Ice-Free Summers Coming To Arctic

rocketjam writes "CNET reports that researchers from the University of Arizona and other universities have concluded that the Arctic will likely see ice-free summers within a century due to the increasing rate of global warming. The melting will raise ocean levels worldwide, flooding coastal areas where a substantial proportion of the world's population live. The increasing rate of ice melt is already having an impact on people and animals in the Arctic. Currently, researchers cannot foresee any natural forces that will counteract the trend."

Comments

more excuses and misinformation

[cahiha]

Finally, the economic change - read as depression - that would come from doing "drastic" things stands a good chance of killing as many people as climate change might.

There is not an iota of evidence that reducing carbon emissions would lead to a depression. Quite to the contrary: it is quite clear that an aggressive move to energy efficient technologies would create new jobs and growth, and would lower operating costs. Scrapping the energy inefficient technologies of today and building new power plants and factories is probably the best thing that could happen to the US economy.

The only people who stand to lose are the people who have large investments in current, inefficient technologies.

First off, we just don't understand what is happening or why.

I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention, but we do understand what is happening and why it's happening.

Unfortunately, if we are in a position where human-added CO2 is the root cause of all of this, we cannot afford the luxury of these kinds of measures. Sure, they might have some effect and that might help. But if we're the cause of climate change, far, far more drastic measures need to be taken right now.

As comparison with other Western nations alone shows, the US could easily cut its CO2 emissions in half without any decrease in its standard of living; quite to the contrary: a serious program to do that would increase the standard of living and create jobs.

Furthermore, if you think you can't "afford" that level of change, what do you think loss of what is probably going to be 50% of the currently inhabited area of the US is going to do to quality of life? Because that's what's going to happen if the trend continues.

Secondly, the third-world countries would bitterly oppose anything that cuts them off from the developed world or limits their exploitation of fossil fuel energy.

They sure do, because the message we are sending right now is that we want to limit them while continuing our wasteful energy use, since our negotiating position is to use our current, wasteful usage as the basis for future budgets. I suspect developing nations would easily agree to a uniform global per-capita energy and fossil fuel budget.

Re:more excuses and misinformation

[Dachannien]

The only people who stand to lose are the people who have large investments in current, inefficient technologies.

That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies. And the effect of "losing" is that the cost of production of their goods goes up during the changeover to cleaner production methods. That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs.

All that "extra money" goes into producing equipment that doesn't add anything to the growth of the economy, unless the new methods of production also happen to be more efficient cost-wise (which they aren't, and I think that's the failing in your logic - "cleaner" and "more efficient" don't overlap given technology today, while you were assuming they do).

If, as you say, "an aggressive move to energy efficient technologies would create new jobs and growth, and would lower operating costs," then why aren't developing nations jumping at the opportunity to create this new growth? The reason the US didn't sign Kyoto is because developing nations were made exempt from the conditions of the treaty. They were made exempt because they were viewed as being less able to afford such changes. That flies in the face of your statement that changing technologies is a boon to a nation's economy.

They sure do, because the message we are sending right now is that we want to limit them while continuing our wasteful energy use, since our negotiating position is to use our current, wasteful usage as the basis for future budgets. I suspect developing nations would easily agree to a uniform global per-capita energy and fossil fuel budget.

Of course they would, because it uses a faulty metric that's in their benefit. A better measure of what's being done with one's energy consumption isn't per-capita, it's per-dollar-GDP. With that measure, the US is far more efficient than (for example) China and India, whose ability to claim decent per-capita energy consumption is entirely due to the tremendous difference between their urban middle and upper classes and their gigantic rural farming lower class.

Furthermore, if you think you can't "afford" that level of change, what do you think loss of what is probably going to be 50% of the currently inhabited area of the US is going to do to quality of life? Because that's what's going to happen if the trend continues.

The US eastern seaboard isn't just going to roll off into the ocean all in one day, any more than the US is going to switch to nuclear power all in one day. What's more, it's unlikely that, if coastal flooding is going to occur, the US can do anything to stop it. A possible solution is to slowly begin encouraging people to move their homes and businesses inland (we have a lot of space), while building a newer energy infrastructure (nuclear power) as we make that move. The key here is slowly. As long as things are done gradually, the new jobs created by such a program won't be completely swamped by the jobs lost from suddenly shutting off the old infrastructure.

Re:Yeah, but

[Decker-Mage]

No, it is a theory supported by computer models that may or may not have any relation to reality. I've spent my life working in the statistical modeling field and have an extensive background in numerous scientific and damn near every engineering field (see profile) and I can tell you that your model is only a good as whether what it predicts matches reality and exactly how closely.

Current models are all over the place as to what they predict and in almost every case what they predict isn't even close by an order of magnitude to what has happened in that past. Now how are we supposed to rely on models that can't even predict things by a factor of ten? Sheesh, give me a break! Heck, what is even stranger are the journal articles (light reading here) will start with the assumption that global warming is real, find contrary data, and conclude that global warming is real despite the contrary data. This isn't science, it's persuit of funding.

The plain fact of the matter is that to get funding today in various related disciplines to climatology you have to climb on the global warming bandwagon. Sad, but true. It is also interesting that many of the critics of global warming are retired and no longer need funding to persue their interests in the field. In statistics we'd call that strongly correlated.

Now this isn't to say global warming isn't real although I would challenge the notion that it is necessarily related to any man-related activity (that's for another post if anyone is interested). The only constant about the climate on this planet is change and that has been true since it accreted to a planet.