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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'm not trolling I just have an honest question...
When that big lump of ice out there in the North Pole melts, will we *notice* it at all?
My reasoning is that most of the ice is underwater, and ice takes up more cm than water, so there would be a smaller volume of water than there is ice. Sure some of the ice is above sealevel but surely the difference in volume compensates for this?
Where am I wrong?
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Hasn't the artic been warming for the last 10,000 years since the last Ice Age? I'm sure mankind is contributing somehow to this process but why is what seems to be a natural cycle of the earth an inherrently bad thing? Its just another natural phenomenon we must learn to deal with with like earthquakes, volcanoes, storms etc.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...and we should accept it. Is it fault of humans? Maybe, maybe not. But remember there were times where glacier covered half the Europe, there were times when Sahara was a green country, when what today is mediterran sea was a valley of a huge river... It just happens. Now just be wise and prepare to face it instead of looking who is to blame.
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Let me guess: you are an American. Let me answer at least a couple of the questions you just brought up: 3) Scientists are scientists (unless owned by a politician like the ones working for Bush that say global warming is OK..) and they are people who stay true to facts. If scientists are continuously telling you something bad's coming, it means they reviewed quite a few facts before reaching this conclusion. And finally, the above being said, I'd listen to what they have to say. On a side note, you may want to look up the IPCC (www.ipcc.ch). Those guys are from all over the place and they have been working on global warming for a while now. They are saying the same thing. 4) I'm sorry, this is just a stupid question. Global warming (or massive amounts of ice melting) doesn't just make the climate a bit warmer. It actually starts a chain reaction of events which take place in a land slide and end with a signifant portion of the earth's biosphere dead or extinct. Yes, this coming from the same guys that can tell you what your weather will be like tomorrow correctly 90% of the time.
...people will soon start to realize the potential harm these issues can do to our society as a whole. I cannot understand how any sane person is able to ignore the simple fact of environmental problems getting worse over time.
The US government still manages to deny cooperation on the Kyoto Protocol with most stupid arguments, a treaty already ratified by 125 countries all over the world.
"The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere." -- George W. Bush
???
The greenhouse gas problem will grow at a steady level for decades after we have started countermeasures, I hope then there's enough time left afterwards.
Humans are adaptable, yes-within a particular set or limitations. It is our duty as a species to modify whatever is necessary to perpetuate our survival, whether it is artificially regulating the climate by any means necessary or limiting particular actions that contribute to health problems or in a minor way to the trends that we must abate for survival. Environmentalism has nothing to do with this apart from the aspects it derives from scientific study on trends that are common with the prompts for necessary actions for our species survival on the extended scale. Whether this is a "natural" trend or not does not matter, that it will produce inconvenient situations for humans does matter though and makes it a thing to seek control over.
Humans don't have to be solely responsible for us to do something. That there are other factors in climate change does not mean we should not change those which we have control over.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Actually, that's not necessarily the case. During the last ice age the effect of all the additional water being locked up in the arctic ice cap caused the sea levels to fall. As a result land that is currently underwater was exposed by the declining sea level, forming amongst other things the land bridge from the European mainland to the British Isles. As the ice age came to an end and the ice sheets melted, those areas of land were again submerged, opening up the Irish Sea and, sometime later, the English channel. This is why there are fewer species of mammals in Ireland than there are in the UK mainland; they never got the chance to cross the land bridges before they were submerged by the melting ice.
Of course, saying there is going to be more or less land kind of misses the point. What's the use of having an extra few million square km of land, if it's under an icesheet a few km thick? Or if we go the other way, having a nice warm, but somewhat smaller, Eurasia/North America if all the lands around the equator get to become an infertile desert like the Sahara? Those are two extreme examples of course, the reality is likely to fall somewhere in between; but gains in one area of the globe will still be off set by losses in another.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I fail to see how this is so insightful.
It's easy to say "I don't care" about some environmental issue, because natural processes also cause cataclysmic effects. The fact is that humans CAN alter the environment and humans DO breathe the air the environment produces, drink the water, and eat the fruit of the land.
The planet will survive no matter what we do, I'll grant you that. On the other hand, it need not support mamillian life. Though the course of history many classes of living organisms have become extinct though natural proccesses. It's quite possible that given a critical mass of people, all producing some minor atmospheric effect, we could alter the environment on the order of those natural processes, such that mamilian life were no longer sustainable. Natural selection would weed out the mammals and a new form of life would emerge.
If you're OK with that, go ahead and ignore the research about global warming. I for one would like to preserve the human race. I'm not saying all the science about global warmning is good. It isn't. However, to say that 6 billion people on the planet cold never affect the environment in a negative way is quite silly. We do need to take environmental research seriously, debunk the bad research, and heed the good research.
Why is this assertion repeated every time this topic comes up? It's patently false. We annually burn up couple of km^3 pure carbon and turn it all into CO2. A very major volcano spews only a few km^3 of material, most of which is just rocks that fall to the ground next to the volcano. Do you have any valid links to back up your claim?
That there are other factors in climate change does not mean we should not change those which we have control over.
It can, if our changes are expensive (which they are, and "expensive" automatically translates into human lives), and we can't have a significant effect anyhow, which is an open question.
Reflexive knee-jerking is not the right solution, no matter what emotional terms people like you wrap it in.
The water held in the air is not available to flood anything.
Do you have any credible reason to think that the amount of increased atmospheric H2O will counteract rising sea level temperatures?
There are TROPICAL fossils and fossil fuels in the arctic. How did they get there?
Why do you keep asking this question? Nobody's disputing that the greenhouse effect was more pronounced a few million years ago. But just because champsosaurs didn't have a problem with the climate, don't assume that we won't. If you haven't noticed, we're not semi-aquatic alligators. But you know, you're just proving my point: climate change can mean extinction. And I really don't want to be extinct.
These changes take a long time and living things are very adaptable. We will also adapt over the many generations that such changes happen.
a) it could happen faster than that, and b) "adapting" requires a lot of organisms in a species dying.