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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."
Well, the melting of the Arctic ice cap would be annoying to several dozen polar bears, and it will have a very strong effect on Greenpeace members. As to its effect on sea levels, that's something a little less strong.
For something to float, it must displace an equal mass of whatever its floating in. By definition, the north polar ice cap is displacing exactly its own mass in water. If it were to melt, the displaced water would take exactly the same amount of volume as the submerged ice. This would cause the world's ocean levels to rise by the exact amount of zero plus the volume of several dozen annoyed polar bears.
Now, if the Antarctic ice cap were to melt, we'd be in a world of hurt. The southern ice cap does not float in water, it is on top of land which means that the entire volume of any melted ice is added to the seas.
As far as its immediate effect, salinity in the local area would be impacted if we say, microwaved it away from space in the span of a month. And although IANAOS (oceanographic scientist), if it were to slowly melt away over a century, the salinity shouldn't be a factor. And if it becomes a factor for some reason, we have time to dump barges of salt.
Of course, there is always the outside possibility of the lowered salinity disrupting the gulf stream and turning the entire earth into an ideal habitat for the polar bears, who experience a rapid genetic mutation from the additional UV radiation from the depleted ozone layer and hunt mankind to extinction for getting them all wet in the first place.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I predict that with the increasing trend of global climate change ( note, not global warming which is a stupid idea that only works in theory ) the arctic will freeze solid!
Warm surface currents will be disrupted by increased higher lattitude heating and this will cause lower warm water circulation to the Arctic and during winter when no solar radiation is possible to provide other warming. The pole will be colder than ever.
In other news... MIT launched a course in advanced FUD studies for their buisness students
XML - A clever joke would be here if
What you forgot is the whole, its happened hundreds of times over the course of the Earths history from multiple different reasons, making it useless to think humans can stop it, or even SHOULD stop it.
Thats the biggest problem with global warming is a danger arguments, history of previous global warm has shown that not only is it NOT a danger, but some of the most prosperous times in human history and earths history as a whole where thanks to this comming "danger".
And the fact remains there is a failsafe people forget. Once the earth gets too warm and the seas grow too big... they reflect the solar energy and become.... yes you guessed it ICE. And yet again nothing humans can do with our present technology could ever stop that either. Will it summon another iceage. yep, will we survive? We have 3 other times already.
The anti-intellectualism comes from both the Bush camp who thinks that gives us a free card to polute anyway, and wackjobs who think humans in any way shape and form have any say in how the earth is going to behave. Stop being full of youself.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
The most conspicuous signs are the recent claim by the U.S. that the North West Passage constitutes international waters, followed by Canada and Russia both claiming sovereignty over their respective northern lands to the North Pole. The U.S. commercial interests would be well served by having open shipping across the north during the summer months. This summer the Canadian Navy sailed into Hudson Bay to fly the flag.
Personally I think the Canadian north in summer is adequately protected from intrusion by mosquitos and black flies in numbers not even a google plex could account for, and they're really big too.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I have read that Mars is also going througn a period of glabal warming right now. If that is the case the only thing that affects both mars and the earth is the Sun. So more than likely that this is a issue with the sun putting out more energy now than it has in the recent past and this too will probally right itself with the sun cooling down in the next couple of hundred years.
Isn't the icecap frozen fresh water? Maybe someone who really knows can tell us if it makes a difference that it is frozen fresh water floating on salt water.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Actually, large amounts of money could be involved. No ice means new shipping routes. There's already a war of words brewing over land up there.
As with just about everything, there are three distinct possibilities:
The big problem is the things that make the most sense - ending air travel, for instance, which would have the most effect on CO2 with the least harm to humans are going to have a pretty drastic effect on the standard of living in most Western nations. And, it would doom second- and third- world nations to being stuck and not opening any further development for them.
Now, we could all drive 5 MPH slower, turn our themostats down a couple of degrees and plan on building some nuclear power plants to come on line in about 20 years. 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.
Of course, there are some problems with this. First off, we just don't understand what is happening or why. There are a lot of problems with making any sort of predictions based on the knowledge we have about the climate. Nobody is going to vote for drastic measures with what we know today. And nobody is saying that if we do not take drastic measures today the world is going to end. Of course, that may be exactly what the situation is.
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.
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. Who's to say which could be worse - we are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of deaths no matter which way things go.
Oh, and Katrina might be as bad as Camille was - but the only way it might be worse is because of increased coastal building. Constructing buildings in areas that have a history of hurricanes and not building them to resist these hurricanes is folly. Some folks in New Orleans are about to find out about that folly.
Here a a few stats from a quick Google search or three-
The total area of Greenland is around 2,175,600 km2 (840,000 sq mi), of which about 84 per cent, or some 1,834,000 km2, is ice cap.
The average thickness of the Greenland ice sheet is over 2000 m.
The area of the oceans is what, 360,000,000 km2?
Melt all of Greenland's ice and is that 10 meters?
Ouch. Er, glug...
GWB will simply cut more high-end taxes, make the high-end deathtax cut(but with subsequent increase on the middle class increase) permanent, and pay 50B to Halliburton to rebuild the dikes in New Orleans, and then to drain it. Problem solved.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
George Orwell mentioned in a column (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O /OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441103.html ) that melons grew freely in England between 1600 and 1650, and asks whether the climate could have changed that much in three hundred years since they wouldn't do that in 1944.
We might be returning to the way things were, instead of having an Unprecedented Catastrophe.
That's total bunk. For example, what would happen if by some magical means an enforceable decree came down that said we're eliminating all carbon-based fossil fuels by August 28, 2015?
What would happen is that you'd see one of the largest economic booms in human history. Anything that forces people to get off of their butts and work ends up having a positive effect on the world's economy, whether it's all-out global war in the 1940s or having to kludge the dates on most business software in the 1990s. This would be no different.
the whole "it's natural" versus "it's manmade" discussion is pedantic and boring
we can seed the oceans with iron and suck out carbon dioxide
and we can belch out enough burning whatever and push in carbon dioxide
the point: stop talking about blame, start talking about controlling the thermostat
if hurricane katrina in new orleans right now isn't argument that people should control the environment for the sake of:
1. the economy
2. the population
3. the environment
4. the ecosystem
i don't know what the heck is
the argument is dead people: who is to blame for global warming?
who cares
let's just start seeding the dead areas of the pacific with iron and start controlling the thermostat and cooling things down
are you worried about species of plankton in the dead areas of the south pacific?
good for you
i'm worried about the whole planet, so who cares if you can't keep your eyes on the big picture
the earth might have gone hot and cold a lot of times in the past
but now it's blanketed in supposedly "intelligent" lifeforms
supposedly intelligent because we haven't seen if we can stop bickering about pointless esoteric minor issues and start just fixing the dang problem, whoever is to blame, because our survival is in balance
prioritization, it's a funny concept
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hurricanes grow when over waters at 94 F or above, and shrink when passing through waters at 93 F or below. The larger the temperature variance around that line, the faster they gain or lose size. (And you can pick diameter, wind speed, or total mass of suspended water as a measure of size, with the realtionship holding for any of those.). That particular relationship is a well documented fact, based on continueous satelite observation of the ocean temperatures and time lapse observations of hurricanes during their whole existence over water.
There is an alternate theory that some scientists who disagree with theories of global warming and a link to hurricanes have suggested. This theory involves a 40 year hurricane cycle. Given your own claim that we have only 70 years data, there is no possible way to prove a 40 year period exists either - The possible +/- variation is much larger than the base number until we have observed several full cycles. This means that the only well defined competing theory we've got at this time is definitely not going to make a reliable prediction that would let us confirm it, except provisionally and in the most tentative ways, for a good 50 years or so. Even a simple, very nebulous prediction with no exact quantities specified, i.e. that we should see a relatively significant downturn sooner or later won't be testable for at least 10 years. No testability = no science (at least yet).
At this point, several of the global warming theorists have predicted that there would be a sharp isocline above which hurricanes would grow, and that warm cells in the tropical oceans would link up to where the total numbers would decrease as the total area of those cells increases, again with the break point where individual growth starts decreasing total cell numbers being just above that same 94 degree F isocline temperature.
They further predicted that these warm water cells would tend to form with long axi parellel to the equator, rather than getting larger equally along both axi or growing more vertically, and that the cells would tend to more eccentricity with increasing size, not less or the same. Both of these predictions apply to individual storms and not to seasons, and are borne out so far by observation of over 80 such storms of various sizes, without significant exceptions to these patterns.
Aside from just predicting an increased number of tropical storms (not just from over all historical 'guess'timates, but as measured from the 30 or so years when we have had enough space born observations to have a 100% accurate count of even storms too small to count as hurricanes), the theory predicts a higher percentage of those tropical storms will reach wind speeds sufficient to count as hurricanes. Note that the typical trend for a pseudo-scientific or flawed theoretical explanation is to assume several variables will vary roughly linearly with the same change in base conditions, not to take the added risk of predicting which ones will vary as a multiple or power function of which other ones.
It also predicts the spawning of storms after the end of the normal season (a date originally set to include a safety margin based on that era's observations). It predicts changes in other phenomina such as tornados and forest fire spawning conditions (some of which include meteorology and climateology for which we have thousands of years data (i.e. glacial core samples, ice cap and permafrost cores, and deep sea sedement samples).
The best competing theory says, "our theory predicts that you might see short term just what their theory definitely predicts, or you might see something different - either way, you'll see we were right in just 50 more years or so.". No one supporting the "hurricanes just run to cycles" theory is willing to go out on a limb and claim that tornado fluctuations in the American Midwest, for example, also fit that cycle (or
Who is John Cabal?
This is called a feedback effect; specifically, a negative feedback. However, the fact remains that there are many of these feedback effects, and nobody is quite sure whether or not the negative feedbacks will outweight the positives.
An example of a positive feedback? Well, ice is highly reflective. Seawater is not. As the ice melts, the Earth will reflect less sunlight, causing more warming to occur. Another one is that as temperatures rise and sea algae (the largest consumers of CO2 and producers of O2) die off, less CO2 is consumed, producing a greater greenhouse effect
The sad truth is that nobody knows how these feedbacks will even out, and whether or not the positive feedbacks will outstrip the negative ones.
No comment.
In defense of recycling, it can save companies a good bit of money if done properly, which at least makes some people happy.
In one case (that being aluminum), you're correct. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to mine the stuff out of bauxite and such.
In every other case, however, you're wrong. It doesn't save money, at best it's a break even proposition. More to the point, recycling is usually much, much less energy efficent than creating new products, and it usually is more harmful to the environment than creating the new product would be in the first place, when you consider the whole system.
Nature has a great recycling system already in place. It works, it's energy efficent, it's as environmentall friendly as you can get. Yeah, okay, it takes a few hundred thousand years for some items, but for the most part, it's probably the better way to go. It's called simply throwing the trash away and letting the bacteria have at it. Okay, so there's a bit more complications than that, but land fills aren't that hard to make, and quite frankly there is no shortage of land to fill anyway.
Recycling is a near total failure. It's not worth it on most any level. The levels where it is worth it, well, like you said, companies can save money that way. So they will. The problem is an economic one and like most economic problems, it tends to sort itself out.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
But if you read this...
So two "researchers" looking at the same data set came to very different conclutions. Very different from your '"near univeral" consensus'.
And while some rile (possibly rightly so) against the Bush admin for "altering data" or "looking for favorable interpretations"; here is what this Science publication is accused of doing...
So it is clear that the world of politics has already entered the debate and is firmly entrenched on one side. It is sad because it concerns a very important matter, but when one side stiffles the research and findings and the promotes only a single view, it deminishes the entire body of work.
How is that for political ideology?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne
Funny I thought that a few of the Vikings were disapointed at the lack of emegration to the rather pleasent climate of Iceland, primarily because the name sounded cold; so they decided to name cold glaciated Greenland, Greenland to make it sound more inviting.
OBTW my grapes grow just fine in Michigan, which has a thriving wine industry as well as New York, both of which have far harsher winters than the British Isles. Those same Viking named the more northern Nova Scotia, Newfoundland area Vinland, or land of grapes.
Personaly I look at it as the Earth has one main input of heat energy, insolation, and one main output of heat energy direct radiation and when all is said and done, the equation will reduce to either the logistics equation, or something quite close and anybody whose played with fractint knows how that equation graphs out! I would not be at all surprised to find that our climate is in a double-bifricated area of the graph slightly beyond a chaotic band. Because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, we'll never know where we are going, and it's also impossible to go backwards too.
I'll have a lot more faith in the computer models when somebody announces that they have a GCM that doesn't require the numbers to be fudged to keep the model from becoming a permentant Ice-ball.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
How exactly would you get the entire world to stop using all carbon-based fuels by ....(Pick a date)
If only one of the major industrialized countries (China, India, USA) does not sign on, the whole thing goes into the toilet. Enforceable is the key word here. Would you go to war because China is causing too much CO2? How about India, or Brazil? The cheapest thing the third world can do is use 'carbon-based' fuels (wood, peat, coal, oil, etc...) and they use a lot of it.
The USA for example, may be one of the most efficient users and the least polluting per capita (or BTU or ERG, whatever...) than any other nation on the planet.
You cannot legislate energy use for the planet. The only thing that works is: pleasure, pain, or payoff. Make non 'carbon-based' energy sources payoff, and the world will beat a path to your door.
True, if you do that with a glass of water, there won't be much difference. But try it with a 14,000 foot (the average depth of the oceans) column of water and there will be some difference. But the primary reason ocean levels are expected to rise is still the landlocked ice (glaciers, primarilly) melting. Although this will be somewhat offset by the increase of evaporation due to the higher temperatures. Unfortunately this increase of evaporation will lead to superstorms unlike any hurricane we've ever seen. (Or maybe fortunately if you happen to be a misanthrop.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
"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."
Really? While you might define returning to horses as the dominant form of transportation to be no change in standard of living, I think most would disagree with you. That is what would be required for a 50% cut. The only countries who find it easy to reduce carbon emissions are ones stuck in depressions with extremely outdated technology. Even western European countries will find it hard to reduce carbon emissions.
Here is a list of countries by ratio of GDP to CO2 emission. The European Union produces 31.5% of world GDP yet only emits 15.3% of the CO2. The US produces 28.2% of the world GDP yet emits 24.3% of the CO2. If the US were as CO2-efficient than the EU, they could produce the same GDP while only emitting 13.7% of the world CO2, ie roughly half of what the US is emitting right now.
So maybe you have a highly distorted view of how Europeans are living. But Europe shows that cutting emissions in half IS possible without reverting to horse-powered carts.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Don't forget Antarctica too! That's a continent completely covered in ice... kilometres thick in many places!
Your suggestion that environmental catestrophe is our "desired conclusion" is equally puzzling. It would be my preference if human activity were not causing climate change. However, it's not up to me to decide how nature operates. And that's why I, like other scientists, believe that what's really important is determining the truth.
What you say is partly true and partly ridiculous. Parent poster does not make any specific appeal to government. Individuals can certainly do their part without government nosing in to reduce, reuse, and recycle (although the latter of which probably implies some amount of government and industrial cooperation). Taken from a purely free market point of view, natural economic forces should push consumers to do the right thing, correct? In my opinion these natural costs have in many cases been "externalized". Our nation has and continues to spend a lot of money entangled and embroiled in the politics of the region from which we derive a large part of our current energy source. Pollution redistributes costs onto other individuals' health. A free market depends on an informed consumer. Perhaps these should show up as line items - essentially the responsibility has been shifted onto society as a whole. And there are still ridiculous loopholes that give tax breaks to gigantic consumer grade SUVs, while the tax incentive for low-emission vehicles is being expired. The larger point about government regulation an d and intervention is taken, but government is, and will have to continue to be (unless you are advocating a purely libertarian position, which while defensible is a completely different argument) involved in the generation, transportation, and zoning of new fuel sources and distribution channels. It's government intervention every time the government takes my blue dollers and sends them to some red state that got hit by a hurricane or tornado or locust swarm or shit storm. If I can have those dollars back too, I'm all with you.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Bet you want to know how deep you'll be after all that melting ... above or below sea level?
Americans can get a rough idea of this by looking at http://www.placenames.com/us/ and selecting your state, county, and city. The approximate altitude is shown at the top of the city's page.
Now, if you happen to live by a hill just over the hundred foot level, maybe you'll get lucky with some beachside property in your neighbors' drowned yards. ...of course, it is far more likely that you'll be near the water level with miles of docks and the like between you and the open ocean, which would probably be far colder than it is now...
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