Global Warming Past The Point of No Return

mad_goldfish writes "The UK's Independent is running a front page story today on a scientific report claiming that global warming is now unstoppable, after measuring changes in the level of ice in the arctic." From the article: "The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a 'tipping point' beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically. Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average." Either way, someone wins a bet.

Comments

Re:Doom and Gloom

[srock2588]

Erik the Red started a colony in Greenland back in the AD 900's. http://www.greenland-guide.gl/leif2000/history.htm According to archealogical records, at time the colony was warm enough to grow crops and support a decent little town. Now, all ice. The region went through an extremely warm spell for a hundred years or so then froze up again. I wonder what the glacier levels where then? I guess we will never know.

Sick and tired of the volcano comparison

[vlad_petric]

Volcanos also spit SO2 in addition to CO2, which basically has the opposite effect (it increases albedo). Furthermore, when they erupt, the ash they throw into the atmosphere reflects sunlight to the extent that major eruptions effectively cool down the Earth. When Pinatubo erupted, it lowered the global temperature by a fraction of a degree. When Thera/Santorini erupted about 3600 years ago, the sempervirens trees from California recorded a sharp drop in temperature.

Re:Doom and Gloom

[Rei]

100,000 year cycle of glaciation

Apparently I missed 10,000 years between the start of the industrial revolution and now, when we've experienced the degree of CO2 increase and temperature rise. ;)

Are you trying to claim that the rates are comparable? If not, then what kind of argument are you trying to make? "The earth has changed before, so 30x-ing the rate won't make a difference"? :)

within a thousand years

I think you need to look at those graphs again. Historically, temperature changes relatively little over a thousand years, except in modern times.

eventually spit out by volcanoes again

Human CO2 emissions far outpace volcanic emissions. We mine Earth's carbon resevoirs at a tremendous rate - burning about 6 gigatonnes (6e12 kg) (plus an additional GT from displaced carbon sinks) annually. To put that number in perspective, if the carbon sources that we burn annually averaged the density of water, they would fill a cube 1.8 kilometers on each side.