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Countries Plan Land Rush in Warming Arctic
Noel Bourke sent in a pointer to this story about northern nations maneuvering to claim land in the Arctic. Fossil fuels, shipping lanes, and fishing are among the economic interests at stake, in an opportunity opened up by the melting Arctic ice.
Hey! Lets just allocate the new land as a straight swap for contries that lose land under the raised sea level.
Holland looks lucky (or unlucky if you count the relocation costs.)
...And here in the UK, the English, in the Southern (mostly) flatlands, have to move to the north pole, making Scotland a sunny resort.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
I wonder what will happen if this warming trend only lasts ten or fifteen years and then the ice closes back in. Will they find enough natural resources that are worth risking having the returning ice crush millions of dollars worth of equipment if the temperature starts to drop again?.
It is nice to think that there are still people out there who are so eager to explore this new area. As I watch people going to the front window in our office to trigger the remote starters on their cars (it's 20F here today) I can hardly imagine being able to find enough people to fill a helicopter that would be willing to brave that kind of extreme weather!
The melting of Ice caps would also create opportunities for beach front property in Nevada. Get the top maps and find the 200 foot above sea level elevation and stake your claim now - or least for your children.
Watch for the US military to grab a role in "policing the sealanes" across the new arctic circle routes. Watch for the Russian military to challenge that role, backed by nuclear weapons. Watch for Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland to form a competing coalition that loses out because they're too nice.
--
make install -not war
I thought that the land was already divied up? Wait, I must be thinking of Antartica. International waters only extend 6 miles from a country's shores. Can a country legally stake a claim to international waters?
erm.. forgive me here, but isn't the Arctic totally landless? Antarctica is a continent, but the Arctic is simply frozen water. No land. At all.
:) )
(and yes, I read the article, but it was a bit boring really. Why can't Russia control it as it has all those nuclear subs hanging around the place, or Canada that sort-of owns all the cold bits anyway. Denmark.... good luck guys
Hubris, arrogance, and lack of foresight are among the karmic interests at stake, in an opportunity opened up by the melting Arctic ice.
Although... maybe Erik the Red can finally make good on the biggest real estate swindle of the last 2 millenia: giving "Greenland" it's real estate-friendly but truth-defying name.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I hate to break it to you but the Earth's climate has always been in constant change. Don't think there is any law that says it has to stay the way it is now for eternity because now we have environmentalists to fret about it.
Though I'll grant you that the rate of change we are seeing and will see may be a cause for alarm and there is a pretty good chance it is man made. In particular if the change is to rapid many species will be wiped out because they wont be able to adapt quickly enough.
Most of the Bush administration crowd, who also happen to be the fossil fuel burning crowd, are more than willing to kid themselves that this is just the natural "greening" of a planet coming out of the ice age. They do have a point that there is no law that says we have to have huge ice packs on the poles, and there certainly have been era in earth's history when there weren't.
@de_machina
Capitalism? Tell me why in the hell would you chastise capitalism for this, when communist countries have much worse records where it comes to environmental issues?
Well, capitalism doesn't fare better just because it's capitalism -- but, all democratic countries at the moment are capitalist (no, people's democracy is as far from democracy as it can be), and that gives them a chance of having the voices of people heard.
In communism, the Party rules unchecked, and people have nothing to say. And, caring about the environment is not among the goals of any communist party I know of.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It's quite simple. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Perhaps I will explain using examples on a smaller scale.
Do you criticize the autobody man that makes a buck off someone haveing a car accident? Yes, he profits off someone's misery, but he fills a need.
Do you criticize a factory that starts making jerry cans and body bags because a nearby country got washed out by a tsunami? Yes, the factory makes money out of the misery of others. They also fill a need.
Melting ice caps and the openning of the northwest passage is an issue of national security in Canada - our waterways and shores need to be protected and that is incredibly difficult to do if the north is unpopulated.
Nobody will pretend that the tsunami is a good thing and nobody will pretend that global warming is good, but every challenge presents a need and every need presents an opporunity and that is the essence of capitalism.
- Thomas;
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
I know they're in a rush to claim the North Pole and all, but it's just a bunch of ice floating in the ocean. That's hardly valuable to me. All the minerals would probably be found on the arctic islands, which are already claimed mostly by Russia and Canada.
I'm sure if someone other that the U.S., good ol' G.W. will "melt their hopes" with lasers from his newfangled missile defense system that he's planning.
Either that or the current tendancy of the U.S. government to ignore things like greenhouse gasses and global warning will do the job without having to fire a single laser.
Anyone find it ironic that the New Zealand Herald is reporting on this? That's about as far as you can get from a country with arctic interests.
Actually, modern diesel boats are the reason why the U.S. Navy has been developing the ultra high-powered low-frequency active sonar. Because when running on batteries, the newer diesels are often too quiet to hear until they have you in range, quite to the chagrin of American commanders who learn that they've been "sunk" by a Japanese or Australian submarine during a naval exercise.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
There was a discussion regarding this in the letters section of a recent _Physics Today_. You're right, according to Archimedes; but the concern is whether the temperature rise will be sufficient to melt the floating ice AND cause significant thermal expansion of seawater. This paper touches on the latter: http://sedac.ciesin.org/mva/WR1987/WR1987.html "FUTURE increases in the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons) are expected to result in substantial global-scale warming in future decades. In response to this warming, global mean sea level should change owing to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting (or accumulation) of land ice" From the abstract: For the period 1985-2025 the estimate of greenhouse-gas-induced warming is 0.6-1.0C. The concomitant oceanic thermal expansion would raise sea level by 4-8 cm.
--Actually, I'd be curious to know the ratio of Internet Explorer users to people who spent the last ten years in environmental denial. --As well as to people who think torture in Iraq is no worse than college 'hazing'. And to those who bought into the whole WMD thing. Indeed, I wonder how many common threads there are among people who still have their heads plugged into the Matrix.
-FL
I think you're underestimating both humans and the environment.
As a canadian I can tell you that even if the temp. raises more than a few degrees, the earth will still be very inhabitable, and in places, even pleasant.
It's been a long time.
Any attempts to use our waters and resources is a violation of Canadian sovereignty.
International law dictates that, unless Canada makes an effort to assert its sovereignty by, for instance, maintaining settlements, conducting patrols and challenging trespassers, then Canada would lose its right to the territory. And there are currently vast swaths of uninhabited land up there that we don't regularly patrol.
I suspect many people don't realize this. And as a fellow Canadian, I'm quite worried. Just because we make maps that declare it to be a part of Canada, doesn't mean other countries have to agree. And we mustn't get complacent just because we think that friendly countries wouldn't try and steal our territory if they felt they could get away with it. If we want to keep it, we have to work for it.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Actually, it's a staggering example of a nearly instantaneous change in mass culture. Think about it... for decades (LONG before the Russians, or even the Germans for that matter) invaded Poland, it was on the receiving end of jokes (particularly in America). In less than one generation, Polish jokes ceased to be funny (to Americans, at least). Not out of increased sensitivity, political correctness, or because people in Poland bitterly complained that they were unfair or offensive... simply because the whole unspoken and underlying premise that made them funny in the first place vanished.
Even people who thought they were funny 20 years ago have a hard time now trying to figure out why they were funny.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. Yeah, believe it or not, people apparently thought it was outrageously funny a hundred years ago. Why? Who knows. The whole set of cultural references that made it funny are gone, and nobody even knows what they were.
What if all the ice on Greenland melts? It doesn't float, so it will make the sea level rise. By seven meters, according to current estimates
To make matters worse, greenland is on the far end of the
North American plate.
If the downforce of all that ice disappears into the oceans, the tectonic plate might start to balance itself, causing giant earthquakes while lowering the US and Canada.
The same thing happened to Scandinavia after the last ice age.
It's difficult to predict exactly what will happen and how strongly, but it's a dangerous possibility you don't hear much about.
This isn't exactly a new discussion, at least not if you're from Denmark. Claim of the pole has been a subject of discussion for quite a while now. The only countries with a "real"(or at least geographical) claim to the pole are Canada and Denmark. And as a consequence the two countries have started a joint venture to find out where one starts and the other ends. The only thing there's really left to do is for Canada and Denmark to place a border, once measurements and readings have determined where the continentel socket really is. In the less serious end of the topic a lot of ridiculous claims have been made to try to secure claim of the pole. The worst was when a group of "independent" scientists said that Greenland wasn't Danish territory, thereby excluding Denmark from the claims race. Only problem was that we could document that Greenland has been under Danish rule for the last ca. 1200 years. Since Leif den lykkelige and Erik den røde first sat foot on greenland.
I wasn't suggesting all at once, more like, if it goes over a 20 year span (quick I know, but inside some of the worst case estimates), then thats 1 Tsunami equivelent volume every 4 DAYS, now, most of that will be greatly spread out melt, but occasionally it will be the more violoent 'entire glacier slides into the north atlantic' sort of thing, and it just takes a few of those to wipe out large chunks of the UK.
Realities just a bunch of bits.