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NASA Study Shows Antarctic Ice Sheet Shrinking
deman1985 writes "A recently released NASA study has shown that the Antarctic ice shelf is shrinking at an alarming rate of 36 cubic miles per year. The study, run from April 2002 to August 2005, indicates that the melting accounted for 1.2 millimeters of global sea level rise for the period. From the article: 'That is about how much water the United States consumes in three months and represents a change of about 0.4 millimeter (0.01575 inch) per year to global sea level rise, the study concluded. The study claims the majority of the melting to have occurred in the West Antarctic ice sheet."
If you believe in global warming the terrorists win
Or a meter every 2500 years?
Wow.... better shore up the levees, Waterworld is coming soon!
1.2 mm / (August 2005 - April 2002) = about 0.4 millimeter per year, the study concluded.
This is a deep conclusion.
West Antarctica was pretty dull anyway. At least East Antarctica is safe.
Shrink Grow Shink... Grow... Shrink... Grow... Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Shink... Grow... Shrink... Grow...Grow Shrink Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Shink... Grow... Shrink... Grow...Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Shrink Grow Shrink Grow Shrink Grow
and that's just 10000 years
YES! Finally I'll be able to buy some property in Arizona desert and make millions redeveloping it after the ocean rolls in...
Any day now....
2500 years? a Meter?
Hmmm... Anyone want to by a condo with ocean view in Arizona... Not quite finished...
Anyone?
PFFFT!
PS.. Remember MARS icecaps are melting also... Thats probibly my fault too...
Why can't people understand CYCLES? and "GET OVER IT"...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
NOTHING !
those human constructs called numbers and green bits of paper (cash) are far more important than our home planet
screw your kids and screw their kids i want that 50" TV and Hummer NOW !!
... the arctic ice sheet has to be taken in account too..
So when do the volcanoes under the ice erupt and slough the whole icecap off into the sea so that the Martians can revolt?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
OH NOS
Climate change is the apocalypse! Get scared!
Spend money on useless "climate friendly" products and programs!
Hey people wake up, climate change is NORMAL. Did you know that ice pretty much covered the planet? Where is it now? Looks like "global warming" saved our asses a long time ago.
Did you know that the desert regions of today used to be farmed and livable? This was BEFORE the industrial revolution. Did you think that the rulers of the time put out restrictions on cooking and metalworking fires to cut down on greenhouse gases?
It's unreal how stupid sheeple are.
Actually more water vapour means more global warming which means more water vapour which means more global warming which means more water vapour. There's more involved than you can find out by Googling for 10 minutes.
..."LA-LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Seriously though, those in power really don't give a shit. I could sugar-coat it, but that's the reality of the situation.
Just take what happened in New Orleans as an example. Was this a wake-up call about the potential devastation that climate change could cause? No, it was practically shrugged off as a "shit happens", and no real discussion as to the hows, the whys and the what could bes of global climate change ever entered the mainstream.
I feel for the people of New Orleans, I really do, and I don't disagree that their suffering and loss was newsworthy but you don't help avoid such disasters happening again by ignoring the wider issue.
Bottom line: there's a good chance that we're going to be part of a generation that will have some real apologising to do to generations to come because we were so nonchalant about our environment.
I can't be the only one who can see himself telling a grandchild that we pissed away the planet because we were too busy having a good time to care about anything else.
Cue the people living with their heads in the sand with their "Chicken Little" accusations...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
How can the rate of an observation be "alarming" if it has only recorded 3 of 6,000,000,000 years of existense?
I always thought water was a greenhouse gas and more water vapour in the air would mean increased greehouse effect which would mean globally warmer temperatures which would mean air capable of holding more vapour... do you have any sources on your statement? I'm not disputing what you said, it's just that i keep hearing arguments in both directions and would like to figure out who's pulling my leg :)
Also, when you say water vapour, I assume you don't mean clouds, which are not vapour.
solar radiation is depleted and scattered by atmosphere
Go choke on a crumpet you bastard
>More water means more water vapor, which means less heating from the sun.
H2O is a greenhouse gas. It does reduce heating from the sun if it forms into daytime clouds. The same clouds also hold heat in at night. Then just to complicate things further, the more ice melts, the less reflection there is from the polar regions, and solar heating goes up.
It is going to continue getting hotter. Everything making it hotter is continuing to operate, nothing is stopping. The last 5 years are among the hottest in human history. The ice is melting faster than before, faster than predicted. The melt accelerates further melting. When the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Greenland have melted, the seas will be 35' higher, which will be the end of the world for the majority of humans, who live near the coasts or will be invaded by the displaced people fleeing the rising seas.
You're insisting on denial of the catastrophe because you made up your mind before the situation was so obviously bad. You were wrong then, you're wrong now. The least you could do is drop the denial, because that's the main obstacle to people working together to lower the risk that the end of the world is coming.
Regardless of whether you want to admit that humans caused the warming, the fact is that our actions could slow or halt it before it destroys us.
--
make install -not war
We all feel sorry for the people in New Orleans, but you really need to ask why it happened. What in the heck happened to the hundreds of millions over the last twenty year? Why one not a single penny actually spent on the levies?
The breakdown was not from the federal government. The local government for the last twenty years is the actual cause of the problem because I am pretty sure that hurricanes have been around for a few years.
Amenties include:
*Refurbished Y2K model# 1D10T"
Power to the Peaceful
PANIC! PANIC!
I say nuke the poles, lets get this done now, not 2500 years in the future!
Just take what happened in New Orleans as an example. Was this a wake-up call about the potential devastation that climate change could cause?
No, it was a wakeup call to the people of New Orleans. The US government cut funding to the levies which when breached caused the flooding. Human error was to blame. Get your facts straight.
...And that generation can appologize to the generation that follows and that generation..... hmmm any good ideas of what we might have done? My grandmother worked building aircraft in WWI, putting cloth on the wings, my uncle worked for Aerojet building Saturn 1B's and the second stage of the Saturn V... yeah each generation makes mistakes, but the biggest mistake is assuming that they did nothing to better the world. Problem with liberal progressives is they assume everything we touch turns to shit and that we should feel guilty about the shit and we need to apologize for the shit. Liberals are supposed to be progressive as in forward looking as in pushing the boundaries, seeking a better world. Alas they seem to have lost sight of that goal and now just want to sit around mope and complain about everything. It now sucks to be a liberal progressive.
nasal cavity is probed by extended phalanges
Well actually you'll find the people in power do give a shit. Our country knows what is happening, and knows that we are going through a period of climate change and global warming and it will bring about changes like sea level rises and maybe higher rates of hurricanes if you believe in that kind of thing.
What is dangerous is jumping to the conclusion of why it is changing. If we were to "accept" the opinions of a few climatologists that human nature is what is causing the climate change, then the changes in behaviour we would have to make to try not to warm the atmosphere would be very damaging to the economy.
But why it is dangerous is that we DO NOT KNOW WHY THIS IS HAPPENING. So sticking our head in the sand and saying "It's all human fault!" and ruining our economy while china forges ahead with their industry will mean in 100 years when this natural warming cycle is over and the earth starts cooling again, china will be a world power and the US will be like mexico with nothing to show for the past few hundred years.
Just remember until we know what is causing global warming getting in a panic about who is doing what to stop it is just like being insane.
1.2 millimeters?! Time to head for high ground!
/dev/random
>> The local government for the last twenty years is the actual cause of the problem
You're missing the BIGGER PICTURE here. Weather is becoming more extreme as a direct result of global warming, which in turn is happening becuse of man-made pollution.
Why is this so hard for Americans to grasp or accept? Its not doubted by any other nations in the world.
We need this ice to melt so we can have more water for the 6.5 billion people on the planet.
All kidding aside, so what. The Earth evolves with us or without us. If we kill ourselves then we probably deserve it. The Earth won't care in the least bit. There will be a balance somewhere as the law of nature dictates it as much as the law of nature dictates that an apple will fall from a tree if it's stem breaks.
I care more about economic stability (not that I don't care about this but any change is beyond me) because our society, community, and personal comfort demands it.
The world has always been screwed up for a snapshot of any generation. Anybody thinking that they shouldn't continue to have children because of the screwed up world is more concerned with influences outside of their circle of control and probably shouldn't have kids anyway because of the indoctrination that Earth is a bad place to live (but usually those kids are better adjusted because they know they have screwed up parents).
If you want to see some cool North American Paleogeographic maps, check out this link, it might put some things into perspective:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/nam.html
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
For those of you following NASA, there has been a flood of earth science recently.
:) No joke, but some property like sea terminals are going to get more valuable if things warm up.
It's interesting stuff, hopefully more data will continue to help refine and quanitify our understanding of how the earth works.
And guide developers to their next beachfront property
Sigh... yet another pointless cuss-filled standard-issue rant from a destitute potus pounder
'hurricane' katrina was a 'hurricane' that displaced a big group of folks who'd been living below sea level near the sea. Not the manifestation of global apocalyptic doom.
Is the ice melt over This volcano ?
Caiuse Parts of Antartica have neen colder than normal in the past half decade.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Because we're from america. Do you need any more reason for our inability to comprehend things that the rest of the world accepts?
Global dimming used to dampen the warming. Silver lining: less asthma and acid rain while on summer vacation in Siberia. :)
Power to the Peaceful
Thats just like an opinion man.
I don't know if shouting MOD PARENT UP ever works, but the parent has one of the smartest comments I've read on slashdot this year. Why go putting all the effort into something that MIGHT have a beneficial effect when we KNOW it'll also have a massive negative effect. It just doesn't make sense rationally, economically or feasibly.
Well, I have no power at all, and I don't give a shit either.
I hope this helps. :)
And what about the causes of the increased hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico? Or did you forget about those facts?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
AS I understand it, if all the ice melted from Antarctica, the net result would be the continent rising.
The continent would rise, probably by dozens of feet, but not quickly (think tens of thousands of years at least). The sea level would also rise. There are, however, ways to remedy that if we choose to do so. Flooding the Sahara, for instance, could drop the world's sea level by as much as 20 feet, depending on just how much seawater you want to allow to flow across Libya.
More water means more water vapor, which means less heating from the sun.
No. It depends very much on the state of the water in the atmosphere. High clouds increase the albedo of the earth, and reflect sunlight. The same clouds can also reduce heat loss at night. Clouds though, are not water vapor, they are made up of small droplets or crystals of water in the liquid state or solid states. Water vapor is far and away the most significant greenhouse gas; without it, we'd all freeze to death.
The greenhouse gas that gets the most attention in the press is carbon dioxide, which makes up about 25% of the greenhouse effect, while water is responsible for around 70%. We may be able to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'm not aware of any proposals to control the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Shrink-wrapping the oceans is probably well beyond our means for the forseeable future.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And one more effect: greater heat in low lattitudes brings more water into the atmosphere, which can increase precipitation in higher lattitudes, where it can add to glaciers, etc.
The whole thing's a chaotic system.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
ruining our economy
*Where* does this idea come from? Seriously? The amount of sheer innovation that can be done, and money to be made, in the areas of green power, increasing efficiency of existing devices, etc, etc, is *massive*. This is, if anything, an *opportunity*, one that doomsayers like yourself really seem to be missing.
Obviously to counteract the growing threat this poses to our coastal cities we must drink more water and take longer showers...
What I don't get is how you can even identify a West Antarctic ice sheet? Isn't Antarctica roughly a circle centered on the pole? So, isn't every ice sheet the West one?
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- 36 cu. Miles = 39,640,217,100,000 gallons (give or take a fluid dram or so).
- 39,640,217,100,000 divided by 300,000,000 U.S. citizens = 132,134 gallons per citizen.
- 132,134 gallons divided by 3 months (90 days) = 1,468 gallons per citizen per day (according to NASA).
I guess NASA assumes every man, woman, and child owns an automobile (and washes it every day) and takes a shower every two hours non-stop.But in all fairness, I did neglect to include a gallon or so for human consumption. You know how popular bottled water is these days.
I will probably be marked flamebait but this is a serious question.
Hasn't the Earth been warming up since the last iceage?
and
Hasn't the polar ice caps been receeding since the last ice age?
Have we not observed things in nature usually cycled. Why couldn't the global temperature be any different?
10 Iceage
20 global warming
30 life becomes almost extinct
40 global warming continues
50 spontaneous fires produce enough smoke to block the sun
60 lack of sunlight causes global cooling
70 goto 10
run
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
He would probably just say something (in broken Greek accented English) like "Go Have Screw For Yourself"
GHG's are a red herring anyway. If you look at the geological charts comparing them with global temperatures, there is no correlation at all. Solar activity is a much more likely candidate. Of course, as a Canadian from Edmonton, I find concern over global warming to be funny anyway. Here it is March already and it hasn't hit -40 once!
After meeting the united nations has issued a resolution that will force everyone to drink more water. Tony Blair in a press conferance earlier today stated: "... only 16.5 gallons of water a day is all we each need to chip in to keep the ocean levels from rising..." The scientific community has aplauded this idea and water distribution stations are planning to be setup around the world within the next few months.
Water vapor is a very powerful greenhouse gas and definitely increase temperatures. Clouds can work both ways, cirrus clouds generally warm the planet, while low-level clouds cool the planet.
It's just common sense. If one country is putting 100% of its energy into producing goods that can be sold, then it will be a stronger economy than a country that is putting 80% of its energy into producing goods that can be sold, and wasting 20% of its energy on making sure the other 80% of its energy is clean.
You might say green power is profitable, but nowhere near as profitable as the country that doesn't waste its time on such efforts and doesn't have to pay for such power.
The US government wasn't responsible for it, it was local and state government that was in charge of it. I don't see anywhere in the constituion "protect states from their own stupidity". While FEMA may not have ran perfectly, they were there to clean up. They had nothing to do with prevention.
Someone save me from this sanity.
Having a large continent at a pole is unusual anyway, Antartica used to be near the equator but was moved by plate motion to it's current location close enough to the south pole to have permanent ice 100 odd million yrs ago to present. Before that the south pole was open ocean just like the Arctic ocean is now and more of this water was in the ocean instead of glacial ice.
Stories like this always bring out a host of 'climate change denial' comments.
Let's say I could prove to you that *if* climate change is real (as is thought by many scientists), it would have real consequences to you personally. That you and your children would be malnourished, be drafted to fight resource wars, you'd be struck down with new diseases never before experienced in your area, societies and governments would collapse - would you still be so bloody nonchalant?
What I'm trying to say is that I reckon that climate change deniers do so with the implicit assumption that it won't affect them.
It's not alarming that it's shrinking by that rate compared to any historical values we have.
It's alarming because "oh shit, that's a lot of ice making the sea levels rise."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Areas endangered by high sea levels are usually those already sinking under their own weight (NOLA, Venice, to name a couple)
And New Orleans?
What is dangerous is jumping to the conclusion of why it is changing. If we were to "accept" the opinions of a few climatologists that human nature is what is causing the climate change...
I beg to differ. In a recent study by Science Magazine, a search of the ISI database on the keyword "climate change" yielded 928 peer-reviewed papers, NOT A SINGLE ONE OF WHICH disputed the conclusion that global warming is caused by man-made changes to the atmosphere.
The so-called "debate" only exists in the popular press, where (in a misguided attempt to provide "balance",) 53% of articles express doubt on global warming. Red-staters may not like this article very much either, but I challenge any of them to find a respectable counterargument.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
What?!? Sorry, buddy, but you've got that backwards. Energy, in bulk, is simply getting more expensive. This isn't a problem just in the US. This is a problem for everyone. The cost of a barrel of oil is going to continue to increase as new sources dwindle and demand outstrips supply, and the same is true for many other primary fuel sources (eg, natural gas).
So, tell me, which company is likely to be more profitable and competative: the one that uses a lot of energy, and thus must pay for it, or the one that uses less energy, and thus pays less? Furthermore, as traditional energy costs increase further, green power becomes a more and more attractive option.
To give a more realistic example, imagine you have an office building designed to use natural lighting, thus decreasing the amount of artificial light required. Clearly, the company operating this building makes substantial savings on electricity costs, and as energy costs increase, the amount of savings will also increase. Sounds like a pretty strong competative advantage to me.
So on one hand I hear that there's global warming, and that makes the ice sheets melt. Then I hear that when the ice sheets melt, it reduces the salt level in the north Atlantic. And I hear that when that happens, the big heat conveyor stream that comes up the Atlantic kind of peters out, which makes it colder.
Apparently, global warming makes it colder. Make up my mind already.
Actually, it seems that scientists are not in agreement about whether the cooling effects caused by the melting, etc., are greater, equal, or lesser than the warming effects in play now.
Lastly: there was a "little ice age" (History Channel) that ended about 1850 - curiously about the same time as the industrial revolution. I have to wonder how much of the warming we've seen since then is caused by humanity, and how much is just "the Earth is warming up for reasons we don't understand."
All that said, I still think it's better, holistically speaking, not to pump a bunch of pollution into the air, water and soil. I'm not saying that any of that pollution is or is not causing global climate change; I'm just saying.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
While H2O vapour may be a greenhouse gas, last time i looked, clouds were white. Anything that is the colour white reflects light quite a bit. Now, though I'm not a scientist of any sort, the way i see it, if the world had more white, puffy clouds covering it, shouldn't it reflect more light away from the earth?
This global warming seems like it should kind of balance out. More heat means more clouds, more clouds mean less light, less light means less heating.
Kind of resembles other natural cycles on earth, don't you think?
You do realize the scientists who are making these claims? Are you going to say they aren't scientists too?
You should see what Bush had to say about the global warming news.
It may be that we will come out in a world better suited to our soon to be 9 billion human population. It may be that much of the planet will become uninhabitable or no longer arable. What is evident is that the majority of people who bother to consider the possible outcomes seem to think there will be one diasterous consequence and that somehow we'll all pull together to get things under control. It's as if something like Katrina is envisioned, but it's likely to be very complex and detrimental on a number of fronts. The truth is our ability to maintain our existing infrastructure is very limited.
A washed out bridge can bring traffic to a halt on a major highway. Imagine a warming world with increased sever storms, washing out roadways and rail lines, while bringing down power lines. Ice storms could bring the whole eastern seaboard to it's knees because the existing powerlines aren't able to carry the weight of the ice.
The emergency contingency plans and resources in place were slow and sloppy in reacting to Katrina. Play whatif with three or four hurricanes or sever storms pounding on the Gulf of Mexico and turning to ice storms in the north.
In the late 90's the American scientist Edmund Wilson postulated that for the existing world population to enjoy the life style of America today on a percapita basis would require the resources of another 5 worlds. Recently a conservative thinktank worked out that for China and India to live at the level of America today we would require the resources of another two worlds. So we have a world awash in weapons with a population ontrack to hit 9 billion in a biosphere showing signs of undergoing radical systemic change.
You should ridicule the alarmists. You should make jokes because it looks like it's going to get ugly fast.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
More water means more water vapor, which means less heating from the sun. The Earth's environment is a buffer, where one effect is often offset by a resulting opposite effect.
... no. Typical example of common sense gone wrong. Provided that there's enough liquid to ensure phase equilibrium (which there is in this case already, since we do have oceans) the vapour concentration depends on pressure, temperature and chemical potential (take it as the amount of work for a molecule to be transfered from a phase to the other) Now the last one depends on a few other factors, like the total contact surface (a 1m change in sealevel is going to yield a very minor change in the ocean surface; but losing the ice sheet that covers the Arctic Ocean would be quite a bit more important) and surface salinity (which, again, will change very little) Think for instance of water in a tall cylindrical glass - the evaporation rate on the water surface will not depend on whether the glass is full or 3/4 empty, all other things being equal. On the other hand, lack of ice at poles will mean less reflected solar radiation, hence a temperature increase and thus more vapour - but for a different reason. btw, you've been lectured already that water vapour is a big player in the greenhouse effect game.
... I'm gonna buy meself a yacht and organize diving trips, it'll be a rage. Well, wrong idea. Perhaps you don't realize it, but there are HUGE pieces of Earth's environment that currently depend on cold poles. Take that away and there will be some ...ummm ... interesting changes going on. Heck, even the melting process that dumps increased amounts of cold water in the system is already producing changes.
Wow, this is so misguided it's sad.
More water means more water vapor [...] Ummm
which means less heating from the sun ok, let's assume you meant less heat absorbed from the Sun. That only works for clouds - regular vapour is not particularly reflective (quite the contrary) What makes clouds better is ice bits and small water droplets that can play total internal reflection tricks. The problem with clouds is that they work both ways - meaning they interfere with the Earth radiating heat away as well. And the water vapour below the cloud cover would trap heat happily - see Venus for an example of greenhouse effect running wild in spite of the thick cloud cover. (well, it's not that simple - but blindly saying 'clouds are good' is misguided)
The Earth's environment is a buffer[...] Sure, everything in Nature works through balancing effects. You might want to wonder though about where exactly the equilibrium point is and how is the system fluctuating about it. It's the same idea as saying 'hey, the changes in the average temperature of the atmosphere are minuscule, why should we worry?' while disregarding the fact that the extreme points of the fluctuations are growing apart and the transitions are more brutal, with interesting effects like massive draughts, floods, increased strength and frequency of storms and so on. So yeah, the planet can take it - it survived for several billion years by now; the ones living on it, however, are more delicate.
Still, this is misrepresented anyway. What if all the ice melts and the ocean level does rise by a meter? no big deal, eh? a few places going underwater
Noaa Attributes Recent Increase In Hurricane Activity To Naturally Occurring Multi-Decadal Climate Variability linky
more ice melting also means decreased salinity for the oceans and decreased albedo for the planet.
Do you think those might have adverse effects?
evil is as evil does
I propose we dump the next guy that trolls with the natural cycle talking point in a toxic waste pond. After all, it's all part of a natural cycle. It all came from the earth in the past, it all erupts and subducts and reacts. What harm could it do to humans?
I think fairly good guesses can be made. We do know that atmospheric carbon dioxide, by dint of its absorption spectra, will tend to trap heat in the atmosphere. We also know that historically temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide correlate very closely. We also know that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have spiked to a level completely unprecedented in the last 650,000 years, with the majority spike occuring as an exponentially since about 200 years ago. We know that many different temperature reconstructions over the last 2000 years all show a dramatic spike in temperature correlating to, and lagging slightly behind, the spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide. We even know, in case you were curious, that the spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide was caused by human activity. We have strong correlation, and independent reasons (see absorption spectra of carbon dioxide) to expect causation. That's reasonably significant evidence.
Of course the atmosphere and climate are a very complex system, with many factors coming into play. For instance water vapour can be a significant greenhouse gas, or if it forms clouds it can be reflective and help cool the atmosphere. Methane and many other gases also have an impact as greeenhouse gases. There are also questions of solar variation. Fortunately we have people who are well educated in all these matters spending vast amounts of effort collating and considering all this data, testing and validating climate models, reconstructing better historical records, and reporting their results...
That, actually is less clear. It really depends on what changes are made and how they are effected. Kyoto may well be a rather poor blunt instrument, but one bad implementation does not mean it cannot be done. For instance, a lot of effort can be directed toward energy efficiency - managing to do the same, or more with less. In the mid to long term ebergy efficiency is going to be far and away a net gain for the economy. There's also the question of how much economic impact warming, or climate change in general, may have. Sea level rises could well see much greater likelihood of flooding and damage to coastal areas, potentially costing hundreds of billions in cleanup or relocation. The same can be said of stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic, or of sudden changes in the viability of agricultural areas as a result of changing climate. Balanced against the costs to the economy of climate change the costs of some degree of prevention and mitigation may well be negligible. Mostly you seem to be looking for excuses to do nothing.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Hmmmm. Let's see, a major amount of ice melts from Antarctica. Freed from this weight, the continent rises (maybe). Wouldn't that displace more water, thus causing water levels to rise in other places like the ones people live in? As far as water vapor is concerned see this article at RealClimate.
"from the that's-polar-bear-country dept."
Actually, Polar bears are Arctic critters -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bears
the keyword "climate change" yielded 928 peer-reviewed papers, NOT A SINGLE ONE OF WHICH disputed the conclusion that global warming is caused by man-made changes to the atmosphere.
In all fairness, in the absence of additional data, this statement on it's face only suggests a bias in editorial policy. I find it hard to believe that with something this complicated that there are not SOME 'dissenting' papers.
Maybe I'll start my own journal - the Journal of Anti-Anthropogenic Global Warming just to see if I get any submissions (from legit data crunchers, not nut jobs with an agenda).
Computational Chemistry products and services.
If something is "only" occurring in 3 of 6,000,000,000 cases it can still be alarming. The very fact that our current state is so unique in the history of the world is the essence of it being alarming. Just think of if there were 6,000,000,000 viruses and 5,999,999,997 were not harmful to humans but the other 3 mutated and became so deadly as to kill off the whole human race. Those statistically insignificant 3 are still alarmingly important because of their contribution to the outcome.
And you're just going to take the word of one site that for it? That's irrational, especially considering that it is not a site contributed to in any meaningful way by climatologists. Bright geeks would not only do more research than you've done but take the source into account. They would also learn something about the scientific method and why the overwhelming majority of climatologists do believe in global warming strongly influence by human activities. There are disagreements about the details, most certainly. But to use those to claim that it doesn't exist or that it might be warming but that our many activities don't influence it has no more credibility than those who use disagreements among biologists concerning the exact mechanisms of evolution to dispute its existence.
By the way, you do realize that this web site you're so proud of is run by the guy who just was caught out for minimizing risks from tobacco on this site and on Fox News even as he was taking money from the tobacco companies?
here you go, i thought this was a nerds site not one for lazy fskers, you overweight by any chance ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_change
or perhaps a middle school project would explain it better
http://pumas.jpl.nasa.gov/PDF_Examples/02_10_97_1
Near as I can see, it's an "all of the above" situation. Natural terran and solar cycles combined with a lot of man induced climate altering activity. Stuff happens. Best we can do is work towards lessening our footprint while also advancing technologically. The two go hand in hand, so, no longer term problems, as long as we address it, which is the ultimate crapshoot. Bread and circuses business as usual and stay in denial of massive change, or will we actually do the necessary work? That part is a huge variable.
We need a super fast water molecule splitter. We can breath oxygen, and burn the hydrogen.
Was this a wake-up call about the potential devastation that climate change could cause?
No, it was a wake-up call that the North Atlantic Mode has made its 40 year cycle and we can expect two decades of intense storms. Like the Great Hurricane that flattened Galveston in 1900 and killed 6000 people, or Hurricane Betsy in 1964 that flooded half of New Orleans with 20 foot deep water.
You actually believe *WE* are responsible for the problems *you* see with the earth? Why don't you do a little research? Ever hear of the "Little Ice Age?" Did you know other parts of Antarctic ice are increasing at rates of 26 gigatons per year? And no, Katrina wasn't a wake up about the environment, it was a wakeup about red tape and the gov't. Hurricanes happen. It wasn't a byproduct of someone's tailpipe.
Nothing worse than a rebel without a clue.
This guy is way out there
Wrong. There is widespread scientific consensus on the existence of global warming, and that human activity is contributing to it. A 2004 Survey of 928 peer-reviewed research articles related to climate change from 1993-2003 concluded that:
"Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."
Noteworthy is that none of the articles dissented with the consensus opinion. None of them. Not much of a controversy, at least among people who know what they are talking about.
Hmmm.
Sounds good. Ok. Now you shut off your computer. It uses electricity which is probably produced by a polluting source of energy. Then don't drive a car. Don't take a bus. Don't use a train. Don't buy anything, it takes energy to move crap around. Don't eat, it takes energy to grow food. Don't bathe or wash your clothes, it takes energy to heat water.
I'll do my part, but YOU first.
Cut funding? I wish. Complete and utter BS:
c le/2005/09/07/AR2005090702462.html
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
"In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large."
"..overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects."
So WTF have they been doing with the money?
"By 1998, Louisiana's state government had a $2 billion construction budget, but less than one tenth of one percent of that -- $1.98 million -- was dedicated to levee improvements in the New Orleans area. State appropriators were able to find $22 million that year to renovate a new home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and $35 million for one phase of an expansion to the New Orleans convention center."
I've wasted enough time on this, you can google the rest yourself.
The liberal leadership in New Orleans reaped exactly what it sowed for so many years.
I guess we should get a team to the Antarctic post haste so we can keep The Thing from thawing out and taking over the world 27,000 hrs from first contact. And while were at it we need to do something about that big blob we air lifted and dropped off there back in the 50's.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
You can't even post under a Slashdot username, you make some ridiculous argument that reducing pollution equals doing absolutely nothing, and I should trust you to do your part?
You smelly hippie, your increased, though brief, pollution contribution from setting yourself on fire would be well worth the end of your idiotic prattle.
--
make install -not war
Now, the interesting question. Are there any climate models that predict what might happen with regards to global warming in such a case?
After all, I am strangely colored.
How can the rate of an observation be "alarming" if it has only recorded 3 of 6,000,000,000 years of existense?
Is this alarming enough?
Tat Tvam Asi
In other words, the continent rises, and so does the continental shelf surrounding it (after all, the shelf is just a submerged part of the continent). So the extra water has to slough off the shelf, and the oceans get deeper. Good observation.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
This is not a NASA study, people. It seems the submitter and the person who accepted it can't read. It's a University of Colorado study. The only NASA connection is that they used data collected by NASA, but the interpretation is the authors and has nothing to do with NASA.
Before claiming the feds were not responsible, you may want to investigate the Army Corps of Engineers and their responsibilities. They were the ones responsible for the levees that broke. They took them over after a rather large flood in 1927 when congress decided local control wasn't working.
The Arctic is the area surrounding the north pole. It has polar bears. The Antarctic is the area surrounding the south pole. It has penguins. Penguins and polar bears do not share habitat. We don't have penguins up here. There are no polar bears down there.
Signed,
A guy in the Arctic.
I read it on teh Intarweb so it must be true! Wait, I read about both global warming being true and about it being false...O Internet, why hast thou forsaken me? Or maybe this is just a quantum juxtaposition. Some day somebody will measure the oceans and they will either jump up 50 meters or stay level.
I'd suggest you take a look at Venus then for a what happens when greenhouse systems runaway. The cloud cover and lack of an ozone layer there does an excellent job of keeping the surface temperature at a balmy 740K.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
For a more developed argument, please see Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming paper for the explosive and decisive attack against the method of scrutinizing scientific truth which you just proposed.
...for always telling people that God is punishing us.
'That is about how much water the United States consumes in three months and represents a change of about 0.4 millimeter (0.01575 inch) per year to global sea level rise, the study concluded'
That you are telling us we should give in to a guy which made his life working on writing novel and ignore those which made their live studying climate.
For pity sake here is his OWN bio showing he has no idea about climatology :
CRICHTON, (John) Michael. American. Born in Chicago, Illinois, October 23, 1942. Educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65. Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. Graduated Harvard Medical School, M.D. 1969; post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, California 1969-1970. Visiting Writer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988. .
Emphasis mine. I somewhat agree that consensus is bad, but sometiems there can ONLY be consensus when everything point to it !!! Evere heard on the consesnsus that if you release a weight within a gravitational field without initial speed it will craqsh to the ground ? Well there is a consensus ont he cliamt, get over with it, and stop reading your favorite POLITICAL propagenda.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I thought there might be some interest in the actual science here:
Antarctica is losing "152 ± 80 km3/year of ice" according to the abstract which can be found here.
I'm not sure about the article's status as it is not in any journals yet, but there was a similar study performed by these same people about Greenland's glaciers recently.
Apparantly, the study makes use of sattelites which measure gravity in order to guess at the mass of the ice.
On a side note... when did the "the Greenhouse" become a buzz-word?
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
...it's Spring and the ice is supposed to melt, isn't it?
This is actually the oil industries long term ocean-desalination plan. In a million years the sea salts will be diluted enough to make sea-water drinkable, think of the benefits!
One year does not a trend make. Besides, if you don't want to get flooded by a hurricane. DONT LIVE IN A FLOOD PLANE, IN THE PLACE WHERE HURRICANES STRIKE.
That you are telling us we should give in to a guy which made his life working on writing novel and ignore those which made their live studying climate.
So then the question is which writer of fiction to put faith in. And that's all you can do since neither is really capable of science as we know it in other fields.
Just because someone has dedicated their life to studying something doesn't mean they yet know how it works, and if it's really complex they may be too close to the problem (and established ideas) to reach a real understanding of the system.
Posted anon because I dislike the Slashdot groupthink flamers.
Perhaps those who want to jump on the "Sky is Falling" hype, check out http://www.junkscience.com/ -- /.'ers should read both sides of the story before making rash uneducated statements. They have a wonderful write up of "real" data, from a ton of different studies, tearing apart this latest NASA report.
Well, yes. That is the logical thing to believe after all - we already know that due to our overconsumption the earth is in a period of mass extinction of a kind not experienced since the start of the last ice age (or possibly earlier). Mass Extinctions, Acid Rain, deforestation, heavy metals in the food - all are accepted fact, all are accepted as being OUR fault. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere matches our output - who else should we blame? The temperature change we are experiencing matches what would be expected from the measured increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses - what reason have we to think our CO2 is not the cause of the observed changes?
Did you know other parts of Antarctic ice are increasing at rates of 26 gigatons per year?
Have you a source for this? Or by 'other parts' did you mean sea ice (which has broken off the ice shelf - due to global warming?).
The time for plausible deniability for our big mistake is over, I'm afraid. Time for us to suck it up.
"The actual study is meaningless in terms of the global warming debate....blah,blah,fud-link,blah,blah....rather than bearing any relevance to the issue of global climate change and its implications."
Nature has the headline "Antarctica is shrinking" with the sub-heading "Gravity survey shows overall loss in ice". Your link does not give reference to the fact that the paper was published in "Science", rather it takes issue with an article about the paper in "ScienceExpress". Off course they have no trouble picking out and twisting a different "Science" paper to suit their agenda.
"It's unscientific conclusions like that which give non-climatologists a bad name when it comes to these kinds of FUD political tactics."
So why assist them by proffering links to their FUD?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
opps
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nature
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Climates do change, yes. However, this isn't just about climate; there are serious causes for the climate change, which may not be reversible. Civilisations also rise and fall. If the climate of North America changes significantly, it could well be disasterous for the US and Canadian economies. The UK may find itself going from a moderate climate to extremely harsh winters, which would change agriculture, heating requirements, building design, clothing, imports and exports, domestic focuses, etc. And that's BEFORE you worry about the flooding, which I agree, will not be a linear process, as it has not been up to now.
Shrink-wrapping the oceans is probably well beyond our means for the forseeable future.
We're working at it though - one plastic bag at a time.
You and the BBC give your country a bad name. Your air and water isn't any cleaner than ours. London is just as dirty as every other major city in the USA. Piss off you self absorbed smelly little cunt.
You, like many others here, miss my point entirely.
If we continue to ignore the warning signs then, pretty soon, New Orleans 2005 might not be the exception, it may well be the rule.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Consensus is widespread agreement among a group. Scientific consensus is more formalized than that you find among other groups, because it is a natural result of peer review and practice of the scientific method. A fundamental component of the Scientific method is the testing of hypotheses with experiments. Reproduction of these experiments and Peer Review are the methods by which faulty experiments and logic are exposed and corrected. This is the self-correcting methodology that has allowed the feats of science to overshadow inferior methods of prediction, that once dominated our decision-making.
I find the objection to scientific consensus a tad moronic. What, exactly, would you prefer to rely on? A few lonely dissenters who are unable to produce results that hold up under peer review? Or groups who are guided by alternative decision-making such as astrology, religion, or short-term economic or political aims? Go ahead, but don't kid yourself that there is anything scientific or logical about your viewpoint.
The raising of sea level by 60 metres, though sad (for those who live near the sea - and that is thousands of millions of us), is not, in itself, what should worry us. It is the trigger instabilities, such as the large quantite of extra carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere - which will not wipe out Life, but will wipe out mankind.
Please don't ignore, or make fun of, this problem - it will deny you (and me) any grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.
Ian D. K. Kelly
idkk Consultancy Ltd.
"Quality through Thought"
The politically correct jump on the global warming bandwagon. More bureaucrats are hired to deal with the problem. They fly all over the world and speak french to each other. Industries see the writing on the wall and shut their U.S. plants and reopen in China, etc. Gov't hires more workers to pick up the slack. More regulations making it harder to operate a business. Soon, two-tier system: Capitalism for the rich, communism for the poor. Once the cost of starting a business is out of the reach of normal people, the rich won't have to worry about competition for capital or consumers. Finally, a monopoly economic system to replace the free market. So, who's behind political correctness?
"Volcanoes put out far more greenhouse gasses than anything humans do."
flamebait/troll/overrated - take your pick.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well, I think that don't have to be concerned about global warming.
Conversation 50 years from now:
Your kid: Hey! Did you knew that people of my dad's generation where really concerned about Global Warming?
Friend: Yeah? Why?
Your kid: Because they thought that Global Warming could cause floods!
Friend: Wow! Did he also tell you what was causing Global Warming?
Your kid: Yeah! He told me that 50 years ago people drove their cars so much that mother Nature couldn't handle all the bad gases the cars emitted!
Friend: Wow! Well, I'm happy that no one has droven cars for DECADES!! I think that we're saved for now!
Your kid: What's a car, anyway??
Comp_Lex86, the Netherlands
Considering that Earth's climate is something with a huge momentum, changing its course later on may or may not be an option. That's why ignoring even the _possibility_ of irreversable and catastrophic climate change risks missing a crucial window of opportunity, or even a less-crucial window of low-cost opportunity. Now is the time when we have a good chance of getting by with relatively painless, limited, and non-intrusive measures, provided we are prepared to make them _structural_.
And low-cost, low-tech opportunities for savings abound. Just think of home insulation, use of solar energy to reduce the energy needed for airconditioning and general climate control in buildings, use of heat pumps to lower energy requirements of climate control, and (heaven forbid) energy efficient cars etc..
But even those are often not economically viable because the price of energy is so low in the US. To be fair, why bother with complicated gizmos when you can just have this big cheap wasteful-but-effective-and-reliable thingy installed that will set you back only about 100$ a year in energy bills? Unfortunately our situation is known as a prisoners dilemma. If any business takes the time and effort to conserve energy, it can't spend that time and effort on its core business, and any resulting cost increase (or failure to drive costs down) in its products will be punished by the market.
This is why governments were invented. Tho break this deadlock of short-term interests and impose measures on _everyone at the same time_ that make the long-term needs felt. And yes, the primary instruments are often know as laws and regulations, and and the only ways of internalising external cost (as it is called) are known as taxes or levies. Nobody likes them (they hurt), but sometimes you have to have them. I personally think this is one of those occasions.
Taking the risk of missing either a "hard" window of opportunity or a "soft" one, purely for contraryness, short-term financial reasons, inertia, convenience and short-term political gain is both irresponsible and irrational.
It's telling of the American mindset that decades of energy-related research have been marginalised, downsized, cost-cut and generally ridiculed as idealistic but impractical, and certainly unneeded.
It's equally telling that the prospect of irreversible catastrophic global climate change is dismissed while the certain prospect of price hikes for gasoline (to say the levels of Europe) and *gasp* dependence on foreign powers is enough to galvanise an administration into a (fairly marginal) energy research programme.
Well ... at least it got their attention now ... in a way.
Many people overlook the benefit of engineering giant, semi-intelligent organic robots piloted angst ridden teens to combat the ethereal extra dimensional presence that is undoubtably melting the Antartic AS WE SPEAK, and will undoubtably attack mankind in the near future. I propose this project be located somewhere in Japan, as they are the obvious leaders in not only organic giant robotic technology, but fitting teen girls into skin tight piloting suits.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The models that say it's already too late to do anything :)
I think you're giving them too much credit.
I suspect the real motivation has more to do with basic, garden variety Fear. As in, "If I shout and deny with enough force, then the truth will back off, I can live in a bubble of wishful thinking and go about my day without having to think about scary ideas."
-FL
The best legacy we can leave our next generations is to find a new energy source. One that is cheap, and, as a bonus, does not cause more climate change. The problems with flooding, changes in growing patterns, more snow, less rain and so forth will be dealt with when the problems come. Insurance companies will stop insuring flood plains and people will gradually move. Predictive analysis and scenario thinking is good, and it should be part of public policy going forward, but is better to embrace change and work to adapt than try to revert to stone age ways of life.,p> A threat of stone age livig may come in 10 generations, but that is their problem to face, not ours. We don't blame the people of the 1400's for catching the plague - it just happened. The same will go for us - our grand-grand-grand-grand kids won't blame us for not acting - they will think we were just part of the evolution of humankind, and go on to solve the problems of their time.
Hopefully, the question of Linux or Windows will be solved by then.
Yes, and if you cycle the car's exhaust through your air conditioner while driving, you won't be getting your groceries back home.
My body is a system too, but when I stub my toe, I don't get a cold.
No, but you will hobble around cursing. And if you continually stub it, say, once every fifteen minutes, you'll probably do some ugly and lasting damage over the course of an afternoon and lose the ability to walk.
The world economy is a system too, but when Enron and Worldcom collapsed, the European market didn't fall to pieces.
No, but Enron and Worldcom are symptoms of the same problems which are causing Europe to slip into America's world war.
Systems can absorb and recover from small changes. More significant inputs, however. . .
People like to latch on to the metaphor that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, but the metaphor is bogus. No butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, and in fact, butterflies flap their wings all the time, and in the vast majority of the time, no hurricane follows. And not one hurricane in the history of mankind has ever been traced to a butterfly.
Very apt. Thank-you.
Now, let's do some math. . .
If you take twenty liters of gasoline and put it in your car, drive for a week, and then look in your gas tank, the fuel is gone. Where did that twenty liters go? Did it vanish? No. It turned into carbon gas. About Thirty Kilograms worth of carbon gas. (The weight goes up by one third, because while you're breaking down the HC of gasoline, you're adding two O's to each C, creating the CO2 which is the byproduct from a properly running combustion engine.). You complain about people mis-interpreting the butterfly analogy. I complain about people thinking that just because CO2 is an invisible gas it means that it doesn't have any basic physical attributes. Like mass.
Now, let's say you fill your tank up every week during a year. 52 weeks x 30 kilograms. --That works out to about 1500 kilograms per year; 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide you are putting into the atmosphere every year.
Let's multiply that by the number of cars in the average city. . , say, half a million. Then let's multiply that by the number of industrialized cities in the world. . .
Hm. It starts to look like a rather a lot of carbon, eh? Sort of in the billions of kilotons per year region, and all of it put into the atmosphere. --Another way to look at it is to consider the millions of barrels of oil burned every day. Each barrel burned turns into 1.5 times its weight in carbon gas. Every day.
Now the question is. . , are we talking in terms of stubbed toes and butterfly wings, or are we talking about billions of kilotons of carbon gas added to the atmosphere every year?
-FL
Consensus has always been a viable standard. When someone bucks the consensus because he has good research behind him then he can create a new consensus. So far the deniers of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) do not have that good research or the facts behind them. That includes Crichton. I haven't been able to bring myself to read anything by him since the drivel that is "State of Fear" came out.
Hmmm.
So they didn't actually measure the ice fields. They didn't go and actually measure the volume of the ice fields.
No what they did was measure fluctuations in the gravity field, whipped up some calculations on what they think that means, i.e. WAG = Wild Ass Guess, and called it a day. Plus the the period of time in the study is only a few years. So if the Western ice field had a really great year that very first year of the study and then subsequent years didn't accumulate as much snow, then that's Global Warming. Wow that's something to really put my faith into.
What's even more amusing is that they don't actually mention the East ice field in this study, only the West one. Why is this interesting? Because the East ice field is accumulating far more snow than the West is losing. Particularly since the East ice field is about 3-4 times as big as the West.
Is there any greater curse on America than liberals posing as scientists.
An excellent point, but Venus is completly covered in clouds. Venus can't accumulate any more clouds, so a balancing of temperature on Venus due to extra cloud cover cannot occur. Earth, however, still has a "buffer" because only about 60% of earth is covered in clouds.
a tors/eos_edu_pack/p04.php
In case someone was wondering if clouds really did cool the earth, here is an exerpt from "The Earth Observing System":
"Whether a given cloud will cause heating or cooling depends on several factors, such as the clouds height, its size, and the make-up of the particles that form the cloud. The balance between the cooling and warming actions of global cloud cover is very close although, overall, cloud cover produces cooling on a global basis."
http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/eos_homepage/for_educ
Weather is becoming more extreme as a direct result of global warming, which in turn is happening becuse of man-made pollution.
Why is this so hard for Americans to grasp or accept? Its not doubted by any other nations in the world.
Prove it.
The Bush budget also shows that funding for these kinds of "Global Warming Proving" studies to be shrinking at an alarming rate. By 2010, nobody will even know what the words "Global Warming" mean.
Unless they somehow find a way to escape the dome and get back up to the surface.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'm sorry but when did "consensus" become a standard for scientific truth? Truth in science, has often come at the expense of breaking with consensus. And along those lines, science has been led down the wrong roads many times because scientists were trying to marry their data with the agreed "scientific consensus" of their time.
In practice, consensus has become a very useful standard for scientific usefulness most of the time. We all use Newton's theories all the time, even though they have been subsequently refined.
We know that CO2 causes global warming - there is no doubt. Some fine details may need to be sorted out, but that is all.
For a more developed argument, please see Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming paper for the explosive and decisive attack against the method of scrutinizing scientific truth which you just proposed.
Yes, let's pick a single science fiction author (and a bad one at that) with absolutely no qualifications in the subject as a source for 'developed argument'.
This one is just a bizarre bit of disinformation that keeps getting circulated. It is quite false. Volcanoes put out around 130 to 230 teragrams [wikipedia.org] of carbon dioxide a year. The US alone puts out around 5844 teragrams [wikipedia.org].
You complain about 'bizarre disinformation' then use Wikipedia as your only reference? Amusing! The Wikipedia article cites UN sources. I could just as easily cite Michael Crighton in 'State of Fear' for counter arguments. Wouldn't add up to much, would it? You have no credibility.
an ill wind that blows no good
Here's your source. I'll dig up some others but did you know C02 was higher duing the dinasaur era? We're not even making a dent on the Earth, I'm afraid. I'll post the links on how our forests but you're spouting 70's era Rachel Carson crap that's been proven many times over as nonsense on acid rain. Please READ a bit. Try reading Bjorn Lomborg's book. I will post more information for you later, try reading it with an open mind.
This guy is way out there
Maybe the major of New Orleans bought busses with it - which later drowned because he (and nobody else in the city administration) forgot to put them into higher grounds. Only hours later he requested "I need busses, man" on national TV.
Please explain how driving a more fuel-efficient car that reduces the oil-imports and has no other inpact on local jobs is "ruining our economy".
Please explain how insulating your house using local labor and saving money for foreign oil is "ruining our economy".
No wonder they had their funding slashed........
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
The interesting thing is that previously, they didn't have enough data to show what was going on. Now they have data from the identical twin satellites.
Daily News http://newsblaze.com
You have anything based on science.
Are they just giving away four digit UIDs these days?
A blog about stuff.
A scientific appraisal of the consensus among published works of climate scientists has been performed. I linked to it here. The results have been available for some time, and are, or should be, common knowledge to anyone who bothers to educate themselves on the subject. Arguing that climate scientists are not in widespread agreement that human-induced global warming exists betrays an appalling ignorance of the subject, or worse simple dishonesty.
I guess you don't believe on the theory of gravity either, there are several hollywood productions that defy the consensus of how the gravity works. I agree that not all about gravity has been proven or understood, but basic knowledge of how gravity works is there. It may change in the future, but until it does we are stuck with current theory.
Look again.
John was a smart but intransigent guy ... especially in the face of evidence.
He would of course argue against any sea level rise due to global warming but he would probably dismiss any scientific evidence for uplift in the area or any other evidence. Not very objective John was.
Sad to hear of his death though. I had many enjoyable arguments with him, not just about GW but about intelligent design (although not a fundie he believed in it) and other stuff.
Bitter and proud of it.
Head for higher ground! The beach is growing......
Seriously though, how long until we see the effects and what will they be? Desalinated water...or less salt anyway? Cooler or hotter climates in certain parts of the world? Air and ocean currents being changed, stalled, or reversed? What will this do, besides give penguins less places to roam?
Not that I don't like penguins. Let's, face it though, no one knows exactly what this means in terms of impact scientifically.....I mean how many times has this happened in the past 500 years? This could be apocalyptic, catastorphic, or very uncomfortable. The only thing I'm certain of, is that we are in for some changes.
Not a geek just looking for one.
You can't. Macroeconomics is even less of a science than historical climatology.
That burden is on those who assert...
I couldn't agree more.
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.
I'll dig up some others but did you know C02 was higher duing the dinasaur era?
Yes. And I also know that it's irrelevant, since climate change is about OUR survival during a period of rapid change, not how well adapted creatures survived millions of years ago. In periods of rapid change, which creatures survive? The ones that adapt. Everytime I speak to someone like you, I'm reminded of how unlikely it is that our soiciety will pull together when it comes to the pointy end of the matter - you can't even face the obvious reality of the situation, let alone adapt.
We're not even making a dent on the Earth, I'm afraid.
Science says differently. Logic says differently. Observation says differently. Climatologists accept the truth almost universally. You suffer from a condition called denial.
By the way, the US Army Corps of Engineers is Federal and therefore comes until the control of the Federal Government. This mighty President let a "liberal" Governor wrestle control away from him? Tsk tsk. What was he suppose to do?
I'm tired of Bush supporters shifting blame from this Presidental imbecile. The New Orleans Levees are number 3 on FEMA's mostly likely diasters after an earthquake in LA and a tsumani hitting the Washington State coast. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this administration knew it would eventually come but did nothing to shore up the levees.
Reports have it that parts of the levee system had weakened to the point that they would have had a tough time surviving a Category 1 Hurricane. The levee maintenance has been neglected under this and a hellva lot of other past administrations. They all knew the levees were weak they just didn't want to spend the money. When disaster finally hit, all I see is a bunch of politicos at all levels covering their butts.
By the way, who's administration gutted FEMA?
Why is it that every taxpayer in the US is expected to pay money to hold the ocean back from the city of New Orleans? They choose to live there, I think they should be responsible for paying to maintain their levees.
Think irrigation. You would probably be utterly amazed to learn just how much water it takes to produce the food you eat and the clothes you wear. I believe the cultivation of coffee and cotton are particularly thirsty enterprises.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Oops, accidental double post. Mod me redundant.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
the keyword "solar system" yielded 928 peer-reviewed papers, NOT A SINGLE ONE OF WHICH disputed the conclusion that the earth moves and orbits the sun.
In all fairness, in the absence of additional data, this statement on it's face only suggests a bias in editorial policy. I find it hard to believe that with something this complicated that there are not SOME 'dissenting' papers.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Two very, very different beasts. The earth orbit issue is one direct observation of periodic motion. This measured values are a directly input into Kepler's Law. The correlations about climate change are based on proxy data, and that is causing quite a few scientists and statistician's 'discomfort.' In fact, one modeled the 'hockey' stick graph using other proxies besides CO2 concentration. There may be more to consider than JUST pollution, or JUST CO2, etc. The data is not conclusive of only ONE conclusion.
:)
Thanks for playing, though. That was a fun analogy attempt.
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The point being that your logic and statement was pretty scary. Scientists agree (or at least all published papers in the field), which can only suggest[] bias?!?!
The people involved are experts in the field. They studied this suff for a living. They aren't confused. They have looked at a variety of data from a variety of sources.
In broad strokes, yes there is only one conclusion.
The earth is in fact warmed by the greenhouse effect. The earth would be about 30C / 54F cooler if there were no greenhouse effect.
CO2 is in fact a greenhouse gas (along with others which only further support the conclusion, but which I will negect).
The earth's CO2 level was extremely stable at about 275 ppb for a minimum of a thousand years before the industrial revolution (I think far far more than 1,000 but that is as far as the graph I saw went).
The earth's CO2 levels have never been over 300 ppb for hundreds of thousands of years.
Humans HAVE been pouring out CO2 (and other gasses) at a rate orders of magnitude greater than any natural sources since the industrial revolution. (Volvanoes produce about 3% and humans about 97%.)
CO2 levels HAVE increased to 379 ppb and continue to increase at an increasing rate.
At this point one would have to be in denial to suggest that it would not have ANY effect at all.
And of course we have measured continuously increasing globally increasing temperatures and observed massive permafrost melting and observed massive glaical and arctic ice sheet melting.
If the CO2 level soon rise to 400 and keep going it is ludacris to suggest that there will be no effect at all.
Scientists certainly are arguing over the complexities and scientists and statistitians certainly are "uncomfortable" with a variety of things, however ALL of that is over trying to measure the history and measure what has already happened and attempting to predict the magnitude and nature and the side effects of future change. There is no scientific argument against the basic fact that humans HAVE spiked CO2 and other greenhouse gasses at unprecidented rates (ever) and to unprecidented levels (at least within the last umpteen million years), and that those increased levels HAVE had an effect and they HAVE cause some warming and IS causing globally signifigant changes, and that if we do continue to increase CO2 levels that those effects will continue and will increase in uncertain magnitude with uncertain side effects.
The basics really are simple. There's no scientific dispute over those simple matters. It's trying to predict the effects of those changes upon the climate that is as complicated as hell. There is even the remote paradoxical possibility that this sort of rapid heating could even trigger a swing into an ice age. We can't really predict what the climate will do, but we DO know that humans ARE causing an unprecidented rapid change in the global environment and that it WILL have an effect.
Rapid climate change is inherently disrupting for us, and it can have a disasterous effect on ecosystems that have no time to shift and adapt.
The fact is that it is happening. Any politician or industry PR efforts to deny it are silly and harmful.
Whether Global Warming is real is a scientific question, not a political question.
Whether we want to do anything about it, and if so what we want to do about it, that is a purely political question. If we look at it with open eyes and decide that the costs of attempting to do something about it are too high and that the increased disruption from not doing anything about it is acceptable, ok. That is a valid political decision. Science cannot tell you what to do. Science cannot tell you not to put lead paint on children's toys. It can only tell you that if you DO put lead paint on children's toys then you will get brain damaged children, and that is a social and political choice.
However it is unacceptable for politicians and industry PR campaigns to spread anti-scienc
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"ice melting due to warming"
c le/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html
actual subhead in friday's dead-tree version of http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
i'll scan it when i get home;-)
I didn't really mean to incite a diatribe like this. You are frothing at the mouth! I only point out that miriads of ninnies on this forum submit condescending posts that make extravagant claims based on nothing more than Wikipedia citations. I suggest such people are intellectually lazy and shouldn't be taken seriously.
As for you, you cite more convincing sources. But like most global warming proponents you cite increased levels of CO2 to global warming and ignore all other climate factors, like the variation of solar lumenosity and obliquity cycle's effect on climate. Like most people who politicise climate variation you are not intellectually lazy, just dishonest.
an ill wind that blows no good
Scientists agree (or at least all published papers in the field), which can only suggest bias?!?
That's not what I said. I said a survey of a small number of articles published over a 11 year period does not ON IT'S FACE support the conclusion that 'scientists agree.' The report says not only is there consensus, but that the consensus is 100%. This simply is not true. There ARE dissenting reports out there, but they were either not found or ignored by the author of that article that you are using to assert the notion of 100% consensus.
In broad strokes, yes there is only one conclusion.
Bull. I've seen results in which other proxies, such as a pure random driver, generated the hockey stick graph that is used as the primary basis for the anthropomorphic part of the arguement. Highly qualified statisticians have argued that at it's most fundamental level, the analysis of the tree ring and some core data is flawed; using proxies to form correlations is WRONG. Yet ALL the anthropomorphic-based conclusions rely on such analysis of the available data.
Look. I'm not saying the conclusion is wrong on it's face, but there ARE serious problems with the data itself, the analysis of the data and the weight of the conclusion given. Maybe the current climate change models are correct; but the issues listed above must be properly addressed, not swept under-the-rug before I, and bunch of other trained SCIENTISTS buy into it. In short, as it is now, it is little more than crappy pop-science.
Scientists certainly are arguing over the complexities and scientists and statistitians certainly are "uncomfortable" with a variety of things, however ALL of that is over trying to measure the history and measure what has already happened and attempting to predict the magnitude and nature and the side effects of future change.
Ah, so you acknowledge what I've been saying. The problem is that the conclusions of "earth getting warmer" and "humans causing it" and the current models generally in use to make predictions RELY on the potentially faulty analysis of that historical data. Simply put, the whole arguement rests on the hockey stick that correlates CO2 with global temperature. As it stands no, NO SUCH CORRELATION EXISTS.
Let me state that again. At the current state of analysis, no such correlation exists. The proxy analysis is flawed, and any resulting correlation is fortuitous. When you say it is fact that putting more CO2 in the atmosphere causes a certain effect on the global climate, you are completely ignoring other mechanisms - carbon sinking in the deep oceans for example which are not well understand at all. Or, how about methane-hydrate's role? Or how about variations in solar output (I've seen this one in the literature, and it is pretty much shown to be anti-correlative, but the point is, the global climate does not rely SOLELY on CO2 concentration). Etc.
The fact is that it is happening. Any politician or industry PR efforts to deny it are silly and harmful.
Whether Global Warming is real is a scientific question, not a political question.
Oh yes it most certainly *IS* a political question. First, that Global Warming is happening is not the issue. The issue is the cause. The earth HAS undergone huge fluctuations in temperature over it's history. Ice ages come and ice ages go.
At stake is the role of humans. Much research funding depends on this; that's the bias I mentioned earlier. If it were shown tomorrow in dramatic but inconclusive fashion that AGW did not exist, a whole bunch of research dollars would dry up. A bunch of folks would find themselves without a relatively easy avenue to funding and would have to scramble to find a basis to study their pet system.
The basics of Golbal Warming are in the "beyond any reasonable doubt" catagory.
That's just plain nuts. If that were true, you and I would not be having this discussion. In ess
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I said a survey of a small number of articles...
A search of hundreds of thousands of articles that turns up 928 relevant ones is hardly a small sample.
There ARE dissenting reports out there
Link? Reference? Show me one.
Highly qualified statisticians have argued that at it's most fundamental level, the analysis of the tree ring and some core data is flawed.
Link? Reference?
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
either not found or ignored by the author of that article
He did a search on the ISI database with the keywords "climate change". The search was done in 2003, and the earliest paper in the database was from 1993. The only papers excluded from the analysis were a small number that had "climate change" listed in their keyword list but which did not address climate change. The only effect of excluding those papers is to diminish the number/percentage of papers that fell into the "neutral / no comment on the issue" catagory.
On the level of actual expert professionals in the climatology published peer review community, dissenting views are eaither zero or so near to zero as to be undetectable in a survey of ALL ALL ALL 928 database papers in the field over a decade period. Not picking and chooseing papers, every single paper in the database.
There is a public perception that there is controversy in this feild. there are certain groups pushing the notion that there is controversy in this field. Most reporters write their news stories giving the impression there is controversy in this field. However there is no detectable level of controversy coming from the mainstream peer reviewed published scientific community.
I have no doubt you could dig up some paper from someone with some degree in something disputing AGW, and I can equally dig up some paper from someone with a degree saying that the sun is powered by electricity. However neither of those papers is going to make it into a mainstream published in refereed scientific journal unless it has some reasonable scientific basis to back up that claim.
When you do an unbiased search of ALL 928 databased papers from published refereed scientific journals you would find nine dissenting papers if there was 1% scientific dissent. Instead we find ZERO. There is no measurable level of scientists in the community arguing against AGW.
I've seen results
Put away the newspapers. Lets see you come up with some recent results from mainstream refereed scientific journals. No 20 year old results. No crackpot faulty work that can't pass muster for a credible journal in the field. No fiction authors.
Ah, so you acknowledge what I've been saying.
I acknowledge that scientists are resolving issues and conflicts and details within AGW.
the whole arguement rests on the hockey stick that correlates CO2 with global temperature
Even without temperature measurements, the result is blatantly obvious from first principles and basic physics. You have not disputed that the earth's temperature is already elevated by more than 50 degrees due to the greenhouse effect. You have not disputed that humans have caused a huge increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Right there basic physics says more heat will be treapped and the temperature will increase. From there you would need to suggest some mechanism to PREVENT that basic physics result. All of the other science that has been done only further supports that basic physics result. All of the evidence only further supports that basic physics result. The fact that temperatures are increasing only further supports that blindingly obvious basic physics result.
you are completely ignoring other mechanisms - carbon sinking in the deep oceans for example which are not well understand at all
We have the fact that humans are pouring more CO2 into the atmosphere than is being removed by any and all sinking mechanisms combined.
Any unknows about deep ocean sinking is irrelevant to the fact that there is a hugely increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and irrelevant to the effect of that CO2. Any unknowns about deep ocean skinking is merely an uncertainty in constinued rate of increase in CO2. It is merely detail of future magnitude, a detail of magnitude within AGW.
the point is, the global climate does not rely SOLELY on CO2 concentration
Of course not. How
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