Ward Hunt Ice Shelf Breaks In Two

heidi writes "CNN has this story on the breakup of the largest ice cap. A permanent feature for the previous 3,000 years, it has broken into two pieces. "The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported.""

Comments

Chauvenistic Scientists

[Baldrson]

Obviously this is hyped by chauvenistic white male scientists who fear change and want us all to fear their demise with them. Let us not fall for this neophobic paranoia born of closeted homosexuals in denial about their desire to be bare-back raped by HIV-infected ethnic gangs while undergoing a much needed rehabilitation for their racist and sexist sins.

Re:This is serious stuff folks ...

[Tokerat]

Actually, I was just trolling, but good call. ;-)

Re:certainty

[tetra103]

I have a different perspective on the whole "green house" gas issue. It's like an alien conspiracy theory with the whole, "rise in global temperature" and how bad CO2 is. I remember watching one show where the whole simulation of a rise in CO2 caused a rise in temperature with the side benefit that vegetation growth boomed. The model predicted that polution had the benificial effect of increasing tropical vegetation. A very plausible explaination.

The other scare that many have is that if the global temperature was to rise, the ice caps would melt and the world would be flooded. If we're mainly talking about the ice caps as in the "floating" ice caps, then 90% of the ice is below water anyway. And of the 10% above water that would contribute to the rise in global water line, concider that water is more dense than ice. That 90% ice that's below water is really displacing a certain amount of water too, thus that 10% above may really just balance out that 90% below and thus no increase in water level. To illustrate my point, take a glass of water and drop an ice cube in it. Make a mark of the water line. Then wait for the ice to melt. Make another mark. Not much of a difference if any at all. By the way, no scientific data here. I'm just using common sense and my logic may be seriously flawed, so excuse my lack of insight if this is a much more technical discussion. Also, I'm only taking about the "floating" ice cap and not what's on land. I'm sure someone would have to run numbers, but my own feelings are that the ice cap melting wouldn't really have a huge impact on the land mass of the earth.

That being said, I also think of the CO2 issue like the Atkins diet. Let's just say for the sake of argument that CO2 gases are actually benificial to the environment. The more CO2, the more vegetation. The warmer it gets, the less ice we have. The less cold climates we have, the more area of the earth is habbitible for man. In theory, it's argued that CO2 is a win win situation. The same is said about the Atkins diet. Hey look, you can eat all that good tasting fat and red meat (or whatever is in the diet plan) and you benifit by loosing weight and looking good. Again, a deceptual win win situation. Common sense tells me that the Atkins diet will kill you in the long run (clogged arteries or something). I'd much rather eat what I concider is healthy and spend the effort to excersize to loose weight instead. I have the same perspective on the CO2 arguments. Regardless of the "science" involved, common sense tells me that polluting the environment, regardless of the short term effects, in the long run, it'll just kill the planet.. I don't really care about all the studies, and theories involved. Common sense just tells me we should be taking our pollution issue far more serious. For that reason, I'd definitely concider myself an environmentalist. I don't buy into the arguments for or against the CO2 and global warming issues. To me, treating the environment with respect is just the right thing to do.

George Bush is...

[nycsubway]

AN IDIOT. He is. and now there is undisputed proof. He doesn't even know there is ice in Canada.

Postmodernist conservatives...

[freeBill]

...are so funny. They hate postmodernism (as I do, as well) yet they embrace its tactics. Look at these quotes:

That's your belief.

Ah, yes. The O'Reilly tactic: Spew unsupported statements like mad; when your opponent cites facts, respond by saying, "That's your opinion!"

What makes this particularly amusing is the fact that the post this poster was responding to actually agreed with his premise. Which makes the following unintentionally funny.

Scientific evidence to support that belief is not in evidence, however.

Since Arker is actually responding to a post which agrees with his position, this statement is actually one of the few truths in his diatribe. If one assumes he intended to attack some other view (as he does in the rest of his post), nothing could be further from the truth. There is plenty of evidence. That evidence has been well published (to such a degree that other post-modernist conservatives have argued the scientific journals are biased). One can legitimately argue as to whether the evidence is strong, overwhelming or definitive. If one wants to advocate a really weak case, one can argue it is balanced by evidence to the contrary. But to say it is "not in evidence" is a lie of absurdist proportions.

Despite politically motivated statements to the contrary by some politically funded researchers with obvious interest in spinning things that way, the evidence suggests instead that human action has little, if any, net affect on the global temperature average. Humans produce greenhouse gasses, yes. Humans also do things with the opposite effect.

Other humans have measured both and found it appears the greenhouse gas production is likely to overwhelm those "things with opposite effect." Those other humans then made predictions that the climate would be affected. Then they went out in the real world and tried to determine whether their predictions were being born out. They were, to the limited degree they were able to ascertain. They were challenged for not measuring as well as they could. Better measurements were funded. They continued to support the predictions. A president was elected who was strongly biased towards the challengers. He appointed a group of distinguished scientists to look into the question. He loaded the group with people biased towards the challengers. They reviewed the evidence and found it supported the predictions. The people who were misinterpreting the work of those scientists doing the challenging continued to misrepresent the conclusions.

One good volcanic eruption has a lot more effect than years of human activity.

Not really true, and completely irrelevant.

We're in an interglacial period. Icepacks are receding. Natural, normal, and on the whole a good thing for humans and most other species as well. Why people want to spin this as some kind of disaster is beyond me, excepting those with an obvious political motivation of course.

We are only in an interglacial period if it followed by an ice age. We don't know if the present period will be followed by an ice age or not. This is the kind of statement for which not only is there no "evidence in evidence" but no evidence is really possible. But, if we assume that this is an interglacial period, the rest of the paragraph is still riddled with fallacies:

Icepacks recede at the beginning of interglacial periods. Followed by a long period of relative homeostasis, during which glaciers stay about the same. Such periods are very good times to live. Times of rapid climatic change are not. Homeostasis is good, not rapid climatic change. This is not "spin." It is clear, well understood science. As well as common sense. The fact that this poster tries to equate interglacial periods (which are known to be "good" for life) with the rapid clim