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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.

10 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Terrific! by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "I guess I'll be buying property in Antartica."

    Hate to disappoint you, but Antarctica has been cooling for years: it's only the Arctic which has been warming (and much of that is because many parts of the Arctic were unusually cold a couple of decades ago and is returning to more normal temperatures).

  2. And this is a bad thing? by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Re:Yikes! by Indigenous+Cowbird · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'll start with the last comment first:

    Do you assume that global warming means that temperatures will rise uniformly across the globe?

    Do you assume that global warming would cause no shift in weather patterns?

    Do you assume that any shifts in weather patterns would not be disruptive to agriculture?

    Do you assume that disruptions in agriculture can be easily accomodated, say by rapidly shifting agricultural production to different parts of the globe (assuming, of course, that there would be vast new tracks of arable farmland as a result of changed weather patterns)?

    If the answer to any of these questions is "no", then global warming should make you nervous.

    If your answer to any of these is "yes", then it's you, not the environmental scientists, who have some explaining to do. They seem like pretty shaky assumptions.

  4. Re:Yikes! by jkxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Ok for the sake of humanity by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am prepared to send two of my ex's to the north and south poles respectively. Those cold hearted frigid bitches will soon put an end to any thawing going on.

    All I ask for saving humanity is a tropical island paradise where I can be surrounded by nubile maidens.

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  6. Re:Yikes! by nomadic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Out come the enviro-trolls.

    Yes, here you come.

    1: Show me ACCURATE 1 million year tempature records. Wait!! We only have 80 years of records

    It's called paleoclimatology. It was developed by people who actually studied when they went to school, as opposed to following your apparent curriculum of eating glue and getting your head stuck in bannisters.

    2: Show me this hasnt happened before.

    What does that have to do with anything? If it happened before it can't happen again? I mean, remember the last time you got your head stuck in a bannister? Did the fact that it had happened before prevent it from happening again?

    3: Tell me the "scientists" studying arent also getting grants from... greenpeace or ELF..

    Well, if you read the article then you would see who commissioned the study. But I guess it's more fun to accuse the scientists of being bribed liars. Because who wouldn't be corrupted by those climatology grants; you can really live the high life on those.

    4: WHY exactly is global warming bad? Wont it give more landmass (eg, melts permafrost siberia) and lessen the "nice tropical -120F on antartica?

    See, those pesky laws of thermodynamics mess things up. Maybe you should have taken junior high school physics instead of eating all that glue. Water, like many, many substances, tends to increase in volume when you add heat. So sea level rises. So you may gain part of Siberia, but you also lose a sizeable chunk of the world's coastal areas.

  7. Re:Yikes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The amount of greenhouse gases that the civilized world has output since the Industrial Revolution is still less than what is output in one major volcanic eruption.

    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?

  8. Re:Yikes! by Yokaze · · Score: 5, Informative

    > 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.

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  9. shhhhh by dougnaka · · Score: 5, Funny
    Could we cut down on these stories, I, for one, want rapidly rising ocean levels to be a surprise to our coastal residents, and articles like this are giving them far too much warning.

    --
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  10. Re:CO2 warming a myth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Regarding 6 :

    http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipe di a/g/gl/global_warming.html#The%20solar%20variation %20theory

    "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. ... It has the fingerprints of the greenhouse effect.

    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."