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Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming
gollum123 wrote in with news of a new study of warming in the Arctic, showing that warming from greenhouse gases is causing vast changes in the region. If your lifestyle depends on cold and frozen rather than mild and damp, you're in deep trouble.
Actually melting the permafrost is likely to produce less usable landmass. According to the article:
"Oil and gas deposits on land are likely to be harder to extract as tundra thaws, limiting the frozen season when drilling convoys can traverse the otherwise spongy ground, the report says. Alaska has already seen the "tundra travel" season on the North Slope shrink to 100 days from about 200 days a year in 1970."
Manufacture in China
I live in the Northwest Territories (Canada) and I can say in the last 15 years the winters have become much warmer. I remember stretched where is was -35 C for 3 weeks at a time. Now it only reaches that occasionally. I cannot speak for long term trends however. And yes, I did walk to school both ways uphill.
antarctica is a continent covered by ice, 3km of it in some places. not really 'underwater'. same for greenland -- the second biggest ice sheet.
Nowhere except the "north". Actually the ice on the north melting wouldn't change a thing as it's immersed and would just replace its own volume with water. But the southern cap is completely different. It lies on top of a huge landmass and is helluva big. Melt it and it will raise ocean levels.
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All well and good - we can have all the floating ice in the world melt and the sea levels won't be effected in the slightest. However, not all ice is floating freely on an ocean - a good deal of it lies over land; if the ice on the northern areas of Eurasia, North America, and the Antarctic land mass melts, or moves as a glacial flow to warmer climes and melts, then the water that is produced will eventually flow into the seas. That ice melt *will* contribute to a rise in the oceans, and it's kind of difficult to imagine a scenario where just the free floating ice melts, while that over land remains unaffected.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions on the validity of the science on the basis of an NYT article.
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One of the many ways of studying past climate patterns is by looking at ice cores.
We have pretty good data on long term climate patterns in cold places. Some links here:
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/globalwarm
http://www.secretsoftheice.org/icecore/warming.ht
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/pa
Correction: the ice replaces exactly the amount of water it occupies when floating (=law of Archimedes). Proof: take a glass of water, put in ice cube, fill up glass to the edge (but not overflowing!). Ice melts, and water is still exactly up to the edge.
Secondly: the bigger part of ice masses aren't floating, but piled hundreds or thousands or metres thick on top of land masses. And a glacier isn't usually found in an ocean or lake either. So if these ice masses melt, you get more water -> sea level up -> less land for people to live on.
My next comment will be ready soon, but subscribers can't beat the rush or see it early!
4) There are also theories that, after a short period of global warming, the increased area of water will cause an increase in cloud mass, reflecting more of the sun's energy and causing global cooling, plunging the world into another ice age. Why is global warming bad? Because we don't know which potentially harmless or potentially horrific chain reaction might occur, but it most likely will make the world MUCH different than it is now, and when things are MUCH different on a global scale, it's usually not a good thing.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Really? Is that why my beer cans shrink when they freeze? I think you are missing something.
Which is why I used the word "tends". Water is somewhat unique; when it changes from liquid to solid it expands, due to the formation of a crystal lattice.
But that behavior only happens in a narrow band of temperatures. It doesn't kick in until water hits about 4 degrees celsius; above that temperature, water behaves like other liquids, and expands when it's heated. Ocean temperature varies by latitude, but over much of the earth water doesn't hit the 4 degree mark until you go down more than a kilometer. So the water above that will, in fact, expand if you add heat.
Check your facts. Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes. That was the first hit on Google for "volcanoes co2 human".
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
The gulf stream is integral to the climate of: "the British Isles, Scandinavia north western russia including the area surrounding Moscow. Without the Gulf stream countries like Finland would not have the warm summers they do have and the winters would be much colder considering what latitude they are at.
It matters not that there was a big hollywood flick on this thing. They were using some solid science in that film moron.
Regardless of the dramatization by Hollywood, the gulf stream is and extremely important system/engine regulating our planet's climate and desalinization could trigger a disruption of the flow of the gulf stream because fresh water has a different density.
Imagine a liquid trying to move through a liquid with a different density versus a stream flowing within a liquid of approximately the same density.
Now I ask you, would the flow patterns remain the same?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
But what about data such as this?
See the spike on the right?
That said, it's ok to be skeptical, but one really can't ignore it completely.
> The amount of greenhouse gases that the civilized world has output since the Industrial Revolution [...]
You are merely making an unfounded statement, but still got moderated up. Care to back this up?
According to "Gerlach, T.M., 1991, Present-day CO2 emissions from volcanoes: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (EOS), v. 72, p. 249, and 254-255." CO2 emissions of all volcanoes are surpassed by us humble beings by a factor of 150.
Sulphourous-emissions of volcanoes and all other natural sources are surpassed by 330%.
I guess, you'll now have to retort to doubting the integrity and/or qualification of the scientist in question.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Not usually. While a super-eruption may be able to put out more in one eruption than humans can in a single year, these eruptions are few and far between. The last one of this magnitude, IIRC, was Krakatoa, and before that was Taupo, and before that I think was the volcano in the Med in ancient Greek times. However, such eruptions also kick a lot of ash into the air, which causes a cooling effect, so really, some people should be asking for more volcanos to erupt.
BTW, I'm on the side of the skeptics. I just like for everyone to be on the same page.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Don't forget there was a time only a thousand years ago when Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which today is supposed to covered in permafrost year round.
200 years is way too short to tell us anything
How about 420,000 years? And all I had to do was an obvious google search.
Or I could have looked at wikipedia for discussion and pretty graphs.
The fact that some scientists may be focusing their attention in particular studies on post-industrial-revolution effects doesn't mean that other scientists haven't established a longer baseline in other studies. There are a lot of data out there if you go look for them, so I'm not sure why the grandparent only referenced short-term studies.
Hmmm, yes. You see, Mars' polar caps melt every two years. And how much data do we have about Mars? Let's see, about none.
I have no freaking clue what you are talking about the Earth's magnetic field. For one, it has *NOTHING* to do with global warming. You might as well start talking about Mars again :)
About the sun, well, let's see. Sunspots are actually cooler areas of the Sun. So the more sunspots, the cooler the sun!
So parent might be interesting, but not very insigtful or informative. Human CO2 emissions since the Industrial Age over 150 years ago are *directly* proportional to the global warming. Temperature records around the world are *very accurate* over this period (ie. ice core samples).
On the contrary. The evidence is quite good.
I have no freaking clue what you are talking about the Earth's magnetic field. For one, it has *NOTHING* to do with global warming.
Read this and this and then get back to me. The magnetosphere blocks solar radiation from penetrating the lower levels of the atmosphere.
About the sun, well, let's see. Sunspots are actually cooler areas of the Sun. So the more sunspots, the cooler the sun!
Read this and then get back to me. Sunspots are indicators of higher solar activity.
Greenland, as well as much of Antarctica is covered by mile high glaciers, much of it indeed piled up on dry land. If much or all of this ice melts, the result will be much like dropping an ice cube into a glass of water, in that it will raise the level in the glass. If you own real estate in the Netherlands or much of the southeastern US, as well as other low lying parts of the world, you can kiss it goodbye under a rising sea level. Unfortunately, this also includes a number of large coastal cities, which will require their relocation inland to make way for the expanding coastal fishing areas. Our skyscrapers will make good structure for sheltering marine life, and will one day be on many sea captain's list of fishing hotspots. If the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers melt, the sea level could rise 200 feet. All of the current major seaports would be inundated, and cities on rivers even hundreds of miles inland would be at least partially inundated by the rising waters.
Can I have a play on that slippery slope once you're done with it?
This may seem like a slippery slope fallacy, but it is indeed based on solid evidence. Analysis of historical climates indicates that climate changes are indeed very sudden.
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But hey... we can wait untill our society has been crushed by global climate change before we take off our blinders.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Apparently the parent poster doesn't realise that ice occupies more space than it's equivalent amount of water. Example: if you have a million molecules of water and freeze it, it will occupy more space as ice (but still be 1 million molecules). It's mass will be the same, but it's volume will be different. Try this little experiment at home if you don't believe me: Pull out a glass tumbler and fill it with water, then put it in your freezer. Wanna bet the glass tumbler breaks when the water turns to ice? Water turned to ice is responsible for breaking rocks, causing asphault and concrete roads to break, and other serious damage. The molecular mass is identical. The volume grows because of the way ice forms (it's related to the 212 degree angle the hydrogen atoms relate to the oxygen atom in the water molecule). This expansion process is also what kills plants. When a flower or vegetable freezes, the water in the cells expand, causing the cell wall to burst. When the thawing process occurs, the cell wall is broken (actually all of the plants cell walls), and the plant is soft/mushy/wilted/dead. Root vegetables are less succeptable due to the lower volume of water they store in their cells.
Fresh water does slow down the gulf stream which restarts an ice age, which re-builds the ice shelves in Antarctica, North America, etc.
Saw it on Discovery Channel several weeks ago.
-- No sig for you!
2. Water vapor is by far the primary contributor of the greenhouse effect, accounting for 96 to 99%. CO2 accounts for 1 to 3%. Methane and others trace gasses account for less than 1%. The greenhouse effect lets solar radiation in, but, like a blanket over the planet, absorbs some IR heat that would otherwise radiate out. This keeps the Earth's mean temperature somewhere around 15 C, instead of roughly -15 C. This vital 30 C swing is the reason that the Earth is habitable.
3. During the current interglacial period, the Earth has been about 2C cooler (The "Little Ice Age" around 1600-1700, when the Thames regularly froze over), and it has also been about 2C warmer (The medieval warm period around 1000 - 1200, when Greenland was colonized by the Vikings.) We are currently about in the middle of this natural variation, which occurred without manmade CO2.
4. The 500k year Vostok ice core data: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.htm shows CO2 either in phase or lagging temperature by up to 1000 years, over four temperature oscillations. This means the CO2 does not drive temperature, but that temperature drives CO2. The most likely explanation is that the ocean outgases and releases more CO2 when temperature increases, and holds more dissolved gasses as the oceans cools.
5. I'm not disputing the Earth may be getting relatively warmer (as we are coming out of the little ice age). One reason is likely the unusually active Sun. This report: http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/aah4688.pdf shows that over the last several centuries, solar activity is at its highest levels. The IPCC determined that the Sun's variation in energy output were too small to explain global warming. They dismissed the sun as a likely source of Earth changing climate!. Here is a link to a recent study showing how the sun's variation could have a feedback that would drive earth's climate change: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2333133. stm The theory goes like this: When the sun is highly magnetically active, the increased solar wind shields us from cosmic radiation. Low levels of incoming comic reduce cloud formation. Reduced low level cloud formation reduces reflectivity (i.e., the Earth's albedo). More energy is absorbed instead of reflected, and the temperature increases. The difference from an active Sun to an inactive Sun was about 3% global cloud coverage. The correlation in the study is remarkable. The jury is still out, but it could explain the correlation between the Maunder minimum of the 1600's and the little ice age, and account for the warming in the last 3 decades that corresponds with unusually high solar activity at the same time.
6. In November 1991, Danish scientists Eijil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, startled the climatological world with a paper in "Science" describing a 0.95 correlation between solar cycle length and global temperature (IPCC version). "Science" writer, Richard Kerr described it as "one dazzling correlation". The blue line is temperature, the red line is solar cycle length.) As can be seen, global temperature has tended to increase in lockstep with shortening of the solar cycle length (ie. solar maxima becoming more frequent) I hope you follow the link, because one look at it, and you are forced to say, "Its the Sun, stupid." The graph is at the bottom of this link: http://web.dmi.dk/sol-jord/proj
Regarding 6 :
e di a/g/gl/global_warming.html#The%20solar%20variation %20theory
... It has the fingerprints of the greenhouse effect.
http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikip
"On May 6, 2000, however, New Scientist magazine reported that Lassen and astrophysicist Peter Thejll had updated Lassen's 1991 research and found that while the solar cycle still accounts for about half the temperature rise since 1900, it fails to explain a rise of 0.4 C since 1980. "The curves diverge after 1980," Thejll said, "and it's a startlingly large deviation. Something else is acting on the climate.
Later that same year, Peter Stott and other researchers at the Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom published a paper in which they reported on the most comprehensive model simulations to date of the climate of the 20th century. Their study looked at both natural forcing agents (solar variations and volcanic emissions) as well as anthropogenic forcing (greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols). Like Lassen and Thejll, they found that the natural factors accounted for gradual warming to about 1960 followed by a return to late 19th-century temperatures, consistent with the gradual change in solar forcing throughout the 20th century and volcanic activity during the past few decades. These factors alone, however, could not account for the warming in recent decades. Similarly, anthropogenic forcing alone was insufficient to explain the 1910-1945 warming, but was necessary to simulate the warming since 1976."
Yes, and if you plug in the numbers you will see that any heating of the atmosphere will result in neglible water uptake by the atmosphere on average.
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I just took a quick look at this figure:
http://www.tesag.jcu.edu.au/subjects/ge1400/Ima
You can see that a temperature increase in the atmosphere of 10 degC results in roughly a doubling of the water holding capacity of the atmosphere. The upper limit of the IPCC estimates of the global mean atmospheric temperature change is 5.8 degC.
Furthermore most of the atmosphere is undersaturated (that is the relative humidity is less than 100%). In a future warmer climate the relative humidity is expected to drop further.
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_040
This means that we will probably see less than a doubling of the water vapour content if the temperature rose 10 degC. An upper estimate would thus be 2.8 cm sea level drop due to more moist in the atmosphere. This is neglible in comparison with the expected total sea level change
And yes, I am a climate scientist (although a physical oceanographer - but I had a substantial portion of meteorology during my education).
I'm curious, how many scientists do you suround yourself with on a daily basis, how many scientific papers have you read on the subject, and have you done any serious scientific research projects on the subject?
I can speak for what I see in the scientific community over here at University of California, Riverside. The consensus seems to be, in the Atmospheric Science, Soil Science, Environmental Science, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering circles, this:
1) The mean global temperature is rising and has been rising.
2) This rise is highly correlative with the rise in Carbon Dioxide emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
3) A correlation by itself does not mean anything.
4) Carbon dioxide is a known greenhouse gas, whose output has indeed increased steadily over the past two centuries, due to human activity.
5) So have other types of greenhouse gasses, including Water, methane, CFC's, etc
6) Water has a residence time in the atmosphere of about 11 days, meaning a water droplet, after evaporation, will on average stay in the atmosphere for about 11 days before condensing and precipitating down. The majority of this ends up in the ocean or in soil, where it's residence times are far greater. Translation -> warming effects of water are most likely negligable.
7) Methane - everyone farts. We can't really revolutionize how Cows are raised or decrease their farts. The main way to control methane production is via landfills. This is begining to be done.
8) CFC's are already highly regulated.
9) Carbon Dioxide has a residence time in the atmosphere is quite high in human terms, over 100 years. That means, when it gets up there it stays up there for a while, keeping heat close to the surface of the earth, warming it. This is believed to be fact, backed up by countless papers and objective experimentation.
10) Taking into account that mean global temperature is indeed rising, CO2 has been emitted at an ever-increasing rate since the 1800's, and this rise is correlative to the rise in mean average temp, we might have a connection. It could also, indeed, be a natural climate shift.
11) Whether it is a natural phenomena or not, we should do what be can to fight it, because it could mean more dramtic climate variability, more extreme storms, and perhaps a shift of the green belt north and south - which would be bad for the US economy. Canada would be the new bread basket of the world.
12) The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty funny movie, but was not accurate at all.
That seems to be the scientific consensus. The evidence is convincing, but like everything else in science, you can't prove anything - only disprove it. This global warming model has not been effectively disproven. The news letter for the American Geophysical Union has articles in nearly each issue about global warming, it's causes, and it's effects on the global climate system. This is real science. It is not laughed at in the main stream science community. While i'm sure you can find sources to the contrary, you can also find minority scientific sources to back up creationist theory and the existence of God. Both of which cannot be known, both of which there exists some evidence for, one of which the evidence against is fairly voluminous (creationist theory).
Now for my little bit of opinion
One of the largest emitter of CO2 is not industry, it's not factories that employ hundreds of thousands of workers - it's cars. It's technology that can CHANGE. That can be forwarded, not to the detriment of our society, but for the betterment. Creating more efficient cars, developing viable hydrogen fuel cell cars will not destroy our economy, it anything it will improve our economy. R&D dollars will go to fund research initiatives that will create jobs - high paying, high-tech jobs. There will always be a need for fossil fuels - that industry won't just die