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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.""
Giant Arctic ice shelf breaks up
;)
In a statement, the Giant Arctic ice shelf hoped they would be able to remain friends despite the breakup.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
It's all a ploy by Microsoft in their new "kill the penguin" buisness strategy.
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Squirrel
so why should we believe that this ice shelf actually broke, or even existed to begin with? because some environmentalists say so? call me a skeptic but i'll believe this when i hear it in church
Anyway, oil will run out. Then you'll WISH we had global warming.
It is probably a good time to post this:
Bush covers up climate research (again)
I wonder what, if any, effect the draining of the fresh water lake into the sea will have on "the global conveyer. There was some speculation that the melting ice caps will release so much fresh water into the system the salinity and temperature difference that dries this engine will break down, and the CO2 that it deposits in the deep water will also stop. Is anyone an oceanologist?
How much more serious of an issue would this have been if a shelf of the same size broke off in Antarctica (where the ice is anchored to land) than in the Arctic (where it was floating before and thus won't raise sea levels)?
I've been on large, frozen lakes before ice-fishing when they split. I forget the technical term, but basically a huge, long crack appears out of nowhere with a horrifying sound. (Devils Lake, ND is the second largest closed basin lake in North America, after the Great Salt Lake. When Devils Lake splits you don't want to be near it. I was on it when it happened a few years ago, and I damn near literally shit my pants.)
I can't even imagine the terror of an entire ice shelf splitting. The reuters article doesn't mention if this was a slow or fast occurance.
Even scarier, we're several thousand years past due on the next ice age. This "global warming" thing could actually be the precursor to the beginning of the next, depending on which cadre of scientists you believe.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
RTFA, in particular the following two passages:
Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said -- adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.
"There's a regional trend in warming that cycles back 150 years," Mueller said in a telephone interview. "I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming."
The Arctic region is warming far faster than the rest of the world (I seem to recall estimates of five times faster), if the rest of the world is indeed warming at all, and its related to natural shifts in water and wind currents. Even if the world temperature was stagnant, this area would still likely be warming, and the shelf would have cracked anyway.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The ice is already in the water (ocean), so melting it is not going to increase the sea levels. Remember, water expands when it freezes and it goes back down when you melt it. If you don't believe me, fill a glass full of water and put it in the freezer.
:)
As the earth is still coming out of its last ice age, we shouldn't be too concerned about global warming. What we should be concerned about is desertification due to the lack of vegitation and depletion of the Ozone. Given the natural course of things, the earth will make big dinosaurs, not silly monkeys who play on computers and bitch at eachother.
Anyone else up for a nice honda civic hybrid yet?
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Free your mind.
I'd buy a beachfront property on Ellesmere Island while it's cheap, and start building a tropical resort there.
On the geological timescale, 3000 years of solid Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is really just a little blip. For all the worries about human greenhouse gases, we should probably also take a serious look at natural cycles. Only 12,000 years ago, you could walk out to the Farallon Islands outside SF.
Had we been living 50,000 years ago, I wonder if we would have blamed the melting of the Bering Strait ice bridge on global warming.
The fabled Northwest Passage is at hand, reducing voyages from Europe to Asia by 5000 miles.
It's been sought by adventurers and explorers for hundreds of years, and only now is the northern boundary of the American continent becoming free of ice to allow passage. No longer will the Panama Canal or Cape Horn be the only routes between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Not all changes are bad. Sometimes the world actually changes for the better, contrary as this is to the worldview with which we have been indoctrinated.
According to the article, Derek Mueller of Laval University said "It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming." He didn't call global warming a "myth." He accepted global warming as fact and only said that there was impossible to say whether it, or regional warming, was the cause of this particular event.
Here's an excerpt from the EPA's web site:If the EPA web site under Bush/Cheney (who are pawns of the oil industry) acknowledges global warming as fact, that should give you head-in-the-sand types a clue. Wouldn't it be terrible if we reduced pollution and it didn't fix global warming? Oh the horror!
This is not a good development for the ecosystem of our planet.
First, I must mention that those who rush to blame anything and everything on climate change are just as irrational and stupid and those who rush to the assumption that climate change has nothing to do with anything. Both assumptions are erronous, unlearned, and emotionally modivated.
What we need to do hear folks is educate ourselves. As one who has done a fair amount of reading on the subject, I can assure you that although the world isn't going to end tomorrow, the effects of climate change (and man's contibution to climate change) are well worth taking seriously. Instead of blowing it all off as has been done with this subject on this forum in the past, I think we all need to grow up and at least seriously consider the very real possibility that this is in fact a very real problem and that perhaps we should rethink our dependence on fossil fuel and the rest. Because let me tell you folks, if it's half as bad as many scientists predict it is, we'd better get moving on this right now!
So please put aside your impulsive reactions for a bit and go out and learn more about this subject. It's important enough to offer it the benefit of the doubt.
would no doubt be the perfect tool to solve this conundrum.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
If you RTFA, you'll see them discussing that they don't know whether this is global warming or just regional warming.
Not mentioned in the article, but relevant, is that in some parts of the Canadian Arctic, I think including this area, the local Inuit had stopped making kayaks for some centuries, and had to relearn in the mid-1800s when the weather got enough warmer that kayaks were useful again. Don't know if that's global warming or just regional either.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Coincidence.
There are a lot of other graphs that show similar growth rates.
To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature is just bad science. There's no evidence to back it up. We need experiments and more data before any sound scientific conclusion like that can be made.
In my list I mentioned at least four very plausible reasons for global temperature rise that do not depend on an increase in CO2. Environmentalists continually shout about the GhGs because it's easy to make slogans out of and it furthers their agenda.
I have no agenda but to get at truth. In my experince, accepting the first piece of data that fits your assumptions is not the way to get at truth, but a way to sell books and get on the 6:00 news.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
To do list:
Buy Milk.
Call Dentist.
Sell all Florida real estate.
Pick kids up after soccer.
Mow lawn.
My
I'm giving up on debating global warming on Slashdot, it seems just about everyone is convinced its bunk. With the weather getting more and more extreme, could you at least understand why we are worried?
Well, I just wanted to make everyone aware of the new distributed project - www.climateprediction.net.
Whether you agree with the theory of human caused global warming or not, with this you can help getting the world scientific community more accurate climate models.
Unfortunately only a Windows client available at the moment, but a Linux one is in development. Personally I think this project and the
Folding at Home distributed project are much more deserving of peoples' clock cycles than Seti or distributed.net.
Cheers,
Lars
MEDIA KIT: Debunking Pseudo-Scholarship: Things a journalist should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
It may not be too late to Give Florida Back to Spain.
I think we may still have the Receipt around here somehwhere...
On the other hand, at an average height of just 4 feet above sea level, this may be Governor Jeb's covert attempt at "wetlands" reclamation.
My
Therefore it would seem to me to be reasonable to state that greenhouse gasses seem a likely cause and take action to reduce them while simultaneously doing more research on the subject to figure out what the cause is for sure.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Very nice graph. It does make me wonder however, how does it correlate with, for example, the temperature peak during the medieval warm period when temperatures were on average a degree C warmer than today?
Personally, I dont think CO2 emissions really make a big difference. Even if we did manage to completely stop all CO2 emissions (which I think we should do anyway) we'd still get global warming. Historical temperature data tends to point out that we're not even in a very warm period for the moment, and with or without human interference we'll get far larger variations than we've seen the last century.
So, not buying that beachfront property might be a good idea. You never know when mother nature will conspire to make your house an experimental submerged water dwelling.
The fact that temperature changes coincide with increasing levels of a known greenhouse forcing gas, is actually fairly pursuasive. Or did you mean 'mere coincidence.' ;)
To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature is just bad science. There's no evidence to back it up. We need experiments and more data before any sound scientific conclusion like that can be made.No serious scientist is arguing 'undeniability.' The large majority of scientists, however, are pursuaded that anthorpogenic carbon dioxide (and other gases) are making a major contribution to the observed climatic changes.
You are simply wrong about a lack of experimental data. The greenhous forcing potential of CO2 has been recognised since the time of Avernius. The mechanism by which heat is trapped (it's actually diffracted), is also well known. What is more the various indicies of heat forcing potential for CO2 and other 'greenhouse gasses,' has been quantified.
On the balance of probabilities, it seems to me that right about 10-20 years ago we should have stopped buring the planet's carbon sinks and moved over to nuclear.
I have no agenda but to get at truth.If that is so, the best starting point would be the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change site. Providing, of course you prefer a scientific gloss on the issue rather than an ideological one.
There is a bit more reason to believe CO2 is causing the warmup than corrolation.
Scientists are running climate models on supercomputers, and simulating the effect with and without the human-emitted CO2. When the scientists recommend cutting CO2 emition is desireable it is probably because they have run the numbers through their simulations.
You, sir, are so wrong it hurts my eyes to read!
Place a big chunk of ice in a container and fill it with water. Then sit back and see how the melting of ice does not rise the water level. Then get back to your physics books and figure out why it doesn't.
The problem with global warming is not with floating ice. It's with Antarctica where ice is sitting on the continent. Melting of that ice will rise the sea levels.
To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature is just bad science. There's no evidence to back it up. We need experiments and more data before any sound scientific conclusion like that can be made.
Good point.
Let's do a giant experiment using the Earth as a testbed. If the Earth is still habitable in 50 years, you were probably right.
-a
To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature is just bad science
Well, yes.
However, it is known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that we release loads of it every year. There also have been some correlations made, even though they've not yet been proven.
Now, given the potential problems that could be generated by global warming (flooding of coastal cities, alteration and possible destruction of major ecosystems due to changed animal migration or plant survival/dispersal patterns - the latter possibly caused by changes in wind patterns of deep sea current shifts) don't you think it might be a good idea to stop pumping out as much CO2 as we currently to in case it's the problem.
Or do you want to bet the lives of millions (billions?) of people on the case that it turns out not to be the problem?
If you have no idea what the result of a course of action is going to be, but are aware that it might affect the whole planet in a very real and negative way, don't do it!
Please, I don't want to get 20 years down the line, find out CO2 was the problem all along, but that it's too late to do anything about now and is all fucked beyond repair.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
The fact that temperature changes coincide with increasing levels of a known greenhouse forcing gas, is actually fairly pursuasive.
In the absence of other factors that may even be true but in the presence of factors like the percentage of reradiated wavelengths being absorbed by atmosphere being already at 100% for the wavelengths absorbable by CO2 mean that CO2 as cause is a poor explainer at best
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
That's false even by the scientists' own admission. The models are not predictive. Part of the obvious falsity of the claims made by the IPC is that the computer models project warming at the surface, and in the upper atmosphere. The upper atmosphere has actually cooled. If the model is not predictive - it is worthless. The models can not even manage predictiveness for known past climate events.
That's your belief. Scientific evidence to support that belief is not in evidence, however.
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. One good volcanic eruption has a lot more effect than years of human activity.
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.
Earths climate is never static. If the icepacks weren't receding, they'd be expanding, and that would be much more like a disaster.
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