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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.'"
I can hear Pres. Bush's spin on it now: "...Just imagine the further untapped resources we could discover by not joining the Kyoto agreement."
beachfront property in Sacramento!
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
With all of these benefits who cares about preventing damage to our environment?!</sarcasm>
"lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries."
:)
Great. Add more pollution to the area. Just what it needs!
AC comments get piped to
that global warming would lead to new oil discoveries.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Sacramento is in the middle of a valley with a big river (coincidentally *also* called Sacramento) running through it. If anything, Sacramento will be on the bottom of the California Archipelago's Great Central Sea.
Maybe my acres of permafrosted land around hudson's bay weren't such a bad investment afterall! Drive those SUV's boys, I want palms and bannana trees in my scenery!
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Canada considers the Artic to be an internal water way and as such maintains dominion over all shipping in the area. The U.S., no surprise, considers the area to be international waters. As the ice recedes and the fabled Northwest Passage becomes a reality look for increased tension between the United States and Canada over control of shipping in the area (like we need more tension than already exists).
Unfortunately, Canada will probably roll over and let the U.S. have it's way on the sovereignty issue as we've done in the past when the U.S. ice breaker Polar Sea transited the Northwest Passage in 1985.
'polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage
Primarily, this will open up trades route with Hell, which incidentally is short on handbaskets.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Still, global warming is not a plus for me. The ski season is getting shorter :-(
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Here's the thing, if there's more water, there's more weight on the crust, which will subside a bit. Cutting a long story short and without explaining the ins and outs of crustal isostasy, if your house, water source and farmland is above 75m in elevation, you'll be alright.
Otherwise, to quote Tool's very appropriate song Aenima, learn to swim.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
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).
Look at the recent flood in America.. now think of that flood was in one of the African slums where they can hardly eat.
Kind of like that tsunami that hit indonesia a little while back. Tons of devastation, killed over 100,000 people. Wikipedia reports only 1200 deaths from hurricane katrina. Only 2000 US soldiers have died in Iraq. 200,000 Allied soldiers died during the battle of normandy. Americans don't even remember what real devastation is, and some have never ever experienced it. At least not first hand. They hear about it on the news, but it's hard to relate to pictures on a tv screen. Maybe this is why so many people forget how vulnerable we are. Because in the last 50 years, there has been very little in terms of real devastation.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A.C. you make an excellent point!
I find humor in the root-level comment, but there is a deeper underlying issue with the Kyoto agreement that doesn't settle well with my view on it.
Sure the U.S. pollutes a great deal; we also use something like 1/6 of all of the world's resources. But to my understanding (and I may be wrong), we put out a lot less pollution than China or India.
I have family that has recently travelled to this part of the world, and they've had a hard time adjusting to the pollution that exists in that part of the world... Smog is everywhere I'm told.
Yeah, the U.S. can do a lot to clean up its own act, but the rest of the world has a long way to go, too.
Now, why should the U.S. foot the bill for the rest of the world?
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
However, if you look at this map of possible routes for a northwest passage, they go right through canadian territory. Based on the three miles rule, the middle of lake superior would be international waters. It might be hard to get there without passing through canadian/american waters. And try passing off on your local game warden that you caught those fish in international waters. you'd have to navigate a pretty specific route to ensure that you didn't come within 3 km of any piece of canadian land while going through the northwest passage.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I agree the melting and re-freezing of ice caps are cyclical, and that stats always skewed, but you do realize that coastal communities are a lot less mobile than they were the last time the icecaps melted significantly? (And yes, I know that only the melting of one of the icecaps, the Antarctic, can actually affect sea levels). You can't easily abandon all the infrastructure in say New York and rebuild on higher ground, like a small tribe living in simple huts or cabins could.
Just because events are historically cyclical, doesn't mean we're better able to weather them.
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.
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make install -not war
First of all, let's be clear: we are facing warming. Using proxy data from a variety of sources such as tree rings and ice cores it is possible to calculate some decent estimates of global temperatures over the last ten thousand years or so. There are obvious cycles, and a fair amount of fluctuation, but current temperatures represent a significant upswing - that is acceleration - in warming over the last century or so.
Given that, the question of causes remains. Volvano activity certainly throws out a lot of C02, around one hundred and thirty to two hundred and thirty million metric tons a year. In comparison the US produces around five billion metric tonnes a year by itself convincingly dwarfing volcanic output. You also point the finger at solar activity, claiming it is ignored - it isn't. As you point out the IPCC includes it in their considerations and found, depending on the model used, that it accounted for effects of sixteen to thirty six percent that of those caused by CO2 and other greenhouse emissions. There are questions as to how well solar activity actually correlates with global temperature as well, so it's an open topic.
On the other side of things: Our present understanding of physics is fairly unequivocal that CO2 and other gases can cause warming by trapping heat. Using ice cores and other methods to reconstruct historical CO2 levels we find that CO2 correlates extremely well with global temperature. We also find that CO2 levels have spiked beyond anything in recent history (recent history being the last four hundred thousand years) in just the last 150 years - again correlating extremely well with the recent acceleration in warming. Given the extremely good correlations and the clear reasons to believe in causation (which is to say, physics) it would seem that the burden of proof should fall to those who suggest human CO2 emissions are not having a significant impact on global temperatures.
Are we killing the earth? I doubt it - I expect the earth will simply get warmer and keep on going. The question is: are we making life for ourselves much harder and much more costly, and is that preventable? There is strong evidence that human CO2 emissions are having a significant impact on climate, and that is certainly the cause over which we have the most direct influence. It makes sense to do something about it if we can.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1352
"The research described in this week's article demonstrates that over the last 1.3 million years, sea surface temperatures in the heart of the western tropical Pacific were controlled by the waxing and waning of the atmospheric greenhouse effect. The largest climate mode shift over this time interval, occurring ~950,000 years before the present (the mid-Pleistocene transition), has previously been attributed to changes in the pattern and frequency of ice sheets.
The new research suggests instead that this shift is due to a change in the oscillation frequency of atmospheric carbon dioxide abundances, a hypothesis that can be directly tested by deep drilling on the Antarctic Ice Cap. If proved correct, this theory would suggest that relatively small, naturally occurring fluctuations in greenhouse gases are the master variable that has driven global climate change on time scales of ten thousand to one million years."
This study of plankton cores combined with the recent study of bog hardwoods puts all these "sun output" and "natural cycle" arguments to bed. Good night. Usually it's a large catastrophic event releasing trapped methane from ocean depths that cause it. This time we did it all by our lonesome -- or is that loathsome -- selves.
Someone had to do it.
>>> 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.
No offense, but you cleary have incomplete knowledge about international maritime law. What you are missing is a key piece of info known as innocent passage(UN Convention on Law of the Sea, Articles 17-28). This right allows ships to pass through territorial waters for the purpose of accessing international waters. It is even extended to warships, provided they take additional steps to appear more "neutral" (for instance, aircraft carriers may not launch/recover aircraft and submarines must be surfaced). This right is exercised on a daily basis through the straits of Hormuz, and Bosporus, amoung others.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
But to my understanding (and I may be wrong), we put out a lot less pollution than China or India.
Hmm, perhaps you knew you were wrong in the first place, but besided to say it anyway? Well, yes you are wrong. The US is by far the worst polluter (OVERALL, not Per Capita) in the world. The difference is that they don't pollute into the heart of their urban areas, so it's not visible to the average citizen. Some statistics to back this up:
Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Energy consumption
The central argument of your whole post is destroyed when you discover that your basic premise is wrong. Everyone in the world agrees that there is man-made global warming. Only in the US has the propaganda been strong enough to still sustain a debate, no matter how senseless. EVEN BUSH finally admitted that humans are causing global warming. Perhaps you need to admit to yourself that it's possible you could be wrong, and that the attachment to your lifestyle and your nationalism is what makes you so apprehensive of seeing the truth.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
That's a conveniently odd mix of economic policies in your post. For one, Europe's economy hasn't changed for the worse by executing Kyoto - those problems already existed. If all the doomsaying about Kyoto in the US were accurate, following it with their already weak economy would have absolutely destroyed them. The lesson is that the US, with its stronger economy, is even better positioned to execute Kyoto - and even more of a producer of benefits, as we produce most of the damage that would be cut. Then compare your capitalist view of Europe's plight with your socialist view of who should pay to reduce Greenhouse accumulations. Not exactly consistent economically, but certainly consistent politically, protecting the US from accepting consequences of our pollution production.
Kyoto has controls for both emissions and sinks. One reason Russia embraced it is that Russia does produce quite a lot of carbon fuels (they've got the world's largest reserves), but also has the largest area that can be reforested. They're in the carbon sink business. But the problem with your plan, which they'd favor, is that emphasizing the sink now more than the emissions would pass all that pollutiuon through the atmosphere. Like protecting polluters from liability as long as they clean it up later - or someone cleans it up later. Like exonerating a thief if they give back their loot when they're done using it.
Kyoto isn't the best, or last, solution to Greenhouse pollution. But it's better than nothing. The US has embraced nothing as our solution. Which is unacceptable, especially as Bush lied about responding to Kyoto with "something better", which he has certainly not. So Kyoto isn't good enough - it gets us all started, and gives us something to learn from. It's a global industrial policy, with our civilization's survival hanging in the balance. We've already squandered a decade ignoring it here, where we can best execute it for maximum benefit, so we have that much more ground to make up. Many scientists warn that the tipping point, beyond which accommodations like Kyoto won't be enough, might pass within a decade. It's certainly far too late to make procrastinating arguments for doing nothing, that merely build our polluting industries. We've got to do something to save ourselves, while we argue about what better we can do with the time that Kyoto has bought. Europe is making us look stupid, though we're doing at least half of the work to do so.
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make install -not war