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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.
And you thought it was a bad movie, it's a FEMA training film now!!!
As if it wasn't bad enough, the flamewar that's about to erupt here will further speed up the process...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
On a tangential note, does anybody else get annoyed by the overuse of the phrase "tipping point"? It's like "perfect storm" was a few years ago, everybody's favorite trite phrase-of-the-moment. It's like we've reached a tipping point of "tipping point" usage, and this perfect storm of "tipping point"s has driven out the "perfect storm" meme.
Have you read my blog lately?
"Seriously, we've had the technology to detect global climate changes for what, a hundred years at most?"
:-)
"
[snide]Yes, but we have discovered amazing technology that allows us to see into the past![/snide]. We have examined records of climate change that span hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years.
"Life will continue on, and we'll adapt. Okay?
Sure, we'll adapt, since we don't require genetic change to make different climates livable. What about all the species that do? What about our food supply? How much suffering will be endured by less rich nations while we race to adapt our agritech?
Maybe we differ in points of view, but as I see it, it's not just about us. Don't we have the responsibility to minimize our impact on other people and other species?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Ehh...this is the life we chose.
Many of these have been disproven, but they keep coming up. New ones occasionally replace them. But they all amount to the same basic concepts:
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.
The Raven
According to wikipedia, the greenland ice sheet, if fully melted, will raise global sea level by 7.2 meters (23.6 feet). This would put large portions of many coastal cities underwater.
Fortunately, there are other factors that should mitigate this, such as increased mass of the antarctic ice sheet due to increased moisture levels. See sea level rise.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Sweet! If we're past the point of no return, there is no sense worrying about it now!
Repeal the Kyoto Treaty and fire up the coal power plants. If we're all going to die, it mine as well be full speed ahead!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Best to go ahead and kill yourself now. That way, nothing scary and complicated will happen to you.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The fact is that humans, even with all our pollution, can't put a dent in our planets ecosystem
Have you ever eard about the holocene extinction event? From wikipedia: A 1998 survey by the American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of biologists view the present era as part of a mass extinction event. Some, such E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, predict that man's destruction of the biosphere could cause the extinction of one-half of all species in the next 100 years. Research and conservation efforts, such as the IUCN's annual "Red List" of threatened species, all point to an ongoing period of enhanced extinction, though some offer much lower rates and hence longer time scales before the onset of catastrophic damage. The extinction of many megafauna near the end of the most recent ice age is also sometimes considered a part of the Holocene extinction event.
Well, 70% of biologists think that we are going thtought a massive extinction event and you say that humans can't put a dent in the ecosystem. With that, you get modded +5 Insightful..
We could at least say that your thinking is not shared by the science community, even if it seems to find echo on slashdot.
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.
You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favorite artist is Picasso.
Your argument is flawed in that you neglect to mention that computer-driven models can generate hypothesis that can be *tested*, both retrospectively, and in the future.
In your example, you'll know the computer model is wrong if in a week you are still alive. On the other hand, if the model can make accurate predictions about historical data, without being based on that data, then you have evidence to the model's accuracy. For example, use a machine learning technique to train a system to predict a 1-year climate trend using data from 1900-1990. Then, see if the system can accurately predict trends from 1990-2005. If so, there's no evidence that it would be wrong when predicting a trend from 2005-2015, when trained from 1990-2005. Other similar tests might include training on even-numbered years, and then predicting climate for odd-numbered years, or training on non-leap years, and predicting for leap years.
When you have sufficient data, you can use rigorous statistical methods to say with a known confidence how accurate your methods are likely to be in making predictions (and I'm not just talking about accuracy and recall; you can validate a hypothesis much more rigorously). You can then make rational, scientific statements.