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Capitalizing on Melting Polar Ice
efuzzyone writes "As an affect of global warming, the polar ice caps seem to be slowly receding, what do you do? The NYT reports it is a gold rush, 'the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars.' Also, 'polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries.'"
This is really stupid. We are all excited about making more money, but not worried about the impacts.
Humans are stupid.
With all of these benefits who cares about preventing damage to our environment?!</sarcasm>
that global warming would lead to new oil discoveries.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
"Also, 'polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage" I think the melting ice will unlock a treasure all right....and its a treasure that we should bother looking for....like pandoras box..???
Anyone else feel sick when you read things like this? If the human race is that fucking stupid then we deserve to drown in the flood we'll end up making. Saddly a handful will probably survive it.. most likely the rich ones who can aford to hoard boats, food and drinkable water...
Money : Because killing 6 billion people just to make some more was so worth it, now that it's totally useless because everyones dead and paper has no use when it's already doodled on.
I like muppets.
Great, I can fulfill my lifelong dream of going on a cruise from the Yukon to Siberia. Meanwhile, all the good cruise ship destinations will be closed off because hurricane season will last 10 months.
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I used to think of slashdot as a place to get news before it appeared elsewhere. That was wrong; slashdot is just one more wall in the Intraweb echo chamber. But five days lag time between the article's appearing (it appeared on 10/9, even though it's dated 10/10) in the NYT and on slashdot... this has got to be a new record.
Capitalism on the arctic can be a risky venture. When you bring in companies that are established to deliver on share holders profit, it is hard to guess what kind of a route these companies might take. Without clear laws and regulations limiting how companies exploit this new "gold mine" we might end up with something like the US Patent laws, where large corporations take advantage of the ability to patent anything they can think about. I the arctic scenario this could lead to fishing companies endangering many species, tour companies damaging the habitat of local wildlife, oil exploration polluting the air and water. We must establish clear baselines to prevent this happening! Lemmings look like fat furry hamsters. They have strong legs and claws for digging. Thick fur helps to keep them warm. Lemmings live in the arctic. --- Sydney Computer Support
Big deal. I could as easily and justly consider the moon and all the stars to be my own personal property.
Unless Canada can think of a legitimate reason why 600 years of seafaring tradition should be abandoned, they should shut up. Their writ does not extend more than three miles off shore, same as ours. The Law of the Sea, both formal and informal, has long recognized that navigable deep water "belongs" to anyone and everyone.
Moreover, Canada is always first in line to bitch about American exceptionalism and our contempt for international law. I'd say they should practice what they preach, but instead I'll note that all nations, at all times, have no more morals or ethics than my little fingernail. Nations always do what is in their own self-interest, and nothing but what is in their own self-interest.
And right now, with the USSR defeated and America pretty much doing what it pleases in the world, it is in the interest of many Lilliputian nations to band together to tie down Gulliver. The goals and moral sensibilities of many do-gooding leftists happen to coincide with the internationalist, anti-American platitudes currently being mouthed by the ruling elites in places like Canada and France, but the Left shouldn't delude itself that the Canadian or French governments would behave much better than the American government if their roles were reversed. Politicians are the same everywhere, and so are voters.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
When the northern ice caps melt then the cold water starts to cool the ocean, and there would be fewer hurricanes. That is what the environmentalists told us all during the 80's and 90's. How come we have had the terrible hurricanes this year and last... Why is it happening if the ice caps are melting? How about explaining Antarctica's glaciers getting larger? http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1806
w s/20041002/Antarctic_ozone041001?s_name=&no_ads=
They also said we created the hole in the ozone; however in 2004 the hole in the ozone was recorded as getting smaller by up to 20%. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNe
Take a few hours and read about how much crap volcanoes spew into the environment (e.g. sulfur dioxide). Do some Google searches on how many erupt each year... compare that with our fossil burning. The environmentalists have always been pretty disappointed with the results. Don't forget to include the ocean volcanoes when you do it.
Still think we are causing global warning? Remember the Ice Age? Scientists are starting to dispute whether or not an asteroid caused it. Where were we with our wicked cars then? We all know that Solar activity had been written off as crap until recently when the numbers were just to obvious... the environmentalists account for it now by saying that ONLY 10-30% of the warning is being caused by the sun.
I just wish you guys would preface all your "we are killing the earth" talk with, hey we really don't know, but we THINK "we are killing the earth". I certainly will ay I don't know for sure, but the evidence isn't cut and dry in your favor. The media is, but not the facts. Just some food for though. I know I'm going to get slammed for this post, the same way I do when I defend MS, but hey what can ya do?
There are two other effects to consider however - you alluded to the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica, which would have a much greater effect on sea level if they should melt or even just flow into the ocean faster than they do now. With the polar ice cap gone, the Greenland ice cap would probably move faster and possibly even disintegrate.
The other effect is that once you get above about 4 degrees C, water starts expanding again. So if the entire volume of ocean water becomes warmer on average, you may well get a rise in sea level even without the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps melting (the quibble is whether enough of the water will remain around 4 degrees C where it reaches minimum volume per unit mass - this is going to be difficult to compute because the effect of a melting polar ice cap on ocean currents is hard to predict accurately).
Wow more unsustainable "resources" show up everyday due to the destruction on other non-sustainable resources.
Amazing, how stoopid humans are, we just deserve to be eradicated.
Content + Container; Content = Container; Content â Container... which is the question?
First thing I thought of was "Whoop-de-fricken-do" times changes, climates changes, the land changes. Nothing new here, move along.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
According to my limited physics understanding, if ice is covering a landmass, it's not floating in water. SO when it does melt, the water level will increase to accomodate the new water.
I don't know, I guess it could all just be floating around.
If you look at history, the melting and freezing of icecaps varys throughout history. The specs are skewed for everything. While i will admit we are doing damage, its also part of the natural course of our planet. Ya'll are to quickly to blame bush and polution for all the worlds aggricultural problems.
.5% due to illigal downloads. So statistics can be skewed to show whatever the heck you want them too. Look for trends and you see how green house gasses and temperature naturally fluxuate, and how one lags behind the other. I mean we could go way back and see how the abundance of CO2 and just water lead to oxygen and etc, which would be considered on todays terms to be 100% polution.
I'll put it in a voice that fellow geeks can understand. The skewed facts of global warming is much like that of music downloads effecting cd sales. Harvard did a study on it, and found out the facts were taken over a span that just tap the boost in cd sales due to everyone switching over from cassette. Of course sales were booming. After people rebought old music and started buying new, it slowed down. This just happened to start at the beggining of p2p. If you ignore the boost cause here, I believe the article said music sales were only lowered by
So you are right, stupid humans. Stupid for not seeing the other side of things.
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If all the effort everyone is putting into Kyoto was instead directed into deploying current Feul Cell technology a good portion of the problem would go away.
Instead we have whiney Euro politicians who want to appease their Green parties and stick it to the Americans, while avoiding fulfiling their obligations as much as humanly possible.
International Treaties aren't worth the paper they are written on.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
No, we've got Euro politicians and businesses who accepted Kyoto - without "ruining their economies". Now they're ahead of us in conservation and development of alternative energy. Although we Americans are whining (well, *you* are, anyway) while we drag everyone else down with our pollution.
The worst American politician whiner was Bush, who whined "we'll give you something better than Kyoto" when he rejected it. Just another lie from Bush, who has given us nothing but tax rebates on SUVs that did nothing but further break the environment, and even break the American carmakers' future sales, driving them to the brink of bankruptcy.
Just to complete your Bushwacko rhetoric, your "aren't worth the paper they're printed on" was Bush's comment about our Social Security "lockbox" that he looted, referring to the debt he owes us to finance his $3TRILLION annual budget, his $45TRILLION in committed debt. When, in fact, those Social Security debts, backed by US Treasury Bills, are by law the highest priority debt obligation of the US government. Bush is talking about defaulting on America's $TRILLIONS in debt, which would do for our country what he's been doing to the economy and the environment. And you're happily parroting his insane talking points. You really deserve the ecocaust you're courting. But I don't.
--
make install -not war
It's commonly agreed that if Earth was warmer, humans would be better off while many animals would go extinct. Most of the argument now is about how creatures which can't evolve as fast as humans would suffer and less about how humans would suffer because everyone's settled that humans would just evolve out of any problems.
Humans would have to give up their multi billion dollar coastal mansions and their riverboat gambling. Eskimos would have to get real jobs instead of living off welfare in the middle of nowhere. Antarctic scientists would have to shift to rainforest studies. There wouldn't be any more arctic polar bears.
On the other side, we'd consume much less energy for heating. 1000 less marines would die every year extracting heating oil from terrorists. Russia and Canadia would become inhabitable.
No, just the intelligent minority. Both presidents refused to take part in the Kyoto accords but only one of them has given lucrative oil subsidies to his cronies, cut funding for student loans, cut spending on NASA and other important scientific endeavors, started a war with the wrong enemy for the wrong reasons, given my tax money to churches and private schools, and pushed a right-wing nut job religious agenda. I'm surprised he hasn't instituted mandatory grace before all meals and given government contracts to the KKK.
The right way to judge a situation is not emotionally, or sentimentally, but through cost-benefit analysis. As an example, I'm afraid that environment==good :. kyoto == good is simply not a logical assertion. First of all, the environment is not intrinsically worthy... what makes a bunch of carbon atoms organized as molecular skeletons any more important than carbon atoms organized as a rock? You would be hard pressed to come up with a formula. Sentience on the other hand introduces a whole new prospect of morality and evaluations of worth that can exist without a reductionist deduction from particles and and particle properties. (You can argue that sentience does not make us any more important than other molecular aggregates, but then you are arguing the irrelevance of your own stake in the argument, so forgive me if I don't feel too bad about neglecting a critical analysis of that philosophy.)
So in an analytic, rational way, we should look at what outcome, subsuming all its possible advantages and disadvantages, is to the greatest benefit of mankind. Global warming is not ipso facto a bad thing just because that's how people spin it when they talk about it. The earth used to be rather more tropical than it is now. Is it's moving back in that direction a bad thing? Was it's moving out of the ice age a bad thing? Could global warming stave off what would cyclically appear to be the inevitable of another earth iceage?
I think most people are rather more reactionary than they should be about this topic. Global warming != the sky is falling, global warming == gradual climactic change we are faced with drawing up a reasonable response to. Rising sea levels over a hundred years is not a big deal. Coastal cities face infinitely more peril from sudden oceanic storms than waters that will take hundreds of years to reach them. We should certainly consider what the effect will be on ecosystems, what species will die off, and whether we want to accept this as another stage in earth's evolution (mass extinctions are nothing new) or if we want to stick our noses in and try to keep things the way we like it. But "The earth is doomed!" is not a terribly levelheaded approach. The sky is not falling, people. Climactic change is something that planets do. It is quite possible that a warmer earth may be a bad thing for us, and that we should invest to arrest its change. It is also possible that it is a very good thing, or that we simply do not have the capacity to affect it significantly at all. My recommendation is simply that we recognize (1) change != apocalypse (2) that doesn't mean taking action is not warranted, only that we should not be reactionary about it.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
If we took a leadership role, rather than being pulled by the ear, in developing renewables and conservation technology, then when China finally decides to face up to the music, because the enviro-riots they already have happening there every month get way out of control, we will have an export industry to sell them products to get their crap cleaned up. Might take a good chunk out of that huge trade deficit we owe them.
Unfortunately doing so would require both business and political leaders with vision. Something we lack bigtime.
Someone had to do it.
Have little effect on sea level. It is floating already. However, if the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt, there will be a serious increase in mean sea level. Greenland meltdown is estimated to yield about 7m (circa 23 feet) rise in sea level according to this. Should the Antarctic cap go as well, sea level would increase over 70m (about 230ft) according to this source. Seven meters puts me on the beach, 70+ meters puts me in the position of having to breath water, which I've yet to succeed at..
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
>>> cruise destinations in the pacific get flooded
>
> So relax, the Pacific islands aren't going anywhere.
But anything built on them or growing on them will be going away if/when they get flooded.
The islands may indeed catch up to even something like a 5m rise in sea level, but even if it's in such a ridiculously short time as 100 years, that means (a) they cease to exist as islands for the near future, (b) they're scoured of all terrestrial life, and (c) all buildings and equipment on the islands are destroyed.
In other words, the islands are gone, at least as far as current human use of them is concerned. Witness what 5m of flooding did to New Orleans in just 3 weeks.
> Why do people discard rational thought when discussing the Kyoto treaty?
A fine question indeed.
"U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory ... "
"If Clinton commanded a congress with a dominant Democrat majority, as Bush commands a Republican majority, the Kyoto protocol would have passed under his administration."
Please explain to me this contradiction. Or are you saying that there was 95 Republicans in the Senate and 5 Democrats?
The more you know, the less you understand.
What's the unemployment rate in Germany? The GDP growth of France? If Europe keeps going the way it is going, then, the US will surpass the EU in absolute GDP within 5 years.
Besides, Kyoto is fatally flawed because it seeks to manage the atmosphere by controlling emissions, rather than by mandating or establishing a carbon sink. And its a consumer pays treaty, not a producer pays treaty, so the USA would have to foot the bill, when OPEC should be.
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Perhaps once we are done drilling the arctic full of holes we can concentrate on rendering the magnetic field useless as well. This will make life on Mars so much more familiar by the time we get there.
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