Slashdot Mirror
Polar Bears Drowning As Globe Warms
An anonymous reader writes "The Times Online is reporting on disturbing findings from the arctic. Polar bears appear to be drowning when they attempt long sea crossings as a result of receding summer ice." From the article: "New evidence from field researchers working for the World Wildlife Fund in Yakutia, on the northeast coast of Russia, has also shown the region's first evidence of cannibalism among bears competing for food supplies ... As the ice pack retreats north in the summer between June and October, the bears must travel between ice floes to continue hunting in areas such as the shallow water of the continental shelf off the Alaskan coast -- one of the most food-rich areas in the Arctic. However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes. "
I can see evolution breeding stronger polar bears capable of swimming to your house to eat you. i for one welcome our polar bear overlords.
Water Wings for Polar bears, support your bears today.
Sounds awful. I wonder how the seals feel about it? Anyway, if the Polar Bears can't find food the regular way, they may have to adapt by moving southward, which will bring them into contact with more people. Come to think of it, why didn't they just do that before?
The same thing has been happening for ever.
Its how bio diversity starts.
Its just that we are seeing it first hand now that its an issue.
liqbase
Everytime there is an article about global warming there will be an army of sceptics who say that global warming has not been scientifically proven and that trying to do anything about it is a wast of money and bad for the economy.
This bothers me a great deal. Although it may not be possiple to _prove_ without a hair of a doubt that global warming is occurring, there are way too many signs saying our climate is changing drastically.
We know this and we know that CO2 and other greenhouse gases have a strong influence on our climate. Looks like reason enough to strive for a change to me. Because of the upcoming shortage of fossil duels, reducing fuel depency also makes sense ecologically. And no, without significant increases in nuclear power usage, the hydrogen economy is not it.
As a geologist, I know that the areas I work in here in southcentral Alaska were covered by an ice sheet 1,000 feet thick just 9,000 years ago, but 65 million or so years ago it was hot and humid, and there were many more active volcaloes than there are now. I suspect that there were few, if any, humans around in an industrial culture 65 million years ago.
That ice sheet was one of many recent glaciations. Are humans contributing to "global warming'? Perhaps. Is that contribution significant compared to natural process? I am skeptical.
Finally, in another article I read, (CONSERVATIONISTS FILE LAWSUIT) I have to ask exactly what, other than fund-raising, will this lawsuit remedy?
Alaska Volcano Getting Stinky, May Erupt
There is no shortage of fossile fuels. The oil resources are humoungous but a lot of it is too expensive to be counted in the oil reserves (yep, there is a big difference between resources and reserves here. This is also the reason the oil companies have been able to tell that the oil reserves have stayed at "enough for 35 years" for 35 years despite no new significant oil resources have been found for a long time now), but the demand for it will only trigger the prices so that it becomes economically viable.
The known oil resources are expected to last for 150 years with the current pace of burning. When this runs out, we still have coal for a 1000 years or so. We will have to stop using fossile fuels for other reasons. For environmental reasons.
"The Times Online is reporting on disturbing findings from the arctic. Polar bears appear to be drowning when they attempt long sea crossings as a result of receding summer ice."
So that means the bears that do survive will be better swimmers than previous. Evolution wins again!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ice melting is not the real problem here. The bears are simply swimming in the wrong direction because the change in position of the Magnetic North Pole combined with the accumulation of too many Leap Seconds has screwed up the BearSUV's latest Navigation Package. Fix the SUV software, sell more BearSUVs with good software to bears, and forget that "global warming" mumbo jumbo.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
1) could we please have a proper discourse about probability distributions? having the ice recede 200 miles further north than the average means nothing without a given variance. and even then they would have to name the period of observation to get any meaning out of it. obviously giving all that information won't go so well for an article, but giving just scraps of information isn't all that hot either
2) global warming is not a threat to nature! nature has dealt with catastrophic climated changes in the past and it will deal with them in the future. the threat of global warming is to us humans and the the status quo of nature, but there's no doubt in my mind that the ecosystems will adapt to a warming planet - as they have to countless ice ages, meteor hits, etc. although i would find it a shame to see ice bears going extinct due to human interference in world climate, we _can_ not take responsibility of _nature_ on this scale; what if a warmer climate brought forth an even more beautiful creature than the ice bear? wouldn't we make _that_ extinct by preventing global warming as well?
note, i'm not advocating to do nothing, nor am i lacking sympathy for the ice bears. but in my mind, global warming is first and formost a danger to the status quo and to _our_ survival. if the planet heats up drastically other species will replace the current ones and the cycle of life will turn on; with the difference of us being dragged down by the environmental changes...
jethr0
Even if you don't give a damn about the bears further changes such as these signal problems for us. Our civilizations depend upon stable food supplied, stable ocean levels, predictable tides, seasons, and weather, all of which may likely be thrown off drastically by global warming. Most of humankind lives within a few miles of sea level. As polar ice retreats oceal levels rise. As temperatures rise so do the frequency of powerful storms such as Katrina. Similarly rising temperatures herald more unpredictable seasons and thus crop losses. Changes in weathere patterns seem likely to doom some areas to overly warm weather (e.g. Africa) and some areas to much colder weather (e.g Europe).
It is one thing to be sanguine about the loss of polar bears to natrual selection. The loss of human populations, that's another thing.
This is a win-win situation. Without polar bears we can go ahead and drill for oil without the risk of harming them. There might be a surplus of seals since the bears won't be around to eat them so go ahead and hunt them too.
I was kind of hoping the article had some photos of the drowning polar bears?
Baby seals are cautiously optimistic.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
It astonishes me the blind naiviety of these Republicans who insist they aren't convinced that Global warming is happening. Every year we get another story or two like this and they still have their hands over their ears going "LA LA LA - I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Even more naive is the notion that it can't affect us or that we can buy our way out of any issues it causes.
The house has smoke all thru the ground floor - the ceiling is burning two stories up out of sight and all Republicans can say is "Well, we're not convinced this smoke is our house. And we're not convinced that there hasn't been smoke here before and that this is natural geology - and we're not convinced the fire will spread to the ground floor if the building is on fire.
idiots - naive, blind, idiots
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I have to say this, because every time something like this comes up, there are a bunch of posts saying, "It's natural, it's evolution, new species will develop, nature will repair itself, bla bla bla". I just want to point out a fucking obvious fact that people seem to forget. Yes, nature will sort it out. Somewhere during the next several million years. You, your grandkids, and the whole human race probably won't be around to see it. Evolution works on geological time scales. Try and wrap your head around it. Save those species now, because from our point of view they will never be replaced.
As far as the seals and the bears up north go, it wouldn't take too much to apply the same concept, minus the million dollar boats, and build some platforms (artificial bergs) up the coast for them to use. For the distances they're swiming placing one every 10 miles or so should be plenty, and would give a boost to the fishing in the area as well.
How are the polar bears handling the polar ice cap melting on Mars? Must be the Mars rovers...
Perhaps they will have a theory that polar bears have a natural cycle of extinction and re-evolution every few hundred years.
Cue the 'I'm more cynical than you' comments, more like.
'evolution in action' 'they need SUVs'
More like 'I'm feeling mighty cosy and safe here in one of the richest countries in the world'.
Unfortunately, kiddo, there's no gaurantee that will protect you.
Also, a thought. People talk about there being a lack of evidence for climate change. What we're doing at the moment is conducting a global experiment in how hard we can push the climate without it changing. Guess what happens if we cock up?
So when people talk about making a change in our lifestyle, they're talking about keeping the Earth as consistant as possible, because no one has a bloody clue what the climate might do. If you think about it, you'll realise that reducing CO2 emmisions is actually a conservative approach.
That makes me a sad panda
Not extinction and re-evolution, but swings in population levels can be quite severe even in 'undisturbed' nature.
Like another poster mentioned, unless this gets much, much worse natural selection will simply start choosing bears better at swimming, or that find an alternate method for moving.
I don't read AC A human right
"Fossil Duels". Best. Video game name. Ever.
Then they will dissolve!
cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
Maybe we could just use the truths that we know to promote environmental friendliness and leave out the unprovable theories. There are too many factors in the atmosphere to even predict local weather, let alone the cause of global warming.
and why exactly is not "replacing" them during my lifetime somehow bad if nature will sort it out eventually? Evolution does indeed work on geological timescales, that doesn't make it work any less... Showing polar bears to my grandkids is of purely romantic value, I'd say, not something I "need" from a rational POV.
The polar bears seem incredibly adapated to living on ice -- the article says they live their whole lives on ice. Their natural range is circumpolar (http://www.solcomhouse.com/polarbears.htm ). I know their feet, fur and sense of smell are all optimized for living in ice. I'm sure there are more things.
i stribution.jpg
It seems that the next time the earth gets warm, for whatever reason, the polar bears are going to die off in droves.
The same is true for camels: they've got special eyes, feet, a way to store water and energy for long periods, etc. If there is ever a mass greening of the earth, wild camels will have a hard time.
More general animals, like brown bears ("grizzly" bears) have it differently: their problem is that they are adapted to living in Eurasia and North America, so they come into conflict with humans in nearly all the areas they'd like to be. Here's their range (it would all of North America and Europe, but for humans):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ursus_arctos_d
If you look, you'll see brown bears live all over Alaska. That's where that bear-maniac Treadwell got mauled by them. There's now a movie about it, and it uses his amazing bear footage:
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10725/
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Nothing to do with communism or Islamic terror. The Phenomenon may well lead Slashdotters to the conclusion that polar bears are Windows-operated, and their drowning is simply due to the fact that longer swims increase the risiko of getting a BSOD before reaching the shore. A team of slashdotters may be sent to do some on-site assistance and format all bears, to then install linux. Or BSD. OpenBSD to be sure no hunters can hack into the bears?
i heard all about that. also there were pollutant making sealions go crazy and attack people. this was pretty much around the time i took a sailing class and we rounded the dinghy too close to the buoy at the harbor entrance and the sealion reared up at us and i saw the terror look in my instructor's face who was sitting in a small powered boat 20 ft away. fortunately nothing happened but there are just too many sealions and theyre acting like they own the road now.
seems to me what they need to do is put a small low voltage wire all the way around the boat to irritate their wet skin just enough to make it uncomfortable for them to attempt to get onto the boat.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
(see Chronciles of Narnia)
to inform people of that for a very long time. Theres also some heating on one of uranus's or neptune's moons i dont recall which, which is heating up the atmosphere there. Its the sun thats causing all of this. Maybe if we're lucky we'll see mars thaw a bit. I wonder how much the sun would have to heat up to make all the ice thaw there.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
May wind up being the only solution, thats probably the only spot on the planet that will stay coldest the longest as the rest of the planet thaws.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Things NEVER change overnight.
l canoes/images/st_helens_mosaic3.gif
http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/education/student/vo
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Not extinction and re-evolution, but swings in population levels can be quite severe even in 'undisturbed' nature.
Like another poster mentioned, unless this gets much, much worse natural selection will simply start choosing bears better at swimming, or that find an alternate method for moving.
Interesting thing about evolution: it's not a perfect upwards slope. Indeed, in many ways biodiversity has been on a downwards slope for long before humans came onto the scene. Furthermore, consider that introducing a new way for animals to die doesn't happen in a vacuum; this is one of many examples of shrinking habitats and increasingly hostile situations that animals in the world (including humans, but we're good at changing our immediate environment to offset the overall environment) are finding themselves in.
To go back to what I was nudging towards initially, though: 'natural selection' is not another name for 'all-powerful god', that is to say, just because a new method is needed doesn't mean that this 'natural selection' thing will magically provide it; natural selection is just trimming combined with chaos, there are severe limits to what it can do, and I can't think of many methods that the bears could use other than swimming (I do realize that you said "unless this gets much, much worse", but really, there aren't that many alternate methods of moving, it's not like they'll suddenly develop wings). And anyways, I would think that after so much time, Polar Bears as a species would be pretty damn good at swimming. I doubt it's merely the few weaker ones that are drowning. The article notes that ALL the bears are being forced to swim further from the shore, and some of the deaths noted were from storms that arose; so whether they're good swimmers or not isn't even going to make that much of a difference, it's an extra bonus to the death rate period.
Hmm, in some ways I'm sortof making a straw man out of your argument. But really now, just think about it for a moment. As you mentioned, population levels can swing quite dramatically in rather 'natural' situations, yes. Now say that one of those swings happens for some random reason, combined with the problems noted in the article. It's not that hard to imagine entire populations of polar bears dipping dangerously low. The article mentions increases in the rate of cannibalism due to the lack of food sources, so for many populations there may be a tipping point that would create a downward spiral. Consider also that this is just one of many examples of the effect of humans on the environment that hurts wild populations, so I might agree with you if this was all that was going on in the world (ie. if the only thing that polar bears had to deal with was having to swim further), but it's the combination of many harmful factors that puts species at risk.
Plus, just from an empathic perspective, I'm not exactly going "hurrah! animals are dieing!". I'd rather they, umm, not die when they shouldn't be.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Oh man, Stephen Colbert's gonna be pleased with this!
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Will these environmental stresses fork the polar bears evolution toward becoming a water creature? Are there any indications that some them could manage not to drown and actually survive spending most of their time in the water?
:T:R:A:N:S:
We'll house em in Sweden. There are so many polarbears around the streets anyway, a few more wouldn't do any difference.
What about Coca Cola? Do thay have to change their ads?
The point of environmentalism is to protect the human race from suffering and devastation due to the way we interact with the rest of the environment.
;) I could give a shit. I don't want to die, however.
The point of environmentalism is not to "protect the planet" because animals are cute or because somebody particularly cares, on a moral level, if we pollute or if we exhaust our finite resources per se.
It is completely irrelevant if on geological timescales the earth will cool down again, if it means the human race is nearly or completely extinct by the time it does.
People who say "it is irrelevant because the Earth will heal" are the worst kind of tree-hugging hippies
Extract:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Three environmental groups sued the federal government Thursday, seeking to protect polar bears from extinction because of disappearing Arctic sea ice.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, demands that the government take action on a petition environmentalists filed earlier to have polar bears listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.
Once a species is listed as threatened, the government is barred from doing anything to jeopardize the animal's existence or its habitat.
....
...as funny, because I can't take the thought that he might be serious.
Please polar bear with us as we attempt to get the carbon dioxide levels drown a bit.
Frog blast the vent core.
Evolution? Gasp! You mean intelligently redesigned, right?
Yes, sorry, I forgot who I was dealing with for a moment.
No discussion of polar bears is complete without mentioning Churchill, Manitoba, The Polar Bear Capital of The World. I visited at the end of October and had the chance to go out on a "Tundra Buggy" tour. It was quite exotic.. we saw 3 polar bear. There's also a guy who lives out on the tundra for a few months a year in a huge tundra buggy with satellite internet access.. He has a site: http://www.polarbearcam.com/
The buggies are amazing.. probably about 4-5 feet off the ground, HUGE tires, furnace inside to keep warm.. we ate dinner on board as well, with the bears just outside. Our tour guide was VERY professional and knowledgeable, we were quite impressed. It turned out he had also lived in Africa for many years and given tours there, etc etc..
Here's some fun facts about polar bear off the top of my head:
Their skin is actually black to absorb the sunlight (it's amazing how well adapted they are). The fur is really transparent but looks white in the same way a cloud looks white because of all of the water droplets.
They have suction cups on their paws to keep from slipping on the ice.
Churchill has had, I believe, only 2 or 3 fatalities in the past 30 years. One was a few weeks before I got there as a drunk wandered out of the town limits.
They are very careful about bear up there, for obvious reasons. Every night they fire off shotguns to keep the bears away. People living on the outskirts of town always have rifles in their houses just in case - they also put out traps.. basically boards with nails going through them.. to keep the bears away.
If a bear comes into town they will stun it and carry it away with a helicopter! We actually saw this happening! They move it further north IIRC... but if the bear comes back 2 more times, they put it into the "polar bear jail" which is in town (no tourists allowed sadly). They only water the bear in the jail, and do not feed it, otherwise the bear may view it as a rewarding experience.
I was surprised how nice everything was up there.. beautifully decorated hotels, at least on the insides. Food is expensive though and their economy is pretty much dependent on the bears, although they do export grain to Europe. The train takes 2 days from Winnipeg and is quite a slow ride, sometimes traveling at only 10 miles per hour. (They run 2 engines just in case one breaks down.)
I remember lots more about the bears and Churchill if anyone is interested.. just ask!
Oh - there was far less ice compared to previous years when I was up there. Everyone I asked said they weren't sure if it was global warming or just a temporary cycle. You can check the sea ice information for the Hudson Bay at the Canadian Ice Service site.
And for those with a limited imagination, you might want to google what happened at Chernobyl when they experimented with "what happens when an unstable, self dependent system with positive feedback gets out of hand".
The rest of us are down at Paddy Power's placing large bets on the number of days till the next "once in 50 years" hurricane happens in New Orleans while the odds are still reasonable.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
from the article:
The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food.
Typical racist media! Polar bears--WHITE bears--swim to FIND FOOD. But you KNOW that if that had been BLACK bears instead of white bears, this article would have called it LOOTING.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I think that you misunderstood most of the skeptics. I don't think anyone is doubting that the globe _is_ getting warmer. You can't really argue with hard facts. However, that being said, the majority of skeptics take the stance that the world goes through cycles of increasing global temperature and decreasing global temperature. Therefore, the belief is that with a mere 150 or so years of data, it is _impossible_ to lay the blame our feet (although we might be contributing a little bit). While I know that we have core samples from certain times in the past, it has already been show that the temperature and CO2 levels have been much higher in the past. Just a quick link [bbc.co.uk], you can scroll down to the middle and see the quote: "It was significantly warmer so people could move north without adaptation." This was about Britain and 700,000 years ago. It says that Elephants and other tropical animals lived there. AFAIK, there were no SUVs 700,000 years ago.
And yet seal populations are thriving. Seals vow to create more hydrocarbon emissions in coming years. News at 11
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.
But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.
Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics and the whole multiproxy study paradigm shown to be without significance (see Bürger, G., and U. Cubasch (2005), Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23711, doi:10.1029/2005GL024155.) I'd say the whole "Cry Polar Bears are drowning" schtick to be Yet Another Fake Panic.
Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.
Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
But, surely all of those Coke endorsements will save the polar bears!
/me drinks more Coke...
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
go buy one. its a useful way for sane people to spot those in society who are selfish and gullible, and thus an effective filter on who to bother talking to.
ah a slanging off from an anonynmous coward. I feel so underwheled. Maybe you should go back to ranting about how america is the land of the free instead? although given your own president undermines your constitution to spy on you, admits it, and most of you are too stupid to stop voting for him, I guess its a lost cause.
... or do other people find the idea of drowning polar bears funny?
Flooding with poor propaganda is just that, a propaganda. It's probably like that "study" with certain species of butterfly being given nothing but GM plant to eat and then concluding "GM plants are killing the butteflies". This type of organizations is filled with maniacs bent on spreading hysteria or else they lose publicity. Seals dying, bears cannibalizing on each other, seas rising (even though there is good evidence sea level has actually FALLEN by some 20 cm since the 19th century), omigod, the sky is falling as result of global warming. Best to ignore that nonsense.
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
...Global Warming Skeptic Bingo!
I forget what 8 was for.
There's more data than that, but the darling of the global warming scare maniacs is the CO2 level claimed to supposedly have been 280-290 ppm in the preindustrial. The problem is - this is bollocks. The "scientists" in question have falsified the data and this single lie has been repeated over and over in the same publications, trying to create impression of many independent original sources, whereas in reality there was just one: http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm "The problem with Siple data (and with other shallow cores) is that the CO2 concentration found in pre-industrial ice from a depth of 68 meters (i.e. above the depth of clathrate formation) was "too high". This ice was deposited in 1890 AD, and the CO2 concentration was 328 ppmv, not about 290 ppmv, as needed by man-made warming hypothesis. The CO2 atmospheric concentration of about 328 ppmv was measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii as later as in 1973[8], i.e. 83 years after the ice was deposited at Siple. An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence[3, 9], solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The "corrected" ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record (Figure 1 B) , and reproduced in countless publications as a famous "Siple curve". Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the "age assumption"[10], but they failed[9]."
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
You just finished reading KSR's Mars Trilogy didn't you?
How do we know that these drowning polar bears aren't liberal Democrats on one of those "roughing it" getaway weekends while the Republican polar bears are slowly dying a death from The Conspiracy of high fructose corn syrup Coca-Cola? They must be trying to get to Canada to find some cane sugar Coke.
Every species must have its political factions as well as its Darwin awards.
"I think that you misunderstood most of the skeptics. I don't think anyone is doubting that the globe _is_ getting warmer. You can't really argue with hard facts." ..except the facts are not really that hard:
http://www.john-daly.com/
Look at section " `Global Mean Temperature' - Disputed Data " (no direct link). It appears that where the meteo stations have been properly maintained in last two centuries - Western Europe and United States - there is no observable global warming right up to 1990s.
It's only if you factor in the poorly maintained stations elsewhere that you get the effect. Data should read "global warming everywhere except where the major industrial powers have been producing its CO2" - come on!
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
Al Qaeda have completed their weather-machine!
Another good example of how the non-scientists at Time can mangle a study to their own views. Anyone care to get the actual study and review it instead? Good clue how they have missed the issues again - read this slowly, "However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes." When can we get the global warming issue out of the political MSM and back to the scientists?
I know this was a joke, but you *are* aware that Polar Bears are actually black right?
Black with white (dense) hollow hair, that acts similar to millions of small fiber optic pieces to channel light down to the black skin, where it is more efficiently used.
So, more accurately think of an old black man with white hair. I know a few of those, and they are pretty cool!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Your theory is all well and good, but how old is the polar bear species? Over 100 years? How old are other species that WE'VE wiped out? Older than 100 years? The fact is that none of these species are going to survive because none can adapt quick enough. Sure "nature" will survive but it will be so different from what we have now that it would be hard with good conscious not to consider our responsibility in bringing it about. I guess you're just hoping that humans don't make it to have to deal with the consequences of having no animal species to live amongst?
And she probably won't reach adulthood with all of these creatures still in existence in the wild.
Sure, we've celebrated them to the point of even surrounding our children with their virtual presence, yet we let them slide into extinction all the same.
We are poor, stupid, short-sighted stewards of this planet.
Come on we all know the polar caps melting is all natural, just like the smog in LA. Humans didn't cause that, God did. I blame God and his pal Jesus.
Can I bum a sig?
"polar bears drowning" is not even close to "they have to travel longer to do their job now" There are animals that travel a lot longer to survive, survival of the fittest you know.
Actually, the effects of the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming on each other is pretty circular- UVB destroys small phytoplankton in the Antarctic. This contributes to global warming [see HERE], as well as a collapse in the polar and sub-polar oceanic food supply. I also hope you appreciate that global warming helps to slow the repair of the ozone layer by raising the temperature of the stratosphere. Just because you haven't been taught something, it doesn't mean it's wrong. And yes, the UVB is absorbed no matter *where* it's absorbed, but to be honest I'd rather it were absorbed higher up, and not by the micro-organisms that help to keep our climate stable. In any case, the ozone disappearing and reappearing *is* cyclical, but most recent science takes it for granted that CFCs and our activities on earth are seriously affecting that pattern.
It's brilliant people like you who think that the entire science of climate change study is based on (Paper A) or (Paper B). There are tens of thousands of studies, using hundreds of cores across dozens of timescales from dozens of locations, in addition to many other complete lines of study apart from cores. What an extreme bit of ignorance of the science to pretend that there's only one relevant study of all that has been done - how creationist of you.
Believe it or not, Jaworosky is in the extreme minority in the scientific community (just like those who deny evolution are in the biological community). Those who pick on a single piece of data and claim that it tears down an entire science practice the lowest form of scientific inquiry. Jaworsky actually claims the ridiculous notion that he can prove that the world is getting colder, despite even direct *thermometer* measurements to the contrary and the huge amount of glacial retreat. Jaworosky's theories were not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The were published in a magazine run by Lyndon LaRouche. I.e., his claims are a bunch of garbage that wouldn't stand up to peer review, because otherwise he'd have done it.
The reality is that even if you don't want to compare CO2 levels to those 100 years ago, you can compare them to CO2 from 200, 400, etc years ago. Modern CO2 is the highest it's been in several hundred thousand years, and it went that way from low CO2 levels in a hundred (or even if you believe Jaworowsky) a couple hundred years. Even the most rudimentary glance at Vostok data makes it painfully obvious that CO2 levels are extremely tied to temperature (which is obvious from the properties of CO2). And it's obvious that this would be the case - the amount of CO2 that we pump out easily outpaces all animal life on earth and volcanic activity, and expecting that plants can arbitrarily keep up is silly (most plants are not limited by CO2 - they're limited by various nutrients. There are huge oceanic dead zones because of, for example, iron deficiency.)
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
Even if you gleefully murdered all the evil humans on Earth, the Earth would continue on it's climate path. The history of climate is periods of warming punctuated by ice ages.
Mine is Good
And how long will it be till the enviro-wackos like yourself tell us to quit doing anything and just die, so the earth will go back to its old self? The earth has been warming LONGER than we've even been on this planet you idiot. Typical response from someone who was probably schooled in a government school.
We deny that it is caused by people. The earth has been undergoing warm/cool cycles for millions of years. Nature's a bitch, get over it.
Never heard about that before.
Discovery channel has been saying it's hollow = boyant so the bear can swim with less effort.
It could do both I suppose.
The other part of the problem is if we do something active today we have really no idea of what the result might be. It could be that the only thing that is keeping glacial ice from burying New York City is the current level of CO2. It could also be that without immediate, drastic elimination of all production of carbon - i.e., burning - we face a runaway heat cycle where the surface of the Earth will be like Venus in 50 years. Sadly, we have no idea which way to jump. And guessing "conservatively" in favor of reduced emissions - like 1990 levels - is likely a feel-good measure without any real results. Sure, it might help everyone's attitude, but it isn't going to make much difference if the necessary level is where we were in 1790.
The one thing that might help - a massive war which would eliminate at least 25% of the population of the Earth - is getting closer and closer all the time. That would solve the problem for a very long time, especially since it would be most of the first-world countries that would be hit the hardest.
Oh, I won't argue that it could be a contributer to polar bear's extinction in the wild. It's just that I feel certain that until something more severe happens there will still be enclaves of polar bears.
;)
...'. I love when I hear about placements of artificial reefs, reforestation, bird nests, etc. Improvements in habitat.
I won't argue that people shouldn't keep an eye on it, or that nothing should necessarily be done. Like somebody else posted, there might be ways to plant buoys/rest spots. And yeah, they're very good swimmers, not much to improve on there without some sacrifices on other fronts.
I'm fully aware that evolution tends to refine and eliminate species. I remember that occasionally there is an explosion of new species, most of which die off very quickly(over half of them in a few thousand years). Then it gradually slopes off until you get to today, where you're down to a few per year, instead of hundreds.
What I haven't seen is any sort of explanation for the 'explosion'. The creationists might of had an arguement if they had an explanation for that, but if they do I haven't heard it. It's part of the reason that I say that evolution is a observation of current events, not an explanation of how life began.
And no, I don't go 'hurrah' at the deaths of animals that aren't trying to eat me.
What always gets me is why so many 'greens' seem to want stasis. This and that change are always 'A threat to
I don't read AC A human right
This is kind of a debateable point. When you're talking about an animal that is, normally, covered entirely in fur, it's fairly standard to refer to it as its fur color, not its skin color. (For instance, I would say my dog is tan & white, not pink & brown. Unless you shaved her. In which case she'd probably get upset with you.) I guess it would be more correct to say that polar bears have white fur & black skin. (Although I thought it was more brown... Or was that artic foxes?)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
There are SUV driving slashdotters? I would've expected they were already driving gokarts powered by their own sense of self-satisfaction.
Global cooling harming seal populations.
Ice conditions in the arctic continue to deteriorate as global cooling continues to increase the size of arctic ice flows. Whereas 20 years ago Polar Bears had to swim as much as 60 miles between flows, the cooling trend over the last 2 decades has reduced the distance to as little as 1-2 miles in some cases.
Polar bear populations have been exploding in recent years. Polar bears are preditors of baby seals (see picture of cure little seal with big brown eyes attached). Polar bears have been known to eat as much as 100 pounds of seal flesh in a single feeding. Bears can kill several seals in a single day.
Bears search around until they find the breathing holes seals need to make through the ice in order to breath. Faced with certain death from drowing the hapless seal has no alternative other than to take her chances.
2 decades ago the arctic was warmer than today and with the cooling, vast areas of the arctic ocean which were formerly open water are now freezing over. This further adds to the misery faced by the seals. In the past seals could simply surface in the open ocean whereas today they must not only cope with the encroaching ice, they also face certain dead either from drowning or from predatory bear attacks.
Global cooling has been attributed to the inability of mankind to stabilize the climate.
Fossil fuel consumption has been in decline worldwide since the peak of World Oil Production in 2007. CO2 levels are still rising but are not strong enough to offset the well recoginzed cooling trend identifed by the progression of our planet into another ice age. As the planet cools, ice continues to build up and ever greater amounts of water vapour are lost from the atmosphere. This sets on a vicious positive feedback mechanizm which will eventually culminate with a full blown glacial cycle with Glaciers to a depth of over 10,000 feet in the North Eastern part of the USA.
The peak of the last ice age occured about 18,000 years ago and is widely recognised as the 22'nd cycle of the recent Pleistocene ice ages. The present ice ages have been gripping the earth since the cooling trend of the last 30 million years which is now recognized as being a partial consequence of the mountain building which peaked in the Miocene and which continues today in areas like the Himalyan Ranges.
The present cooling trend is thought to be the beginning of another ice age which is anticipated sometime during the next 20,000 years. In the past glacial cycles occured with a frequency of about 110,000 years and are caused by the variations in the Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles).
For more information please check Christopher Scotese's paleoclimate website: http://www.scotese.com/lastice.htm
That's what they get for not having opposable thumbs. Stupid bears.
1) The sun has had more sunspot activity, longer duration, higher degree of spin off, and more force in the spin off, than any time in our recorded history starting circa 1986. On top of this the activity is increasing. Could it have Some effect on the temperature of the Earth? I mean, it's only a few billion nuclear bombs reaching our upper atmosphere. Could the constant higher level of bombardment cause holes in the atmosphere? It depends upon whether you believe that nuclear material can cause "burning" of atmosphere or not. We have always worried about it "in theory".
2) The sun is scheduled to go super nova, last I checked, in about a mere 10,000 years. Go figure. We suddenly have large changes in the spin off now...
3) If you got to www.co2science.com you can get some expert opinions, from people who actually work in the field, rather than some computer program calculations based upon statistics and path plotting. I am not saying that pathing models are not useful, but they tend to be highly inaccurate, remember the sun rotating around the earth was accepted for a long time due to pathing predictions. heh.
I am not denying changes, they are measurable. But they may be part of some other effects, and we have not been recording information for long enough period to determine what is happening. We go by 10,0000 year blocks of time for measuring changes in the past, because we have to. That does not mean the changes were not sudden, just that our tools are limited to detect that aspect.
After spending many decades in science, both applied and theoretical, I think it is pretty arrogant to think we matter in the scheme of things. Since the advent of printed matter humans have claimed we are destroying ourselves and our world. It hasn't happened, yet our arrogance of our "power" continues.
It's brilliant people like you who think that the entire science of climate change study is based on (Paper A) or (Paper B).
...and all of them eithr having the problem of telling incorrect CO2 levels due to common error to them all:
That's how science works - it's not based on voting, but on being correct.
If there are 10,000 bad studies and a single correct study, the 10,000 in question gets thrown out, and that one gets accepted. If you don't understand that, well, you're mistaken. That is how Popper's falsifiability works: not much evidence is necessary to get the entire theory thrown out.
There are tens of thousands of studies, using hundreds of cores across dozens of timescales from dozens of locations, in addition to many other complete lines of study apart from cores.
"Perusal of these determinations convinced me that glaciological studies are not able to provide a reliable reconstruction of CO2 concentrations in the ancient atmosphere. This is because the ice cores do not fulfill the essential closed system criteria. One of them is a lack of liquid water in ice, which could dramatically change the chemical composition the air bubbles trapped between the ice crystals. This criterion, is not met, as even the coldest Antarctic ice (down to -73C) contains liquid water[2]."
2. Mulvaney, R., E.W. Wolff, and K. Oates, Sulpfuric acid at grain boundaries in Antarctic ice. Nature, 1988. 331(247-249).
Repeating the same mistake 10,000 times is repeating the mistake 10,000 times. Not being correct just because you could afford massive propaganda.
Time for you to say a big OOPS. Come on, it's not a shame. Everybody's wrong from time to time.
And if you bothered to actually have read the paper, you would find quite an extensive bibliography of other works. Not just one single scientist.
What an extreme bit of ignorance of the science to pretend that there's only one relevant study of all that has been done - how creationist of you.
Making such remarks proves you're dumb, ignorant and obtuse.
Believe it or not, Jaworosky is in the extreme minority in the scientific community (just like those who deny evolution are in the biological community). Those who pick on a single piece of data and claim that it tears down an entire science practice the lowest form of scientific inquiry.
Quick, call the philosophers working on methodology of science and tell them that Karl Popper was a fraud!
Jaworsky actually claims the ridiculous notion that he can prove that the world is getting colder, despite even direct *thermometer* measurements to the contrary and the huge amount of glacial retreat.
Jaworowski said NO SUCH THING. He merely claimed that what he found INVALIDATES THE CLAIMS THAT HAVE BEEN DEMONSTRABLY MADE. You're not thinking precisely. It's like reality is one way, and finding that the claims made of it are based on frauds and distortions. It doesn't even prove that GW is not happening. It merely proves that EVIDENCE YOU CITED is a fraud.
Jaworosky's theories were not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The were published in a magazine run by Lyndon LaRouche. I.e., his claims are a bunch of garbage that wouldn't stand up to peer review, because otherwise he'd have done it.
1. Attacking the credibility, not the criticism. Non-sequitur.
2. As a matter of fact, Jaworowski points out the articles published in NATURE. You obviously have not read the paper.
3. Global Warming gets talked about on NPR (or so I hear), which is even more damning than that total cretin Larouche picking some subject up.
The reality is that even if you don't want to compare CO2 levels to those 100 years ago, you can compare them to CO2 from 200, 400, etc years ago. Modern CO2 is the highest it's been in several hundred thousand years, and it went that way from low CO2 levels in a hun
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
You didn't answer his question.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
First of all nice post, I see your point of view and share a wish for polar bears and animals (and plants) in general to survive but I'm way more concerned about effects of pollution on animals (and humans for that matter) than anything else including loss of habitat --only to a certain level of course: they all need "enough" habitat.
:) )
:) ).
I don't see the link between drowning (which may or may not happen often and may or may not be a new thing) and extinction since polar bears live in plenty of areas that aren't made up of freefloating ice but actually ice and snow on land.
I can see how it might split up polar bears and decrease their numbers and so on, but not extinction. Polar bears are perfectly capable of surviving without large expanses of floating ice or for that matter cold and winter (although that would have a greater effect).
Places that comes to mind as excellent polar bear country, which has significant landmass, and in which they've already established themselves are:
Greenland (huge)
parts of Siberia (huge)
parts of Canada (huge)
Spitsbergen/Svalbard (a small place though so it doesn't necessarily count and too far away for a swim to northern Norway (we don't actually have polar bears walking in the streets on the mainland
As far as I can understand any climate change would have to be even more drastic and sulfurfilled than the worst fantasies of fanatically religious environmentalists to make polar bears extinct. To my knowledge most climate scientists say that global warming will lead to colder weather at the poles and more precipitation (snow). Not that that's an argument in any way as they all seem to be talking out of their asses giving totally divergent and contradicting "predictions", I'll instead give credence to NASA measurements and real empirical meteorologist rather than simulation-addicted environmentalists (oops this turned into a rant, sorry about that
Anyway I might be wrong, so if you or anyone else can fill in the gaps between the drowning and the extinction please do so.
Disclaimer: I'm very sceptical towards the idea of human-triggered climate changes (be it warming or cooling or both and anything) as well as the strong tendency for crisis-maximizing by any and all environmental scientists (be it from honest alarm or securing funds).
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Evolution is a slow process; it can cope with hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't cope with drastic changes on the order of a hundred years.
Really? There has not yet been a catastrophic event in Earth's history that life has not coped with. The KT event that killed the dinosaurs led to the massive radiation of bird and mammal species that we know today. You don't call that drastic? The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out an even larger percentage of species, and then back they came. The kind of hyperbole you are slinging is typical of the environmental movement today. Warming is not dire enough, so they recently announce that the gulf stream is shutting down and will put Europe in a deep freeze. Which is it guys?
an ill wind that blows no good
"Urbanisation has been more successfully corrected for in the US than in the rest of the world and the US also has the best maintained network of weather stations in the world. This must therefore be a better representation of the global picture too." Say what? (emphasis mine)
He also helpfully includes satellite measurements from the last 26 years or so, which don't really say anything about longer trends.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
There are huge ice shelves in Antarctica that polar bears could live off. If the planet is warming up maybe the south pole could be a little more hospitable on the coast lines and ice shelves. There are plenty of seals to eat down there. Would it be a problem for the Penguins?
You're right, science is not about voting. It's about being right. Now, my question to you, and where I smell the big rat, is why pick that one paper? Why not pick the ones that debunk it? You state that "Repeating the same mistake 10,000 times is repeating the mistake 10,000 times." But how do you know it's a mistake? You redo the expirement, you cross check, you let other people have a crack at it. And if they find the same stuff? Well, it's probably you didn't make a mistake. Note that it doesn't mean that all papers and studies have to agree. Nor that it becomes "truth". It simply means that it looks like your model is able to accurately predict future developments.
Here's where you are dishonest: Popper and his philosophy of science is about empirical falsifiability. This does not mean that all it takes is one person to state something for a theory to come crumbling down. And research papers are exactly that: one person presenting a theory, providing evidence that is claimed to support the theory and inviting others to check it. Simply publishing a paper means nothing in and of itself. Got that? It's still an opinion. Just a well-supported one - or so you hope. How do you distinguish the cranks from the good stuff? If you don't know climatology, you go by where the consensus is pointing. Judging from your arguments, which all reference arguments (instead of argumenting on your own and citing data sets for support), you'd be better off going with the consensus.
Oh, and just because I can, here's the latest say on the satellite anomaly, curtesy of 15 minutes on Google: it's the orbital decay, stupid.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by your insistence to rely on a few flawed papers instead of listening to what people say. Apparently, it's now a proven fact that people tend to discard information if it contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. Even in that information is overwhelming and the pre-existing belief random. I'd say you're exhibit A for that behavior.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If we were like every other animal on the planet and had no ability to wreck global havok on the environment, then we could go about our merry lives just as they do: living for the moment and just focusing on the day-to-day struggle for survival.
However, we *do* have the capability and we *do* have the intelligence to consider the long-term consequences of our actions. Therefore, we must act like we are stewards even though nobody officially assigned us that title.
"seriously-do-you-need-more-proof?"
As much as I am starting to dislike the editorial filter that Slashdot has and Digg avoids, let me just say in response:
Proof of warming does not equate to proof Kyoto is a good idea.
Even the planners agree that all countries participating for a century would do almost nothing for the projected warming. Recently, the non-Kyoto-signer US has had higher economic growth and greater improvements on GHGs than the Kyoto signers of the EU. Do you need any more proof that it's the wrong approach?
Perhaps instead of a half-ass non-solution, we should fund more research for true, viable alternatives. I want bettery batteries, solar, and fusion to all be so cheap that any GHG emitting methods of energy generation and storage aren't used because of their economic cost.
Arbitrarily trying to limit carbon emissions, when billions of people who embrace modernity need energy and don't have alternatives, is a bad idea. Here is a good article by Bjorn Lomborg on the The relative unimportance of global warming, with better policy suggestions.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
discovery channel also was my source for hearing what the parent mentioned about lightguides - was on a "how polar bears hunt" special.
ôó
Black with white (dense) hollow hair, that acts similar to millions of small fiber optic pieces to channel light down to the black skin, where it is more efficiently used.
:-S
So, more accurately think of an old black man with white hair. I know a few of those, and they are pretty cool!
Cool? But... But... But you said it was to warm them!
I'm all confused now
You can't take the sky from me...
What question? Questions usually include question marks. He made a sarcastic nasty trolling comment.
Just watched it again last night. Becomes more alarming everytime I do watch it.
Mainly because there is much more evidence to support the conclusions of the movie every day. (Yes I not the change won't come in 6 days. But I'm no longer sure it will take 100's of years.)
Think Deeply.
You state that "Repeating the same mistake 10,000 times is repeating the mistake 10,000 times." But how do you know it's a mistake? You redo the expirement, you cross check, you let other people have a crack at it. And if they find the same stuff? Well, it's probably you didn't make a mistake.
I don't have a stake in this and I haven't read any of the cited resarch, but it's obvious to me that you're missing the previous poster's point. His claim (accurate or not) isn't that the 10,000 different core sample studes were done incorrectly, but rather that the underlying methodology is flawed. Specifically, his claim is that ice core samples don't provide accurate records of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. If that is correct, then even if every study "finds the same stuff", it only confirms that all of the researchers are performing their analyses correctly, it doesn't confirm that the interpretation of those analyses is correct.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't know enough about it to know. But if the interpretation is wrong, more measurements aren't going to help.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You touched on the cornerstone of why it's not being addressed as much as it is. Economics.
In a way you could argue that we are all addicted to Economics to the extent that nothing of significance will take place to change human behaviour unless there is an economic force acting behind it. The Pony Express was prohibitively expensive, difficult, and inefficient. It lasted about a year. But it was the most economical method of quickly delivering mail across the country until the railroad was completed.
The internet was largely a toy for academics and geeks until someone realized that money could be made. After that it was an avalanche of activity to get on the internet as both a client/user and a server/storefront. Today, the super-majority of the internet is all about making money.
Alternative Energy has been around since the 1960's but it's still something that has minimal adoption. This is the result of it's cost to start and return on investment. Why don't we all live in hyper efficient off-grid homes? Because for the same amount of money I can get a much larger house and that's exactly what most people end up doing.
If you disagree with the idea that economics is the engine for everything that human civilization does today, consider this. The EU recently put into place a law for B-2 diesel fuel to be standard. This has put a tremendous economic pressure to develop bio-diesel. The most economic source for bio-diesel today is to use Palm Trees. This has put an economic pressure to start up Palm tree plantations. Do you know what they are doing about this? They are cutting down rain forests to build palm tree plantations to make bio-diesel to help the EU fight global warming. Does it makes sense environmentally? Does it make sense economically? Economics win.
I'm not actually aware of ANYTHING that has been done contrary to this economic force which was a voluntary action of the people participating in a civilization. Dolphin free Tuna was lobbied by small groups. California's higher than Federally mandated emissions is driven by the State government, not economics. Californians tolerate the extra costs incurred for the emissions regulations, but probably not by much. Perhaps they realize there isn't much choice for them because places like Los Angeles has very intolerant geographical features with respect to pollution.
So this will continue until there is either an economic force introduced to make it worthwhile to shift or for some government to actually get enough momentum built to legislate is. Take heed: the EU did it and we are losing rainforests as the result of it.
Personally, I think it would be valuable to add a federal tax to all fossil-fuels (diesel, gasoline, kerosene) to the effect of about $3.00 per gallon to be used for the development and subsidization of alternative energies that compete in the same segment of the market. If you really want to have an effect, take $3.00 away from the gas guzzling SUV and give $3.00 to the biodiesel or electric vehicle geek and watch the industry turn around.
And no, not hydrogen fuel cells. They aren't cost/energy effective solutions. They consume more energy than they produce in the long run. Just like Ethanol.
Given that we ban DDT which if it were not banned would save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives lost each year to Malaria -- the answer is "yes". The same for money spent on reducing CO2 emissions that if it were spent on providing clean water and sanitation in many third-world countries instead would save equal number of lives lost to Cholera and Dysentery. It's a choice made every day and we choose to let people die.
Originally call lake bears, they were renamed when they got chased from their hunting grounds around the great lakes
back in the day we didnt have no old school
It was still a fucked up joke.
The positive feedback loop associated with the difference in albedo between sea ice and open water is generally recognized. Another, potentially more powerful feedback loop that is not as widely known is the potential huge release of methane from the arctic permafrost. First, note that atmospheric methane is a very strong greenhouse gas, about 8 times stronger than carbon dioxide. According to http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/oilgas/hydrates/,
"Methane hydrate form in generally two types of geologic settings: (1) on land in permafrost regions where cold temperatures persist in shallow sediments, and (2) beneath the ocean floor at water depths greater than about 500 meters (about 1,640 feet) where high pressures dominate. The hydrate deposits themselves may be several hundred meters thick." "In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed its most detailed assessment of U.S. gas hydrate resources. The USGS study estimated the in-place gas resource within the gas hydrate of the United States ranges from 112,000 trillion cubic feet to 676,000 trillion cubic feet, with a mean value of 320,000 trillion cubic feet of gas. Subsequent refinements of the data in 1997 using information from the Ocean Drilling Program have suggested that the mean should be adjusted slightly downward, to around 200,000 trillion cubic feet -- still larger by several orders of magnitude than previously thought and dwarfing the estimated 1,400 trillion cubic feet of conventional recoverable gas resources and reserves in the United States. Worldwide, estimates of the natural gas potential of methane hydrate approach 400 million trillion cubic feet -- a staggering figure compared to the 5,500 trillion cubic feet that make up the world's currently proven gas reserves."
I was interested in what proportion of the methane hydrate reserves were located in the permafrost region, and how much methane release might result from melting of the permafrost. Here is some revealing information:http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/geoma rs2001/pdf/7035.pdf
From the above link we learn that oceanic hydrate contains up to 95% of all naturally occurring hydrate worldwide. The methane deposits under the permafrost are at least 200m deep, some much deeper, and those deposits constitute an estimated 5% of total methane hydrate deposits on Earth. So the actual estimate of methane trapped beneath the permafrost is estimated at 5% of 400 million trillion cubic feet of methane is:
2,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic foot = 56,633,693,423,376,624,568 liters, trapped below the permafrost.
Now, further: "What matters for climate change is methane mass (kg or tonne). Normally, volume (m3) or flow rate (m3/h) is measured using some measurement device or instrument, and these volume values are converted to mass (kg or kg/h). An intermediate step usually involves adjusting the measured volume by measured pressures and temperatures to volumes at standard conditions (0 C and 1 atm, equal to 1.013 bar)." http://cdm.unfccc.int/methodologies/inputsconsmeth /MGM_methane.pdf
So for methane, "1 gm mole occupies 22.4 litres at 273 K and 1 atm.
C 12.01115
H 1.00797
16.043 g CH4 = 22.414 litres
Density (16.043 / 22.414) = 0.7157 g/litre or kg/m3.
So 56,633,693,423,376,624,568 liter * 0.7157 g/liter= 40,532,734,383,110,650,203 grams = 40,532,734,383,110 metric tons [metric] (40.5 trillion metric tons).
somebody please check my calculations...
For comparison, the mass of the Earth's atmosphere is estimated at 5.3×10^18 Kg =5,300,000,000,000,000 ton [metric]
Scientists are beginning to see evidence that methane and CO2 release from thawing permafrost is a positive feedback result of the warming
Polar bears using their hairs as fiber optic guides to help warm the skin is a theory that has mostly been debunked. Using sunlight to warm up seems relatively obvious, untill you consider the actual environment they live in. Arctic winters have very little to no sunlight... in the coldest part of the year, mind you. The theory originated from the fact that the guard hairs are indeed hollow, but studies have not supported the idea that the hollow shaft allows light to penetrate deep into the follicle. More likely, the hair is hollow so as to become a better insulator because it has air pockets trapped inside the follicle. The reason polar bears appear white? To match the white background and provide camouflage against prey (I don't think polar bears have any significant predators besides humans and occasional sea lions. The hunter sea lions can be identified by large yellow tusks: they are large because they don't get worn down scraping the sea floor for mollusks, and they are yellow because they are stained by fat.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Also, a dark outer coat would likely be worse for heating; a black body does indeed absorb light and convert it to heat more effectively than a white body, but a black body will also radiate heat as electromagnetic energy more effectively than a white body. Considering the extremely short to nonexistant days in the polar winter, white would be a better choice as the ratio of sunlit to dark is so low.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Well, that's true, but he made a statement that he suggested someone argue with although he probably had no intention of answering. As for the sarcasm, I agree, but the response was just as bad if not worse. What irritated me was that the response was irrelevant. The Patriot Act has nothing to do with proving that global warming is affected by humans. He had no better response, so he starting ranting about things he did have an opinion on.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Kyoto puts a financial value on Greenhouse emissions, and therefore forces investment in developing those technologies that imporved GHGs. The USA's economy is more right wing than Europes. Ie. They sacrifice more economic growth for more social security. Slower growth is to be expected - you need to do better statistics to isolate the effect of Kyoto than that.
:Arbitrarily trying to limit carbon emissions, when billions of people who embrace modernity need energy and don't have alternatives, is a bad idea.
Futhermore euopean infrastructure has been converted to us infrastructure in Iraq by the war. US has stolen billions in oil from the Iraqi people through infrastructure invested in by the French (and Russians - but they aren't first world).
Compared to Kyoto requriements which are based on 1990 GHG emissions, the US has certainly not had greater improvements on GHG emissions. The US is lagging a long way in this.
re: we should fund more research for true, viable alternatives.
That is what Kyoto does. It provides a real economic reason for that development.
re
Carbon credits can also be bought and sold. Kyoto doesn't "Arbitrarity limit" - it provides a cost to the production.
Some fellows at Berkeley attempted to quantify cycles of diversification and pruning in the species history of the planet. I think they found a regular cycle for the planet on the order of a hundred million years or so, and some shorter cycles for individual species (a cycle being a diversification or increase in the number of species followed by the extinction of the unnecessary lines to leave a small fraction of the diversity in place). As of the last time I checked, they were unsure if external factors just pressured regularly by coincedence ofr if the excess diversity was actually self-regulating.
So in short, yeah, cycles of diversification and extinction are quite capable of occuring outside of civillized human influence, if that's what you mean by 'nature'.
And even high-school level biology will tell you that if a species goes extinct, a branch of another will move to fill the niche, if it still exists.
Being sarcastic about something does not make it untrue.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
This is highly dubious. There has been a scientific myth around for some time that polar bear hairs are optical fibres. Yeah right. Just think about it, there is little sunlight at the north pole in fact none during winter when warmth is most needed, the most usable light is in fact available when the bear needs it least: summer.
Why are polar bears white? Camouflage is the best guess to catch food to supply energy, not to have optical fibre hair.
Bitter and proud of it.
You misunderstand what one person's interpretation of one set of data mean. You see, science is, in fact, based on voting. More precisely, since you seem so interested in using that word as weapon, it is based on peer review. Until a paper has been peer reviewed, it is completely irrelevant to those outside the field. You say Jaworowski "points out the articles mentioned in NATURE," what you do not say is that Jaworowski has submitted his work for publication, had it undergo the process of peer review, and get published. This does not necessarily mean he is wrong, but it does mean that he should by no means be thought of as right. I haven't read his paper, it seems like you have and take his results and methodology to be sound. That's fine, but since I'm not a climatologist and I know very little about global warming, I'm going to wait until some of the experts in the field weigh in on the matter. If this paper refutes our theories on global warming like you say it does, then it will certainly merit discussion.
On the other hand, its entirely possible that every legitimate journal out there has peer reviewed his paper, but Jaworowski doesn't want to tell you about it. If he has, as the grandparent poster pointed out, been cited by Lyndon LaRouche then this is most likely the case. Anyway, to get back to my point, 1 paper that makes erroneous claims based on bad data, methodology, or interpretation does not refute 10,000 papers that say otherwise at all. I'm not necessarily saying Jaworowski's paper is incorrect, but it does smell that way. You can try to back it up all you want, but the fact is that I don't know enough about the subject to pick fact from well written fiction, like approximately 99.9%* of the people reading this. Yippee! Sulphur bubbles! That sounds sciencey, this guy must be smart! Sorry, ain't buying it, get it in The International Journal of Climatology and I'll believe it. Until then, keep trying to impress people who think they can tell their ass from a hole in the ozone layer, it helps them think they're intellectual.
* All cited statistics have a margin of error of 100%.
Wouldn't ice cores from different parts of the world have different rates of liquid water, and thus different CO2 levels? Unless they all get liquid water at some point or another (perhaps several times over) and reach an equilibrium such that 2 "waterings" or 100, all come out to about X.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I've heard this before and I think it's likely a myth for some basic physics reasons. Polar bears appear white. That means they reflect most of the light that hits them. Now its conceivable that the hairs work only in certain directions, but if a polar bear looks mostly white at all angles, I am pretty sure that it is impossible the polar bear to be simultaneously absorbing any large percentage of the light. You can't get the best of both worlds, either you are white and camouflaged (with the snow) or black and use the sun to heat yourself.
Or at the very least, poorly phrased.
Ecological change is usually on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
Up for debate. Certain specific types of ecological change, like the orientation of the magnetic poles or ice ages, happen gradually over thousands of years. Other types, such as asteroid strikes or massive super-volcano eruptions, happen very quickly.
Evolution is a slow process; it can cope with hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't cope with drastic changes on the order of a hundred years.
"Evolution" is simply shorthand for change; it can happen at any speed. Mass extinction due to meteor strike would happen extremely quickly for some species, but that would still be considered an aspect of evolution.
When *that* happens, species just get wiped out.
Which is, of course, the heart of evolution--the extinction of certain species in favor of better-adapted species.
It's incorrect to think that "evolution" could somehow "cope" with arctic warming vis a vis polar bears if it happened more slowly. In fact the speed makes little difference. If the ecological conditions shift to select against polar bears, they are going to go extinct; it doesn't matter how fast or slow it happens.
What you might be thinking is that if it happens slowly enough, it may allow time for speciation to occur, and the polar bear line to branch into new, better adapted species. But it might not--it's not a guaranteed thing. Natural selection can only work with what speciation gives it.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You're right about the parent poster's claim - and my initial paragraph was badly phrased. However, my point is easily expanded to include methodology as well as actual data sets. If someone has a problem with a methodology, people will dissect it, and at some point, a consensus will emerge on whether the methodology is appropriate.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
He (or she) probably thought it wasn't worth the effort. Trying to have a sensible discussion with climate-change sceptics (especially if they post AC) is kind of like trying to reason with creationists - it's a waste of your time and it annoys the creationist.
It's a lot more fun (and more satisfying) to just slag them off.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
It's worth pointing out that in fact it is only when you have a non-statistical scientific reason for there to be causation that one can begin to say that correlation is more than correlation.
Exactly. We have a non-statistical scientific reason like physics. I think it was mentioned in the post you are responding to. It's hard to perform controlled experiments on the whole earth though, so we can't just put on our goggles, fill up the atmosphere with CO2 and then fly out to space to measure the temperature gradient (then repeat said experiment with varying amounts of CO2 and other gasses to get precise observed data). Because of this fact really smart physicists make models by observing more wieldy experiments. While these can be equations as simple as F=ma, for very complex systems, like the whole Earth, it takes very complex computer programs. I know you know all this, so here's the basics for everyone else (the kids): Increased CO2 in the atmosphere prevents heat from being lost to space. It's kind of like how glass prevents heat from being lost to the outside of a greenhouse. That's where the perky name came from. In general air is a pretty good insulator (that's why double paned windows and styrofoam are full of it). Air is even more transparent than glass (so it let's through even more light)! Light excites atoms blah blah increased kinetic energy gives off heat energy as atoms collide blah blah blah...
Anyhow, light to heat conversion and insulation is pretty basic physics. High school physics in some places. Further, both topics are covered extensively on the Internet.
Oh, my point (sorry for all that rambling!): we know the Earth is warming (we've measured it). We know why (more CO2 means better insulation given a more or less constant source of light). The only debate is how much of that carbon do we put in the atmosphere (anthropogenic forcing) by, for example, the last 200 years of burning enormous amounts of organic material that had previously been buried for tens of millions of years versus some natural process; and whether we should do anything about it.
Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir. I know practically no one is going to read this now that the story is off the main page and the RSS.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I'm not sure about your second idea, but the first one is already a seriously considered proposal. The idea is to tank a tanker-full of iron oxide powder to iron-deficient waters and dump it in, creating an artificial algal bloom. You get something like a 100-to-1 rate of CO2 sequestration compared to how much iron you have to use. The potential risks need to be studied, however - as you increase the iron in the waters in one location, the algae will eat up other nutrients that would normally have made it downstream, so you risk damaging fisheries elsewhere and even potentially causing unintended extinctions. Thus, this needs to be approached slowly, and carefully monitored.
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
That's how science works - it's not based on voting, but on being correct.
And if you can't stand up to peer review, nobody is going to believe that you're correct.
"Perusal of these determinations convinced me that glaciological studies are not able to provide a reliable reconstruction of CO2 concentrations in the ancient atmosphere.
And no peer review group agrees with him - otherwise, it would have been published by someone more respectable than Lyndon LaRouche. What about this are you not understanding?
And if you bothered to actually have read the paper, you would find quite an extensive bibliography of other works. Not just one single scientist.
He cites others, but since he can't get pubished, he's obviously abusing the data. Creationists use hundreds of cites in exactly the same way.
What an extreme bit of ignorance of the science to pretend that there's only one relevant study of all that has been done - how creationist of you.
Making such remarks proves you're dumb, ignorant and obtuse.
You completely missed the point. Even if *all* ice cores are wrong, ice cores are themselves just a small fraction of climatology science.
Jaworowski said NO SUCH THING. He merely claimed that what he found INVALIDATES THE CLAIMS THAT HAVE BEEN DEMONSTRABLY MADE.
If you yell, it will make it true, right? Sorry to burst your bubble, but even a simple google search shows that Jaworowski believes in global cooling.
Yell some more, perhaps you'll change reality!
1. Attacking the credibility, not the criticism. Non-sequitur.
Yes! If the claims were scientifically valid, he'd have been able to get them into a scientific journal. What about this is so difficult for you to understand? People who work in the field clearly found his claims to be BS.
2. As a matter of fact, Jaworowski points out the articles published in NATURE. You obviously have not read the paper.
So do creationists. Anyone can abuse references. What matters is if they are doing the science correctly, and the method of determining if a person is doing the science correctly is if it withstands peer review by experts in the field. It did not.
3. Global Warming gets talked about on NPR (or so I hear), which is even more damning than that total cretin Larouche picking some subject up.
Yes. They *report* on what has been published in *scientific journals*, and thus has undergone *peer review*.
Look, if you don't want to trust the review of dozens of people who are experts in their respective scientific fields, and would rather listen to a single crank, lets just go into some glaringly obvious holes in his paper right offhand. If that's not enough for you, I've got one heck of a lot more. His paper is a pile of garbage, and there's no surprise at all that it didn't stand up to peer review.
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
If someone has a problem with a methodology, people will dissect it
Isn't that precisely what the paper referenced by the other poster does?
at some point, a consensus will emerge on whether the methodology is appropriate.
At some point. These things don't happen quickly. That the consensus hasn't yet shifted isn't a valid argument against a differing point of view. Perhaps it will never shift, perhaps other papers will rebut the claim that ice core samples don't provide an accurate picture of historical CO2 levels, but that can't be known in advance so it isn't a valid argument. Perhaps the sound, well-reasoned rebuttals have already been published, in which case your argument is easy: simply cite the rebuttals.
Bottom line: There may be a scientific hole in the other poster's argument, but there's no philosophical hole.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
No, the previous poster was just outright wrong. Of course, you usually are when you rely on claims by someone who can't stand up to peer review. Never, ever trust scientific data that hasn't been peer reviewed (even peer review isn't enough to catch everything but at least it catches extreme cranks like this guy).
Man on crucifix terrorizes church, demands they eat his flesh and blood. Details at 11.
However, last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes.
I am not a biologist, but I do know a *few* things about polar bears - I've been all across the Canadian Arctic, from Churchill, Inuvik, Tuktoyuktuk, Alert, Nain, Frobisher Bay, points inbetween, and grew up in Labrador.
One think I CAN say, though, is that if the ice cap had receeded 200 miles in the last 20 years, the North West Passage would no longer be a dream, but one of the most crowded waterways in the world.
There are just too many things in that article that are on the surface, at least, nonsense that I doubt the rest of it.
Propoganda from the global warming folks, maybe?
Ahh, now *that* link is a real argument. Thanks.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
so, is a zebra white with black stripes or black with white stripes? if the latter is true i bet they jam...
always mosh clockwise
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/nov99/9418367 17.Zo.r.html
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Lock yourself up in a cell without electricity or heating or cooling. You are just as responsible as anyone else and should be stopped. You are the problem!
Typical racist media! Polar bears--WHITE bears--swim to FIND FOOD. But you KNOW that if that had been BLACK bears instead of white bears, this article would have called it LOOTING.
Ironically black and grizzly bears are often accused of looting and general mayhem when they encroach on human development. or more appropriately, human development encroches on them.
Polar bears also "loot" and rummage in this way, but this is largely overlooked.
These facts however, have no bearing on race relations withing the continental United States, but do make for good comedy routine material.
May the Maths Be with you!
Great commentary on the 'Gender Gap in IT' article btw. "Self-fullfilling fallacies" abound in that discussion ("everyone knows girls suck at computers!" Sheesh). Thanks for being a voice of reason. I avoided posting as much as I could because I already argued it 'til I was blue in the face on the 'Depictions of Women in Video Games' article the other day. If you want my take on it, it's in my comment history.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.