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Arctic Warming Drying Up Lakes
kingofalaska writes "An accelerating Arctic warming trend over the past quarter of a century has dramatically dried up more than a thousand large lakes in Siberia probably because the permafrost beneath them has begun to thaw, according to a paper to be published the journal Science." From the article at the LA Times: "About 125 of the 1,170 shrunken lakes disappeared altogether, and most are now considerably smaller than the study's baseline of 40 hectares, or about 99 acres, the researchers found. If Arctic temperatures continue to rise, the scientists said, many of the lakes in high northern latitudes, where they are ubiquitous, could eventually disappear."
Your tone implies a negative reply, and yet your argument agrees with me.. Perhaps you had better re-read the post? What I meant is, global warming is not the worldwide effect people shape it up to be, and further, local incidents are just that - local and individual. Antarctica goes through cycles every hundred/thousand years (I am sure you, being such the expert on ice shelves, would know this); if anything is "wrong" at all, it is yet another of these processes.
No one is claiming that sea levels have already risen masively; rather it is claimed that they will rise significantly (several meters, possibly flooding areas like Manhattan) if the Antarctic ice cap melts, which is obvious.
More important is the temperature anomaly (which is global and indisputable), the effects it is causing, such as El Nino and the slowing of the Gulf Stream (not to mention the increasingly weird weather here in Britain), and the likely effects if it continues, such as total distruption of the Gulf stream causing ice caps to form across most of Europe.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Sorry, I should know by now to use a few more steps.
*Temperatures rise
*Wilderness starts to die
*Crops become harder to grow
*"No worries! Just chuck a bit of this on it! We think it's safe, and you'll improve your productivity and hence income by 500%. You'll need to renew your patent license again next year."
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
The short-term concerns about global warming aren't about huge absolute increases in temperature, they are about changing weather patterns. Global warming may well mean a new ice age for Europe.
As for the rise in sea levels, so far, the main consequence of global warming seems to have been increased thawing of ice around the north pole, which will not raise sea levels. A second consequence has been thawing of glaciers, with already serious consequences.
Sea levels will rise significantly when the antarctic ice sheets thaw. We have been lucky so far that increased thawing around the edges has been balanced by increased precipitation in the interior, but that won't last forever.
People like you are about as fringe and ill-informed as the people who deny that HIV exists or that HIV causes AIDS. Unfortunately, in this case, you endanger not only your own miserable life with your hostility towards science and reason, you endanger everybody's.
It's attitudes like yours that have caused this whole mess in the first place!
I had minestra for lunch. My brain is fine. I'm not trying to use hyperbole, rather I'm inviting comment on ways to encourage people to consider the impact of their decisions. For example: Next time you consider eating a steak, I invite you to consider that the average vegan uses half the water and a tenth the land used by an average meat eater.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
And even if this was only about global warming, I think that the most prudent course of action would be to assume a worst case scenario and work based on that. There's nothing wrong with working on such assumptions instead of unobtainable "real hard facts" and erring on the side of caution - engineers and politicians do it every day.
(Off-topic: Is anyone else getting this? "Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between... It's been 13 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment". A bug or a new feature in Slashcode? Damn annoying.)
The owls are not what they seem
And how do you know it's a temperature anomaly, instead of say a natural rise and fall in the planets temp? You are judging the entire planet's weather on a 100 years of data. At the last birthday party I attended for mother nature she said she was some 4 billion years old.
That's like saying you were a lean child and can't figure out why your fat now.
the earth is constantly changing. slowly over time. What happened when the asteroid took out the dinosaurs? The earth recovered from that. It will recover from us. If it has to kill us to do so then so be it. We are way over populated for this planet anyway.
Besides all of that, we will run out of fossil fuels in another hundred years anyway. After that we won't have to worry about global warming. As we won't be putting them into the air anymore.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Except those guys living in the Netherlands, Bangladesh, or on a southern pacific island, among others. They will living by the seaside, sure. On the side with seawater all over it.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
In the same vein, if a climate change that would kill us is "natural" I really don't care for natural. Better learn and figure out how to get a more unnatural but more friendly result if we at all can.
even tho giving a glacier a nice shiny coat isn't gone solve the problem on the long term, it will extend the glaciers life a bit, giving those environmentalists time to find and sort out the real problem. So why the hell are they protesting it?
Because the whole idea is stupid and indicative of the developed world's approach to climate change: spend money so that rich people can still ski in Switzerland.
Enviromentalists can't sort out the real problem. Every single person on the planet has to take responsibility for it. But we won't. And we'll vote out any government that tries to make us change.
:wq
Warning
You are about to read several assinine comments made by geeks who did not get their degrees in environmental science, geology, oceanography, or evolutionary studies.
Please forgive them for their pretentiousness and understand that the various contradicting figures they offer as evidence for their claims are probably read from dirty pages left in the cache of their brain.
How long must we be a victim of fate and circumstance?
As long as it takes to change our minds.
Don't be stupid. It was the company that did it - it's their money to spend, and as they are not actually harming the environment by doing this, those environmentalists should bugger off.
Lets go over this one more time: It's not stupid because a company is taking steps to protect its interests, and IN THE PROCESS HARMING NOBODY. What is the fucking problem?
"global warming is not the worldwide effect people shape it up to be"
What you are missing is that the effects of the small global rise in temperature are not evenly distributed! There are, in fact, even regions that get *colder* as a result of this worldwide increase in temperature. Global climatic conditions are complex and unified, but they are NOT uniform. Hence what *looks* like a local phenom can actually be a direct result of global conditions. Think El Nino, for example.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Except, you know, to the extent that Archimedes Principle says that they won't.
The thing is, if you've been reading scientific literature and science news sources, rather than political news sourcs, you'd know climate scientists are quite aware of this. They aren't concerned about melting ice shelves raising sea level, it's Anarctica's terrestial glaciers they're concerned with.
Oh, and the fact that in the last ten years we've watched some of the largest ones in existence disintegrate.
100% of the ice shelves could disintegrate and according to the physics of bouyancy sea level wouldn't rise one mm. While the retreat of the antarctic ice shelves may be evidence of global warming, they are not linked directly with other expected results of climate change, which, if they happen, will unfold in their own time. So you can't logically use the fact that sea level is not rising proportionally faster as the ice shelves disintegrate faster as evidence that global warming is not happening.
Sometimes I think it would be better to represent our models of this sort of thing by a Bayesian belief network. They are intrinsically honest when weighing evidence, whereas human beings tend to be dishonest with themselves. We all start with our ideas of a priori possiblity, which appriopriately affects our interpretation of evidence strongly at the initial stages. People who are convinced of global warming would need very little evidence to make them completely certain, whereas skeptics are just made a bit less certain at the outset. The thing is, as evidence mounts one way or the other, humans seldom revise their beliefs even to the point of becoming uncertain, unless there is social pressure to do so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When Mount Kilimanjaro erupted in 1912 it released more CFCs into the atmosphere than every county released during the entire industrial revolution.
;)
Look. Im all for saving the planet, i recycle, i bought and use a Hybrid car and live in Berkeley California. Not EVERYTHING is caused by global warming. Our Sun, our Planet does a whole lot on its own. Into Astromony? Ever notice the ammount of coronal mass ejections has dramaticly increased in the last 50 or so years? Which cause upwards of a 9 degree temp (F) here on earth? Or various other factors.
Stop blaming everything on 'Global warming'. The earth changes all the freaking time. (Look at the problems with the mississippi river. The earth evolves, changes. Yes we put more than our fair share of toxins into the world and it needs to be stoped or lessened, but in no way can things like lakes drying up be blamed on Global warming.
Ever heard of Death Valley? Ever know it use to be under water Hunderds of thousands of years ago? Hmm it dried up too. Oh wait, No Global warming then. What about the entire central valley of california, its all freaking swamp land. Its dry too, long before mass ammount of non-native humans arrived. Not to mention the middle-east, Iraq in paticular, use to be a Lush tropical paradise (according to fossil records). It too is now a desert.
Stop blaming every small thing on Human influence. You humans think too highly of yourselves.
(Posted as anon due to im not at my home computer
it's just that it started 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, and not just 50 years ago.
On one level you are completely correct. The potential issue here is when you consider the bigger picture.
If I have bone cancer and my legs hurt, I can take an aspirin and feel better today. But it allows me to ignore the pain that is indicative of a much more serious problem that if not taken care of will negatively impact me months or years down the road.
Similarly, some people view local mitigation efforts this way. To the extent that they remove the immediate problem they allow people to ignore the bigger picture and delay the actions that need to be taken (often expensive and effortful, just like chemotherapy) that are needed to resolve the problem long term and avoid the big nasty consequences later on.
If the person was seeing a doctor and had a serious treatment plan scheduled, there'd be no problem at all taking an aspirin. But if you see the person not taking any of those steps, can you understand why a bystander might consider taking the aspirin a bad thing?
" There are no solid conclusions among all scientist"
Uh-huh. This is how the wacko right pulls this off: they get a few of their idiot minions with online Ph.D.s (or some isolated rejects from the tenure pool) to call themselves scientists. Then they completely ignore scientific method and start polluting the scientific pool with untestable hypotheses. Soon, it's difficult to get a consensus "among all scientist" because a percentage of them are not even legit scientists.
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
Wha?? what about ice core samples and data taken from other sources like trees? Judgement is being made on much more than a hundred years of data. The fact is that ice that is tens of thousands of years old is currently melting. It hasn't been this hot for tens of thousands of years.
u re1/
If it has to kill us to do so then so be it.
If you want to die, fine!
I am just pissed about you killing me at the same time. It is amazing that there are people who still believe nothing is wrong.
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0409/feat
Before you assert categorically that global warming is anthropogenic, you have to explain why the data that shows it's a natural phenomenon do not apply. There are ample oxygen isotope data that indicate the interglacials have had a 100,000 year cycle for at least the past million years. We weren't around in any significant numbers for the last 9 interglacials that have preceeded this one. Why is this interglacial anthropogenic when it's on the same cycle as the previous 9 interglacials?
What's truly astounding is the massively increasing level of outright propaganda on the subject. The scientists appear to be being left behind and the propagandists (sponsored by private industry) are taking over the show.
Propaganda isn't the sole province of partisan politicians. Arthur Eddington was convinced Chandra's theory that black holes could exist was wrong and he browbeat anyone who disagreed with him. It wasn't until Eddington died in 1944 that any progress on black holes was possible. There's a story about Shapely erasing data that disproved his hypothesis that the Milky Way was the whole universe. At the time, Shapely was the director of Harvard's observatory. The point is, just because some scientist believe something to be true doesn't necessarily mean it is - no matter how reputable the scientist is.
You might counter "isn't it better to act than to wait until we're sure?" The answer is "it depends on the cost of acting and being right vs. the cost of acting and being wrong." Moreover, you have to know what to do if you choose to act. Don't look to climate models for guidance - they're not worth much. The salient quote:
It certainly is happening. There are various seasonal cycles, glaciation cycles and others we dont know about because our history doesnt go back far enough. The neocene should be over by now, the next ice age is due. So we have no idea what to expect... its been 12000 years since the end of the pliestocene.
So all that means the Earth was never constant. There were forests in Saudia, a great desert where forests are currently, a lush ecosystem in the middle of the Antarctica. Surely humans didnt change that, we didnt exist. We only very recently became powerful enough to make big changes in the global system, but since its all constantly changing so much, our effected changes are lost. Think of the Tsunami. Could we do that? That was weather dear friend, it showed us how our effects are completely dwarfed by mother Natures'.
I dont think we can make lakes disappear yet. The greatest change we have been able to make is putting dams on rivers, and the heat of cities raising its temperatures by 2 celsius. Apart from that, things have always been changing, and will always be. My hometown used to get 10ft snow every winter 'back in the days', while now it didnt snow for a good 5 years straight. Legend has it that its always been getting warmer there, and such temperatures are to be expected.
Its certainly Global Warming, but not manmade.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
...global warming won't kill us. Because we'll wisen up? Nah. But there's simply not enough reserves to go around. Positive estimates suggest we have 50 years left of oil reserves, with maybe another 50 running on coal (assuming we have to replace all oil with coal). After that, we might want to polluate as much as we like, but there's simply not any left to go around. Geologically speaking, we're burning up the reserves of millions of years during a few short centuries. When that's done, you're going to want all the warmth you can get.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's actually much, much worse than the cancer analogy with ecological issues .. because many people understand that if humans ever do make the world uninhabitable for themselves, it won't be during their life time. Life is much too short and stressful to spend it dealing with things that are only going to affect people that we will never even meet because we'll be dead.
.. is that saving the world takes too much effort. As a parent of two who runs his own business, life is stressful and busy enough. Yes I'm one of those people who slashdotters always bitch about because I just don't care as long as I get my American Idol and Survivor.
...
.. not to save the planet.
The problem that I see
If people really care about the environment and the future of the planet a hundred years from now and they want people like me to change our lifestyles and make a difference.. then saving the world better start getting damned convenient and rewarding.
<rant>
A few examples of why I don't partake in saving the planet
1) Recyle boxes should be free (we have to pay for them here).
2) No sorting or separating or anything of the sort should need to be done. In fact, I should be able to throw everything away from chicken bones to styrofoam right into my recycle / trash bin and the people who care should be doing the sorting and recycling.
3) Don't up my taxes for a recyling program.
4) Want me to drive an electric car ? Better make it as fast and as macho-manly as any fuel combustion car.. and it better cost the same or less in terms of fuel and the vehicle itself. I drive to increase the size of my balls
5) Save the rain forest if you want to but if the price of my home goes up even one penny because we can't get cheap lumber anymore then sorry you've lost my vote.
6) Want me to take public transportation ? Lower the prices of bus fares rather than raising them by $0.20 every year and start following your own damned schedules. Honestly, who is gonna ride the bus when it's -10 deg. C outside and they have to wait for 1/2 hour because the earlier bus was 10 minutes early and they missed it?
</rant>
Everytime something changes on the earth somebody's trying to blame humans -- the green-house effect, acid rain, etc. etc. Even without humans on it the earth would continue to change. I think environmentalism has become too much of a religion today.
We humans are adaptable. Let's work with the earth, for the better, and not get all bent out of shape about everything the earth does.
"Enviromentalists can't sort out the real problem. Every single person on the planet has to take responsibility for it. But we won't. And we'll vote out any government that tries to make us change."
Bravo! I'd really like to see some responsibility in this whole mess, but it's not going to happen. Too many people feel too strongly, and at best you'll get tin-foil-hat responses like lowering CO2 emmissions (when we know darned well that CO2 is one of the least effective greenhouse gasses, and most plans to combat it release far more effective gasses, such as water vapor).
That's right, if you're planning on switching to hydrogen cells as soon as they're available, you're going to be HARMING the environment (though probably not by much, as the likelihood that you'll put a dent in solar-induced warming is about as serious as the likelihood that you'll reverse the last 10,000 years of glacial melting).
You're mixing issues here.
There are crops capable of growing in all the warmer lattitudes. So long as wild strains of the various cash crops are preserved, new seeds can be developed for the new climate.
Rising temperatures and unstable climate can cause problems, yes. But increased pesticide usage? Increased requirements for fertilizer? Um... no.
No worries! Just chuck a bit of this on it! We think it's safe, and you'll improve your productivity and hence income by 500%. You'll need to renew your patent license again next year
Care to elaborate what "this" is? What is the precise chemical that will be used more often if global warming occurs?
Farmers don't 'renew their patent license' on anything. There are people producing seeds who patent them. Is that what you're going for? Corporate ownership of these cultivars is a problem. Hybridization can work as a type of patent and so can patents, with the result being that farmers have to buy more seeds each year, forcing dependance.
If we really wanted to stretch things to reach your conclusion, maybe we could paint this scenario;
"the change in climate would destroy local crops forcing native farmers to use corporate sponsored monoculture which, because of its homogeneity will require more pesticide usage.
That's the closest I can get to what you're trying to say.
But it seems that you're not articulating particular issues in this post so much as regurgitating causes and effects of random environmental problems without knowing which connects to which and by what mechanism.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
They're finding permafrost is melting. What's usually all year round ice beneath the lakes is melting. Lakes are getting bigger because of other areas of ice melting, and it might be the cause of the warming of permafrost. They at least appear to be symptoms of the same overall problem, a change in climate.
To quote from this article.
"As temperatures rise, ice and snow melt and put more water into Arctic lakes." and "They now believe additional lake surface brought on by melting is just the first part of the process. In the southern parts of the Siberia study area, the permafrost itself is believed to be melting."
So perhaps an accurate headline might have been Arctic Warming Is Causing Lakes To Grow Bigger, And The Drying Up Of Lakes Due To The Melting Of Permafrost. The Former May Be Causing The Latter.
Their original headline still appears perfectly accurate to me though and, while I'm no journalist, it also seems more effective.