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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 earth just sucks.
rewriting history since 2109
On the other hand, it's great that we'll all be living by the seaside with lovely warm weather. Seriously, it's so easy for people to become complacent, thinking the warmer weather's going to be lovely, and who cares if the beach moves a little closer to the fish and chips shop? Perhaps it's time to change the message to: "Just a half a degree change means that all your food will be laced with horrible poisins and chemicals and millions of less fortunate people will die" but then, so many people happily chow down on poptarts and hamburgers, and who cares what happens to a few africans? People's lack of imagination and forethought is quite frightening sometimes.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
Not only lakes, also glaciers are drying. They even pack them in foil to protect them from melting.
Glacier wrapped in foil to stop melting
Except, you know, to the extent that Archimedes Principle says that they won't. Oh, and the fact that in the last ten years we've watched some of the largest ones in existence disintegrate.
[Off to Norway tomorrow for a conference on Ice Shelf Processes]
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This must be a serious blow for the Siberian Tourist Board.
Ok, I deny it.
I'm George W. Bush, and I approved of this message.
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.
Keep sticking your head in the sand and pretending it's not happening. Of course it will go away if you ignore it long enough.
I am trolling
I find that every August it feels several degrees hotter than in January. I think this merits further data analysis to find the exact cycle of this global warming thing...
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's attitudes like yours that have caused this whole mess in the first place!
You got it all wrong. What he was saying, is that the absence of the sea level rise is NOT an indicative that the polar ice isn't melting away.
Gosh, he even said we were observing some of the largest floating ice formations disintegrate. What do you think made them do so? Ice drilling polar bears?
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
Of course, the country that benefits the most from the Gulf Stream is Britain. You need us to lend legitimacy to wars.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
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.
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.
By contrast, the scientists found that in Siberian areas where the ground below is still permanently frozen, the number of lakes actually increased by about 4% and total lake area grew by about 12% over the last three decades.
Interestingly they neglected to indicate how many hectares this 12% represented.
I guess that wasn't as dramatic a headline.
Arctic Warming Is Drying Up Lakes, Study Finds, but some lakes actually growing
I didn't realise that international relations between the Prussia and Alaskan royal families had become so strained...
Does this make my brain look big?
I'm also waiting for the flood of global warming denial posts from people who have managed to see what all those foolish climatologists have missed - it would mean SUVs are a bad thing so cannot possible be true.
:-
c ience/
We have a similarly inspired great thinker here in Britain by the name of David Bellamy. He was a sort cuddly beardy bloke who used be on tv a lot in the 70s and 80s hiding in bushes and getting excited about birds.
Up until last year he was a well respected environmentalist having set up half a dozen environmental organisations and been invited to the board of half a dozen others. But he has a weakness.
He likes birds.
A lot.
His logic when it comes to global warming seems to be.
Global warming = must use less fossil fuel
less fossil fuel = more renewable energy
more renewable energy = more wind farms
more wind farms = more birds killed by turbines
dead birds = bad thing
Therefore global warming does not exist. QED.
So figuring that his credentials as a ornithologist made him fully qualified to dismiss any arguments put forward to the contrary by people who'd merely studied climatology he wrote piece denying global warming for the Daily Mail that was based on a load of psuedo science he'd found on random web sites.
George Monbiot did quite a nice job of demolishing him here
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-s
If you manage to find a copy of the debate that Channel 4 news ran between George and David it's well worth seeing.
Never trust anyone with an id greater than 889388
"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."
Please see The Arctic: Earth's Early Warning System "The Inuit are already suffering dramatic changes to their Arctic environment, warns a native leader... unpredictable weather, melting of permafrost and glaciers, decreasing sea ice, as well as the presence of new species such as barn owls, robins and mosquitoes never seen before by the Inuit people."
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.
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.
ENSO -- the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, is probably a natural, long term feature of the current climate equillibrium and has been for probably hundreds of years if not longer. So, while it is associated with anamolous weather, the occasional appearance of anamolies is normal.
Evidence has to be weighed in the context of other evidence and a reasonable linking them. The theory of anthropogenic effects on climate stability is twice removed from any kind of measurable parameter: first the proposition of climate change has to be established (at this point the preponderance of evidence), next the link from that to human activities must be established. The theory has, in a sense, fared well thus far, in the first phase. The second phase is a still ahead, I think.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Did you actually read some of those links ?
From this link:
What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.
Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe. This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy, productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued, expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth. The reality is that global poverty and death would be the result of Kyoto's rationing of hydrocarbons.
Hardly seems a considered scientific opinion to me. You may, of course, think differently.
And considering this link:
Try reading something about the person who wrote it, in his own words, on the same site, here:
My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.
Is this really the sort of considered scientific opinion you consider valuable ?
" 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!
i) Climate is not weather
ii) The climate is exceedingly complex, and global warming does not mean a uniform temperature increase across the globe.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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:
I wouldn't say the climatologists are particularly foolish. I am a meteorologist. Many aspects of meteorology are largely misunderstood by the media and general public. The concept of "global warming" is one of the most common misunderstandings.
Without a doubt, the climate of the Earth is rapidly changing. Records show this very clearly. This is not a point for debate.
Also there is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing. Once again, records of this show the change very clearly. This is not up for debate.
The problem comes up when showing a link between the two and establishing causation. It is impossible to deny that human activities change the atmosphere and have some effect on the weather and climate. The actual amount of effect, however, is unknown. There are many cycles which naturally occur in the weather and in the climate. While some of these cycles last only a few months or a few years, such as ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), some cycles may last decades or longer. We are aware of cycles such as ENSO because it only takes a few years for an El Nino to transition to a La Nina (which actually lasts longer than the El Nino phase) and back into an El Nino. There are probably many other cycles in the climate that we are not even aware of. Keeping this in mind, it is entirely possible that we are merely in one phase of a naturally occurring cycle which will reverse itself at some point.
Many factors play a role in the climate around the Earth. These include the atmospheric composition, albedo, ocean circulation, solar output, and many other things. While changes in the atmosphere can cause climate change, changes in these other factors may enhance or oppose the changes. One of the most famous climate changes of the recent past was the little ice age. This period of cooling wasn't caused by human activity. Instead, it is believed that solar output decreased and had a very significant effect on the Earth's climate.
During much of the Earth's past, the Earth has been dominated by either tropical or polar climates. The period of balance we are in right now is actually somewhat unusual. Given the history of the Earth, it is hardly unreasonable to expect the climate would once again trend toward one of the two extremes. This has occurred for many millions of years without any influence of humans. There is no reason to expect that this behavior would cease because humans now inhabit the Earth.
Global warming is a very misleading term. There are many questions about how global climate change, if caused by humans, would actually occur. People have even speculated about possible global cooling. One theory, which some evidence seems to dispute, suggests that "global warming" will cause an increase in clouds. The increased albedo from the clouds will counteract the warming and might even cause cooling. This theory is disputed, but is one of many theories about how climate change, if caused by humans, might play out.
None of these arguments are meant to say we shouldn't scale back emissions. While we don't know if human activities are a major player in global climate change, we also don't know that they aren't playing a huge role in it. Furthermore, it is in our interests to minimize our changes to the environment and to the atmosphere because the theory of humans causing global climate change is plausible. It is in everyone's interest to reduse emissions, anyways, because many of the chemicals entering our atmosphere and hydosphere are toxic. I'm all for finding cleaner sources of energy and for cutting back on human activities such as clearing forested areas.
There are plenty of good reasons to reduce emissions and protect our environment without resorting to scare tactics. While you may have found an example of a "climatologist" making fallacious arguments, many of the climatologists disputing "global warming" caused by human activities aren't all that crazy.
...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
Yes it would. The average global temperature today is only 9 degrees hotter than the height of the last ice age, so 4-5 degrees would make a huge difference. The temp now it about 1 degree hotter than at the turn of the 20th century. yes, I took meteorology last semester
I am Spartacus
Antarctica goes through cycles every 100,000 years
This is the worst argument I've ever heard, and opponents of global warming just keep citing it, over and over, often associated with the Vostok ice core data
The resolution on that graph is a little over a thousand years. The most dramatic change on the graph is 20 degrees over 10,000 years. The arctic and antarctic have changed 5-7 degrees in the past *200 years*, and the rate seems to be accelerating. Of this 5-7 degrees, about half of it has occurred in the past 50 years alone. At the current rate (ignoring things like the rapidly expanding industrialization of China), it would implement that fast 10,000 year change in 250 years.
Furthermore, the Vostok cores drive home an additional point: The temperature is almost always correlated with CO2 concentraions. CO2 concetrations are rising rapidly, and completely predictably. We consume >80bbl per day; that's 12.72 trillion liters, which is about 10 trillion kilograms. Assuming heptane as the average length, that's 7 carbons and 16 hydrogens, about 63% carbon, so 6.3 trillion kilograms of carbon per day (i.e., 6.3e12 kg CO2). In 50 years, that's 1.15e17 kg CO2. The mass of the entire atmosphere is 5.3e18kg, and a current (already high) 0.0353 percent CO2, that's 1.87e15 kg CO2. I.e., at our current rate alone, we would put *61 times* more CO2 from oil alone into our atmosphere in the next 50 years then are in our atmosphere currently.
Now, if you want to look at the balance of how quickly that CO2 will get eaten up and compares to natural generation, we can do that calculation, too - I just wanted to point out the fact that the amount of CO2 we're adding is really quite huge in comparison to what's in our atmosphere.
Ok, well, what if there's some rapid changes in historic temperature that are too high resolution to show up on the Vostok cores? We have much more detailed methods for the past two thousand years - here's the graph for that period
Any questions?
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
junkscience.com is run by steven milloy. Steven milloy was a lobbyist who was paid by Phillip Morris to create a similar "group" to put forth the idea that second hand smoke is harmless.
Now he has this site up, and though he refuses to disclose his funding, he has in the past received money from oil company interests to lobby for them and do PR for them.
This space available.
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.
My point wasn't to say that humans aren't causing climate change. I believe they are, too. There is, however, quite a bit of uncertainty about how much of an effect human activities have on the climate. There's a lot of reports coming out of imminent doom because of "global warming," and that's what I'm arguing against.
There's a lot of possible effects of global climate change due to an increased greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect works because carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and radiates it out. Some of this radiation is radiated back toward the surface. There are many other greenhouse gases in play, too. Carbon dioxide isn't a particularly potent greenhouse gas compared to water vapor. The reason a big deal is made about carbon dioxide, however, is because it has a much longer residency time in the atmosphere than water vapor. A warmer Earth due to an increased greenhouse effect may, however, lead to greater evaporation and a greater amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. This is one concern that's worth mentioning.
It's probably incorrect to refer to this form of global climate change as global warming. What it is doing, instead, is unmoderating the Earth's climate.
It's a fact that the north atlantic drift is slowing. That's an ocean current that is a branch of the gulf stream. This current keeps the British Isles warmer than they would otherwise be for the latitude they are at. It is believed that the melting of some of the ice caps will release large amounts of fresh water into the ocean, changing its composition, and slowing or cutting off the north atlantic drift. This means that instead of warming, that part of Europe will become cooler.
On the other hand, many people believe (with some uncertainty here) that the center of some continents will become drier. I live on the central plains of the USA, which is already arid. Should climate change occur quickly, it may have a significant effect on agriculture in this part of the USA.
My two points here, and in my previous comment, were not to say global climate change isn't occuring or that humans aren't causing some of it. My point was to say that the rate of climate change caused by human activity isn't really known and to refer to the climate change as "global warming" isn't really correct.
The Africa problem BTW has bugger all to do with global warming. US/EU agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs are the cause and at least the EU is changing it's agricultural policies so that farmers are paid for doing nothing instead of being paid for producing. It has also pretty much zero rated African imports.
Some of Africa's problems of growing enough food is due to climate changes though not all. Ethiopia for instance used to be a breadbasket producing more than enough food to feed the population and thus were net exporters. But draughts the last few years have decimated farms and they are now net food importers. One place climate change wasn't responsible for a decrease in food production though is Zimbabwe. Like Ethiopia, Zimbabwe used to be a net food exporter and was also considered a breadbasket. When President Robert Mugabe forced mostly white farmers off their farms and gave farms to his supporters, the farms went to waste and now the land won't produce nearly as much food as it used to if the farms are even farmed. But many have been left to fallow.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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.