans die out (whenever that is). Besides, who are we to say that the Earth must be in perfect equilibrium at the point where we humans are comfortable? (We are just coming out of a cooling cycle remember. Maybe equilibrium temperatures haven't been reached yet.)
We should use more aerosols?
Um, how do I say this... aerosols, by which I assume you mean CFC-based aerosols, float to the upper atmosphere and catalyze the very thin layer of ozone that sort of floats like a skin over the whole planet. This causes sporadic thinning of the ozone layer, which is usually not a big deal, since ozone regenerates. But the CFC's float about for a while, and do persistent damage until they disappate.
Ozone depletion is a different problem than the greenhouse effect, which is caused by increased amounts of CO2 in the lower atmosphere caused by burning fossil fuels and of all things, flatulence of our herd animals.
The confusion of CFC pollution which causes ozone depletion and the global warming engendered by CO2 seems to widespread everywhere. I can't count the times I've seen intelligent people mix this up.
Okay, I'll bite. I'll give you 100% plant safety, immunity to sabotage and 0% air and water polution and still explain why nuclear fission power is bad.
What do you do with the mining tailings after extracting the fissionalbles? Most of that is somewhat radioactive as well as the hardware that extracts it.
There still is not a good solution for the highly radioactive solid waste a nuclear power plant produces. What do you do with the spent rods (old skool nuke) or pebbles (new skool nuke); they are still radioactive, just not efficently radioactive from a power producing point of view. What about the containters you transport the hot waste in? And where do you store it? -- NIMBY! I'll grant you could just dump the plant wastes back into the ground where the fissionables were found in the first place, but that doesn't address my next point.
Transport of ores, refined fissionables and waste is vulnerable to accident. Then there is the chance of theft of materials for various criminal and terrorist schemes.
In addtion to all of the safety issues, there is the costs associated with them. Nuclear power is expensive since the processes to insure safety are very costly. Building a plane-proof nuclear facility costs alot more than building a conventional power plant. All that security needed from mining to power plant to waste disposal is expensive.
A far better power solution is using solar power to heat a sterling engine to produce electricity. These would be dirt cheap to manufacture. They would be alot safer than a nuclear power plant. This is better solar power solution than photovoltaic panels which wear out and are environmentally nasty to manufacture.
Naturally. We're talking about whether man is responsible for either of the above - either 1) the current increase is due to us, 2) whether future trends will involve warming, and 3) whether those two are related.
One point that suggests greater human influence is the precipitous rise in global temperatures over the past 150 years or so. We have never seen a change in global temperatures quite this rapid, going back thousands of years.
True, but if we're considering blocks of 150 years over thousands of years (how many thousands), we're talking about maybe a few tens of 150-year blocks. To me, that in itself doesn't constitute proof. There is also the question of whether we're addressing this from a policy or scientific standpoint. If policy, it doesn't matter what the source is, we need to get this under control doing whatever we can. Scientifically, it's more of an intellectual question, related more to prediction of future trends.
Regarding the so-called grant effect: the reasoning behind this theory is questionable at best. First, most of the grants used for academic research on global warming come from government organizations (NASA, NSF, etc.) that tend to be fairly unbiased in their funding.
Talk to your advisor on that one. The grant distribution process is anything *but* unbiased, in any field, simply because anyone evaluating the grants is also typically performing research in the field. If you've been lucky enough to avoid that mess, I'm happy for you, but I've gotten nailed by it. It's particularly a problem when your boss has a higher profile than you'd like.
You don't apply for a grant to fund research denying global warming.
No, but if that was your conclusion in your last paper, that's effectively what your next grant proposal says. People have memories, and it takes a broad-minded person to thumbs-up a grant or research for someone who published results contrary to their own. Too many scientists see that as some sort of a personal attack. And, unfortunately, sometimes it is.
Whatever the case may be, calling global warming some kind of a liberal conspiracy theory insults both the integrity and intelligence of the thousands of researchers world-wide who study it.
That is well overstating what I actually said. It's not a conspiracy, and I never said it was. It's simply the fact that in any field where there is a very polarized debate (like this one), people tend to take sides. And, those with the majority tend to reinforce each other, being nicer to each other at grant review and publishing time. Those in the minority tend to get the opposite treatment, and eventually don't get large grants or publication in good journals. It's just human nature, and one need not invoke a conspiracy theory to address it. Though interestingly, from what you said, you don't seem to have a problem invoking that argument for those taking the other side.
I want to be clear here - I'm not saying that any of the pro-warming research is bunk. I'm simply saying that basing your conclusion about global warming on which side publishes more papers in Science and Nature is a faulty premise.
So is global warming happening? Almost certainly. Do humans play a role in this? Probably, but how much is still a big question. Are you right to say that we should take steps to ameliorate potential impacts before it's too late? In my opinion, yes.
And as I said previously, I completely agree with the first and third point, and would say the jury is out on the second. I think you got the wrong impression - I'm not militant on this issue, I'm just tired of hearing the "global warming must be true because more climatologists say so than not" argument.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The book, not the movie! :^)
Global warming is junk science. Weather
patterns are cyclical. Nobody, NOBODY,
was recording what the weather was like
5 thousand years ago. Gee, just watch
your local news weather and see the "record"
high and low for your area on any given
day. In 1930 it was 84 and in 1996 it was
69. Does that mean the earth is cooling?
The same weather NAZIS who now claim global
warming were pushing global cooling (ie, next
ice age) during the 1970's. A few bad winters
and 'In Search Of' (Spock) and Reader's Digest
were on the bandwagon. Soon the cyclical
weather cycled, and the weather NAZIS had to
switch their tactics.
Let them joust their windmills, and you just
live your life.
I am a scientist and have the ability to evaluate a piece of research on its own merits, thanks. So no I don't. I'll make up my own mind.
If you had bothered to read it you would have found that it is a faq that does indeed link to published work. Not that it matters; the burden of evidence lies with the person making the claim. It is up to you to try to find some evidence supporting your statement - which I am calling crap.
This is slashdot. I publish real papers, I don't have time to perform research to convince someone who goes by the name Pentagram for chrissakes.
I am a scientist. I am not a climatologist, but I seem to know more about the science than you do judging from your volcano comment.
Really? Where'd you get your PhD?
I am certainly not an expert in climatology, but I accept that cold fusion is probably crap, that there is no significant evidence for telepathy, that chimps and humans share a common ancestor, that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, and that human activity is causing significant changes in the climate.
There is no active research ongoing for any of the above except warming. Second, global warming has not been tested, for obvious reasons of not owning a time machine. This means that you are convinced by an UNTESTED THEORY. For that reason, the models better all line up perfectly for the research to be rock-solid. They don't. Even among the people who have come up with warming trends, they don't agree. Is this enough to make me believe the contrary (cooling or stasis) viewpoint? No. Is it enough to make me doubt their conclusions? Yes, and it should be enough for anyone who has actually read their results. In this thread I've heard from one climatologist. He freely admits that, while the "best guess" is that humans affect the environment, this is far from conclusively proven. My guess is that you spend more time reading dogma than actual research, which is why you're so convinced. I readily admit I don't know what's goin on with warming. Your certainty casts doubt on your objectivity, which is typcially a problem.
You claimed to be an expert and then made a fundamental error, and you glibly accused people of intellectual dishonesty without any evidence, two of the things that significantly piss me off.
First, I never accused anyone of dishonesty. Re-read what I said and my response to the actual climatologist in the thread. No one is being dishonest, it's simply a polarized debate, and people take sides. This naturally affects the publication cycle, in this as in every other similar field. I've had it happen to me in a field not at all related to warming. It's part of academics.
Second, I claimed to be a scientist, not an expert (though on slashdot it's better than the average geek). I know a lot about climatology, but I have the confidence to admit my fallability. If people making fundamental errors piss you off, you need to learn 1) tolerance, and 2) the fact that you aren't perfect either. Either way, getting pissed about a normal discussion isn't a good personal characteristic. Might want to work on that.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Floating arctic ice in general have lower salinity than the ocean. Iceburgs come from salt-free snow and glaciers. The ocean is salty, so the iceburgs will float higher than when in fresh water. In otherwords, iceburgs displace less volume than the volume of itself melted when floating in salty water. Hence, if all the iceburgs melted, *the sea level will actually rise*. I also RTFA and there were no mention of sea level not rising. As many others have pointed out, the point of whether or not the melting of iceburgs will directly cause sea level to rise is irrelevant anyway.
Two things I see immediately stemming from this:
Instead of a generally impassable icy border between the vast coastlines of Russia & Canada, there will be open sea. Expect much smuggling, immigration, and possible clashes.
Possible diversion of the Gulf Stream could devastate agricutlure in Ireland and Britain, which currently benefit greatly from the warming effects of the Gulf Stream during winter. Their latitude is about the same as Newfoundland, but today they are not so buggeringly cold in Winter. THis could change dramatically.
Da Blog
Why are we not freaking out about this??
... their own mortality, if nothing else).
Because it happens natually no matter what we do. It's happened many times in the past, and will happen again and again until our solar system itself dies...
Perhaps, but I think it has far more to do with our capacity for living in denial. It really isn't just a river in Egypt, it is something we all do, almost all of the time.
Whether it is Republicans denying they stole an election, Democrats denying their political incompetence and lack of backbone in recent years, Arabs denying their own complicity and causation of the vast majority of their own probems despite unprecedented wealth flowing into their pockets, Israelis denying their cruelty to Palastinians, Palistinians denying their cruelty to Israelis, Europeans denying their incompetence at handling world affairs (remember their less-than-impressive track record in stopping the Genocide of Yugoslavia), Black Americans denying their own responsibility for many of their problems, white Americans denying the very real, continued existence of racism amongst the fringes of their own kind (all too often finding those fringes in positions of significant power and influence), or Americans in general denying their incompetence in handling world affairs (Somalia, Liberia, Ruwanda, Iran, Iraq, N. Korea, Libya, etc), or all of us in the developed world denying the very real and negative impact of our conspicuous consumption upon the environment which sustains us, we are all, each of us, engaged in any of several acts of denial practically every waking moment of our lives. (If I haven't hit on one of your pet denials and thereby both offended you and illustrated my point, then perhaps you can think of something else someone once said to you that made you react in a very knee-jerk, defensive, and probably highly emotional manner. I doubt there is anyone alive who isn't living in denial of something
Denial seems to be one human trait that transcends cultural, political, ethnic, religious, and philisophical differences, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that those who do not wish, for whatever reason, to believe we could be altering our environment to our own great detriment will happilly deny it is happening, or spin it as either "this isn't such a bad thing" or "it would have happened anyway."
Historically, those who point out things we don't want to accept tend to be killed, imprisoned, or at the very least ignored. Rejecting unpleasant facts is, at the end of the day, a very human thing to do, reality notwithstanding. To our credit, we do as a species tend to accept and confront unpleasantness at some point. When we do it in time, we tend to address the problems and our civilizations tend to flourish. When we do it too late, our problems tend to address us and our civilisations fall into ruin. It will be interesting to see which is the case here, whether it is Global Warming, or any of a host of other issues which confront us, and which we studiously try to avoid, ignore, or deny.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Water is most dense at 4 degrees celcius. So when the oceans get warmer than that, it will expand. When you consider how deep the ocean is, even less than 1 percent expansion would not be pleasant.
Maybe we (as humanity) stop thinking individually and start thinking globally. We need a Borg-like mentality to survive. If we don't, its bye bye human race.
Maybe we can one day forget religions and political differences and start behaving as we really should, i.e. as passengers on a spaceship with limited resources.
By the way, 3000 people died in France from the heat. Almost as many as they died on 9/11/01. My condolences to anyone that lost a relative.
Sure, a melted north pole ice cap wouldn't change water levels (since that exact volume of water is already displaced by the floating ice - that's how floating *works*). But it would royally mess up the ocean currents. Without the blockage that currently exists at the north pole, water could flow freely around the north of Canada and the USSR, and I'm sure that would change ocean currents worldwide since it's such a chaoticly balanced system. That would have a *major* effect of the climate of Europe. Countries in Europe are only warm because the Atlantic current brings up warm water from the south. Change that and England becomes as cold as other countries at the same latitude - like Canada and Russia. Scandanavia starts being like Alaska. The effect that would have on agriculture would be disasterous for such a populous area.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
One of the major flaws of current climate models is they leave out the oceans. So they might be good for predicting the climate of Mars, but for Earth they're pretty much useless.
Hey, no problem. Personally, I think the problem there, on *both* sides of the debate, is the word "believe." Sounds a bit too dogmatic for me, and that seems to be a large portion of the problem.
I also want to make clear: I have no problem with skepticism regarding human induced global warming. If you couldn't tell, I'm (if not skeptical) then at least willing to listen to well-thought-out arguments against human-induced warming made by scientists who aren't paid by oil companies (yes, there are some, in my department in fact).
I could tell, actually, and it's honestly refreshing to see. I have absolutely no problem with the stance you've taken on this problem - frankly, I think the problem is that things you (as the climatological community) say in a reserved way are amplified by the media and groups that want to believe specific things.
What I don't appreciate are the arguments of those who want to avoid the policy impications of potential warming because those implications could hurt their pocket books in the short term. I realize that this is an understandable reaction, but it's also one that I profoundly disagree with.
I agree with that too - but it *can* be a bit dangerous too. Do you automatically distrust anyone who espouses "contrarian" results? I imagine you don't - but I think too many people do. Not all skeptics are "oil men," but it actually seems to be a well-held belief that they are.
So from a policy perspective, I guess I am far more frustrated than from a scientific perspective.
What, you mean how the oil industry has fought mass transit and alternative industry sources? Naaah. ;)
Personally, I would be happy to see funding given legitimate researchers whose past publications have cast doubt on human induced global warming.
I think it's even necessary. Science (and I mean this broadly) gets too incestuous. Certainly is in my field (and if you haven't guessed, we've published contrarian positions before. And had to publish them in lesser journals because the people whose research we were questioning got to review our papers).
Back to the scientific questions: From my perspective, the extreme warming in the last 150 years seems pretty watertight.
That it's occurred? Of course - though I would still wonder if it's extreme with a little "e" or a big "E." From there, it's a question of what it implies.
That would be 80 150-year periods.
That's not bad. As a person who likes to get reams of stats before making a decision (I like thousands of samples), it leaves wiggle room - but there's obviously a pretty good chance you're right. Like I said, I never said it was *wrong.* But there have been periods of extreme climate wierdness (like the mini-ice-age in Europe in, what, the late 1600's? So these things can happen - and *do* happen. So you're right, the question is what's the chance it's luck?
If you have other reasonable hypotheses, I would love to hear them.
This is fuzzy, because it's off the top of my head, but I would like to see the lag between fossil-fuel-burning and human-induced warming. I know the latter number does not exist - obviously, that would be the answer to your question if it did - but even an estimate would be fine. Because the change in fossil fuel burning has been exponential, the change in CO2 must be too. And from that, *if* the direct relationship is to be believed, most of that increase in the last 150 yrs. should have been in the last 50. I know this data is as noisy as can be and there's no control group, but there should still be an effect. If it's flat, or otherwise-shaped, I'd be more likely to believe the "random fluctuation" theory. If the exponential tracks, then you may have a convert.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Please ignore this post if it turns out to be bin laden and saddam having a go at you and this is in bad taste.
The president and chief scientist of Malin Space Science Systems.
FYI.
Permafrost in Alaska has been noticeably thawing over that last couple of decades. Permafrost researchers at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska predict the beginning of catostrophic thawing within 10 years. The infrastructure built on top of the permafrost is crumbling at an ever increasing rate. Millions of your tax dollars are already being spent to rebuild infrastructure every year, and this will turn into to billions if the permafrost researchers are right. Our powerful Senator Ted Stevens will make sure of that. B.T.W. The change in the Earth's albedo will be the biggest climatic impact of an ice free Arctic Ocean. Rather than reflecting all that sunlight the dark ocean water will just store up the heat. Ought to be one hell of a "Lake Effect". Biologically, the loss of habitat and invasive species will lead to the mass extinction of many Arctic species.
How many people here still believe this rubbish? Wake up! Global warming is not a crisis, it's a political insurgency. The less seriously we take these so-called "scientists", the wilder their claims will get.
Reactor design article by Scientific American
Read that article in print before & it talked about using spheres to contain the nuclear fuel, like a giant gumball machine spitting out spent fuel balls. Discover or SciAm also had an article in the past year regarding cleanup of exisiting sites: apparently, the rules as they are now, or proposed, suggest people may actually want less radiation there than NATURALLY occurs! I also grew up watching "Silkwood" & reading about Chernobyl, so you're going to have the nuclear genie in people's heads for a long time. Also consider if we're producing enough nuclear engineers or not to keep the existing plants running, let alone expand nuclear use. I live not far from Kennedy Space Center, and there were people in this county opposing a new gas plant being built out by the swamplands; mix that with the blurbs about the proposed wind field in Martha's Vineyard: for ANY plant, there will be a "Not In My Backyard" issue.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
I saw that note on the Gulfstream being cooled by more polar water. I wonder if a cooler Gulfstream would reduce hurricanes, but otherwise Europe in general could feel more like Alaska does now.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
1. I was attempting to find articles to suppliment the story at hand. The aerosol thing looked interesting & I only vaguely remember hearing about it before. Otherwise, I've been reading up on this stuff as I come across it for years now.
2. The only sprays I use are cleaning sprays: I gel my hair & use stick deodorant. If you live in the US, CFCs have been banned from sprays since 1978 anyhow: before I was even born.
3. Republican? Hah! Maybe the people around here (Brevard County, FL), but I'm actually a Democrat who would like to own a hybrid & doesn't mind nuclear power.
4. I orignally submitted the story with an 'Ironic' title. I am fully aware of the situation with Greenland & Antarctica. The article in question only refers to the situation @ the North Pole. If anyone wishes to search Google, or go back over the other 500 posts, they can discern that the land-ice issue is of concern & is plenty addressed.
5. I was stupid on one thing: I didn't remember why the water ice wouldn't be a problem with water levels. But we're all here to learn, aren't we?
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Unfortunately, the satellite data you refer to was shown to be miscalibrated due to slow degradation of satellite orbits. Re-calibration of the data showed temperature rises exactly in line with global warming projections.
Mike
You think the climate of all of Europe getting fucked up won't influence politicians? You think that's not a negative side effect?
Oh yeah. That'll pretty much insure the US's new pro-global warming stance. I just recieved a letter from the IRS telling my that next years tax refund will be in home heating credits which will take the form of old tires and diesel fuel.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
If you melt 1kg of ice you get 1kg of fresh water.
Salt water is more dense than fresh water and cold water is more dense than warm water.
Therefore the resulting 1kg of melted ice will not displace exactly the same volume as 1 kg of seawater.
Still don't believe me?
Ok if you put 1kg of lead in a boat, it dispaces 1kg of water. However, if you throw the lead weight into the lake, the boat will rise by 1kg worth of lake water and the lake's water-level will drop by that 1kg of lakewater volume. This will be slightly offset by the 1kg of lead sitting on the bottom of the lake raising the lake level, but the volume of the 1kg of lead added is much smaller than the volume of the 1kg of lake water that was displaced when the lead was floating.
Density is only irrelavent as long as the different forms of mass still float.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
As far as the things I've read, magnetism has no real effect on climate. Poleshifts do not tend to corrolate with mass extinction events either. Birds may get lost, and we may get nice Aurora, but otherwise don't expect anything to happen like in "The Core."
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Hey, if you live by Orlando, you'd realize that it still gets pretty damn cold in Winter. That's also when there are the least amount of tourists ;)
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
He talked briefly about this story before a commercial break and asked this question: "If the polar ice caps melt, wouldn't that bring more cool water into the earth?"
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
Guess Santa and the Elves will have to sit around the pool at the North Pole in their swimming outfits and enjoy what Sunshine they get there, as that won't change (Don't they have looonng days in summer and shhooort days in winter?)
While your correct that there is much confusion about the link between between c02 and the ozone layer, they are not totally unrelated. An accumulation of co2 can alter the atmospheric chemistry resulting in physical changes that possibly could affect structures such as the ozone layer. The resulting changes could be damaging to the global biological process which create the enivronment from which we survive.
"Cutting greenhouse gases is as optional as breathing." - Andrew Simms
"The new human species, homo ecophagus, is a ubiquitous, predatory, omniecophagic species that is a maligant epiecopathologic process engaged in the conversion of all plantetary material into human biomass or its support system with coincident terminal derangement of the global ecosystem." - Hern
> What we "KNOW" is that the global average temperature has been
/. crowd! But that doesn't mean I will accept shoddy conclusions based on dubious data that appear to be based more on politics and religious belief than science.
> increasing over the last 150 years or so.
Which gets back to my original complaint. We don't KNOW anything of the sort. If you factor out the heat island effect caused by most of the sensors with long histories now being deep in urban areas the question gets muddled. And why that magical 150 years instead of noting that global temp has bounced around a lot during recorded history? Couldn't have been picked to coincide with the start of the Industrial Revolution could it? I mean, just look at the topic we are posting in! Weather forcasting can't reliably predict the weather next week. They can't reliably predict trends on things like hurricanes yet, but I'm supposed to jump up in support of a radical change in the organization of Western Civilization based on one made for decades out? My friend, theology is the only thing that causes otherwise sensible people to behave that irrationally and it appears you have a bad case of Green religion.
The Global Warning crowd is always trotting out another computer model that predicts disaster, but they never seem to agree with one another. So they have no real numbers to back up their position. In the end they fall back on belief and expect us to believe as well, and repent of our SUV wickedness. But "If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. - Lazarus Long/RAH"
But 'serious scientists' are practically forbidden to research in any of these directions. Instead they, like you, are expected to begin with the assumption that global temprature IS increasing, and study WHY with the strong implication that human forces are behind it, this being the most productive avenue of research.
That isn't science, it is politics. And anyone who thinks a closeknit community like the scientific one can almost universally hold a preconceived notion like that and still conduct impartial science probably also believes ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN is "Fair and Balanced" with 90+% registered Democrats on their payrolls and FOX is impartial with Roger Ailes at the helm.
> There's a point here, and it's that good scientists (the vast
> majority) are trying to determine what the facts are rather than
> prove their own preconceptions.
Sorry, but I'm a little too cynical for that. Lemme see, what was that Lazarus Long quote on the subject..... Ah yes Google knows all, "Most 'scientists' are button sorters and bottle washers." Point being it is just a job for most, and if the few political hacks in control of the research grants make it known that they will pay for results that support one side of the argument and will cast you out of the business if you speak out on the other side it is a pretty safe bet which way most will go.
I'm sure you howled over the 'cleansing' of the latest EPA Climate Change report by the Bushies. But politics and environmental science have been joined at the hip for decades, it is just that when Democrats and Greens do it the mainstream press doesn't complain.
> These are people at least as intelligent as the average slashdot
> reader
I certainly they are above the average for the
Democrat delenda est
I'm BlindColor and I from Italy so my English isn't very good. Anyway I think I'm able to explain why the melting will not add to the sea-level:
The most part of the SOUTH-Pole's ice lie
on dry land and not in water, so a possible melting of the South-Pole's ice will increase the sea level
Contrairly, the ice of North-Pole already float on the ocean's water and so is already part of the ocean.
To prove this I've done a simple experiment that maybe done again by you:
put in a glass some ice and some pieces of ice, next mark the level of the water. Wait until the ice is melted and compare the actual water level with the other signed with the mark. They're equal, are not?
How long can the people of Iceland tread water?
This may be the time to snatch up some valuable beach front properties in those soon to be get-away resort towns of Vladivostok and Anchorage! On a side note, the Yahoo report states that if when icecaps melt the ocean levels would not rise right? Because the ice is already in the water. Well wouldn't the actual ocean levels diminish because water occupies less space when it is a liquid then when it is a solid?
"The life of a repoman is always intense!" --Harry Dean Stanton
I would believe you if temperature didn't tend to fluctuate wildly at points before humans existed. That takes away your razor there, so you're forced to admit that there are things about climate we don't understand, and to base ANY conclusions on data we don't comprehend is foolish.
As for cold fusion, it wasn't so much debunked as no evidence found for it.
Actually, evidence was found for it, and it was published. Problem is, the guys were finding stray neutrons from the environment, not their test. There is now NO research ongoing for cold fusion, and no one at all believes it. These are not the same, not even remotely. Believe me on this, one of the profs at my school was heavily involved in debunking cold fusion, so I've learned more than I'd have liked about it. It's dead.
It seems fairly clear that if you release enough CO2 into the atmosphere the temperature is going to rise.
I realize you're not a climatologists, but if you talked to some you would find that this is an obscenely simplistic explanation. The problem is that so many other things come into play, namely the oceans and clouds. Also, at the same time we release CO2, we release other substances that aerosol in the upper atmosphere, which have a reflective/cooling influence. So the picture is nowhere near as simple as you seem to think. That's why you can't bank on this.
We don't know for sure, but the increases look different to rises that have occurred previously in the planet's history.
As climatological data go, 150 years is almost completely irrelevant. There is no way to base an educated opinion on data that short when comparing it to the history of the earth.
Some of the rise may be due to other factors, but equally the climate may have been undergoing a cooling phase (as seems to be the expected change looking at the long-term record) and the human factor is more pronounced than otherwise thought.
That's completely true, but if you concede that argument then you have to concede the former - namely, that human influences are insignificant compared to a spurious warming trend.
Ultimately, if you want to see how really screwed up this is, look into some atmospheric chemistry publications. There is a reason why none of the people predicting models come up with the same numbers. If it were that easy, everyone would agree, but it's not and they don't.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Basically you're saying "poleshift," as the incredulous call it, is a symptom & not a cause? That could work: however, you have to be wary of those that have been lead to believe it to be a cause.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Your grasp of physics is astonishing. Incorrect, but astonishing nonetheless.
Suffice it to say: the cooling capacity of salt water is higher than fresh water (due mostly to lower freezing temperature of salt water. Melt fresh water into this (thus diluting it). I think the argument about changing the salt concentration of seawater is pretty much moot. There may be a case for the cold water from melted ice affecting global water currents (and thus weather systems), etc. I don't know enough about those subjects to say for sure one way or another.
You know as well as I do that you just wanted that pump device [from *Water World*] so you could drink your own pee...or, better yet, serve a bunch of your friends and THEN tell them the source of that refreshing cup of alleged *Aquafina*... :)
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
"In Bordeaux, picking began on August 12, nearly a month ahead of schedule and the earliest harvest since 1893." cnnfn This cannot be true! We have Global Warming!
Expect Freedom.