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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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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."