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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.
"Back off, get your own arctic!" - Canada
And the Antartic freezes back up.
6000 years later everyone will be standing around a block of ice that washes ashore gawking at the well preserved specimen of prehistoric man.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
...says a newspaper based in New Zealand. :-)
The world is melting and all we wanna do is milk it for some bucks. Whoever designed the human brain was obviously using windows, cuz smething is seriously screwed up there. One step closer to Capitalism eating itself, friends.
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
Should have been posted in Politics anyway. It might be international politics, but it's certainly politics when Denmark sends a oceangoing geographic team north from Greenland in the dead of winter to plant flags on every little rock they find sticking up from the ice.
A question though- why the heck is global warming still contraversial? After all, it doesn't matter if it's man or nature caused- dealing with it is going to be everybody's concern very soon, and there's very little doubt left that it is happening.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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?
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
here are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of west
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!
Greenland looks pretty damn big on my globe. And it's only a mile or so deep in ice.
Melting that would cause a sea-level rise.
Maybe if you had read the parents post you would have realized he was talking about icepacks that AREN'T floating.
You're right though, most of the ice in the arctic is already floating. The antarctic glaciers are the ones we should worry about as far as sea level is concerned.
AccountKiller
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!"
Now, you know, I've never ever seen a Mercator projection on a globe, since I would have thought it was quite unnecessary.
I would be interested in knowing how that's done.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Think of it like this: take a glass of water and put a rubber duck in it. The duck floats, yes? Now push the duck down so that it's top is even with the top of the water. What happens to the water? Same thing that will happen to our oceans when that freshwater melts.
So you are saying that a glacier weighs the same as a duck and is therefore a witch?
> (you know, like my rubber duckie in the tub)
You know, Moofie, thaere are some things that you just don't admit to on SlashDot.
And weirder, but not surprisingly, the responses here on /.
For those of us in Canada this isn't news. There's a special branch of the armed services that patrols the far north, made up primarily of natives. This is done not only to 'keep an eye on things' but to maintain sovereignty.
There's also more effort being put into patrolling the waters now. The Russians have made a play for shipping, and the US too, trying for a new NW Passage. Canada isn't enthused about this considering it'd have to handle any rescues and should there be an accident, likely in those challenging waters, the environmental consequences would be catastrophic for the region.
A bit further down the melt is having terrible effects. The famous ice highways that have been an important means of supplying northern communities and projects are experiencing unpredictable weather and dramatically changing 'ground' conditions. Routes that have been reliable for 40 years are now unusable and new ones difficult to find.
Outside of deep winter the thaw line is wreaking devastation on communities as roads and foundations heave and subside. Inexorably moving northward the land is turning into the half-frozen tundra-bog that used to be typical of further south.
Along with this change the animals and plants are struggling to keep up as seasons alter, new competitors emerge, and interdependencies fail. Rodents, owls, plants, insects, all sorts of things are showing up in places they haven't been for thousands of years and affecting what had been there. That this is alarming the cultures who've also lived there thousands of years is an understatement.
Heck, even in 'southern' Canada the warming is having a direct effect. Snow cover is less every year. This is actually kinda good news for the ski industry as the expectation is US resorts will suffer in comparison and business will move north. However along with this the hydrology of areas is changing as the spring flood are also less and less every year.
Agriculturally Canadian farmers are increasingly adopting plants they couldn't successfully raise before. Crops are going into the ground earlier and the growing season keeps getting longer. This isn't all a panacea though, for instance PEI potatoes benefit from the cold that kills soil pathogens every winter, without that blights could become a huge problem.
Climate-wise Canada is getting very concerned for what the future holds for it. Planning for large projects now regularly includes future climate considerations. Even trade is affected: Already bulk international water sales have been outlawed for fear of setting precedent.
This newish century is shaping up to be an interesting one on planet Earth. Where much of the big history of the last century was human events this one may well be that of human effects.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.