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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."
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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
...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
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.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.