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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."
That would be 0.4mm a year on top of the other sources of rising sea water.
And assuming a constant, non-accelerating rate unlike what is currently being observed in greenland.
But good job trying to minimaze the problems we face today.
A blog about stuff.
because of the properties of ICE vs Liquid Water the melting of the Artic ice sheet actually lowers water world wide.
It's moments like these I wish Archimedes was alive and reading Slashdot.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
--
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"Why can't people understand CYCLES? and 'GET OVER IT'..."
Because there is no conclusive evidence that this is only part of a cylce.
As an evironmental scientist, my "gut" feeling is that this IS a part of cycle but being exacerbated by human factors. Look at the ice core and other geologic indicators: none of the planetary heating/cooling cycles ever recorded occcured with anything approaching this intensity. They were gradual, over thousands of years. We've seen millenia worth of warming in the last ~120 yrs.
Regression analyses of almost any factors you care to name show a near-perfect correlation with the humanity's industrial emissions. Cooked up examples in introductory statistics textbooks aren't any better.
Blindly chalking everything up to cycles is dangerous - what if that's incorrect? What do we lose by reducing hazardous emissions and pursuing alternative energies? Nothing, that's what. We potentially save the planet and reduce the corrupting inlfuences of the petrochemical industry. And if it ultimately has no effect on the environment, that's a price I'm willing to pay. What you suggest is a gamble that humanity cannot afford to make.
How can the rate of an observation be "alarming" if it has only recorded 3 of 6,000,000,000 years of existense?
As far as we are concerned all of earth's history is unimportant - what matters is how it compares to human history, because while sea levels might have been rising faster some time in the Jurassic it wasn't anything humans ever had to cope with. From the planet's point of view it might indeed be trivial, but from the point of view of humans in the here and now who have to adapt to the changes it may well be significant.
So, how does 0.4mm per year compare to human history? The last 3000 years have (according to Wikipedia) seen sea levels rise at an average rate of 0.1mm to 0.2mm per year. More recent data shows a rate of around 1mm to 2mm per year since 1850, and 3mm per year using satellite altimetry since 1992. On that sort of scale 0.4mm per year does represent a significant amount. Given the previous lack of certainty as to whether the Antarctic was losing or gaining ice with worst case estimates of about 0.2mm per year worth of ice being lost it is indeed alarming.
Sure, it isn't the end of the world, but then nobody with any sense was worried about that. The concern is the vast economic impact that could result from the forced relocation or rebuilding efforts caused by greater risks of flooding for the many many urban areas close to sea level. It may not be an epic disaster, but it could well be very expensive, so it's worth knowing about it so we can be forewarned and take preventative action now.
Jedidiah.
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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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"It is worth keeping in mind that an "abrupt" climate change, which may take place over a decade, is abrupt from a geologic perspective, in which many phenomena take place on the time scales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years."
To put it mildly, if you looked up and saw a car might hit you at 1MPH then you might be a little worried but not really all that concerned. If instead you looked up and found a car might hit you at 100MPH then you would shit yourself. Yes, we don't have the data, capability or knowledge to model climate actions and consequences accurately. This is because in most cases we don't know what the hell we are doing. We do have survival instincts however, and one of these should currently be telling you that its all well and fine to stand on the road, but it might be safer to walk on the grass. Cycles are a reality and love them all you want but being carefull the other side of the cycle doesn't have a big "End of life as you want it" sign is a damn good idea.
On the other side of things, a good two or three meter rise would put one of my homes in a really nice position (taking erosion into account). The downside is that it would be the only home I had left.
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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
Very well said, Voltageaav. I think that's where too many people who don't understand the history of the planet tend to fall short--they somehow think that this climate is a "perfect stasis" that's been this way forever.
Put bluntly, we've been lucky....we hit a relatively calm spell at just the right time in our history and thus moved from a Stone Age society to a Technological Age society. A lot of other planets probably aren't so fortunate.
Ferretman
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Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
When you have large unknowns, you do a risk assessment and then decide if that possibility of destroying the planet is important to you or not
Part of that analysis is the probability that destroying the planet is even a likelihood. That burden is on those who assert it is. Anyone that would base exceedingly costly and disruptive policy on 3 years of data on a subject (literally) with geologic timescales is foolish in the extreme. And, I would argue, not a very serious person.
If you are going to propose a hypothesis that CO2 emissions are harmful, you have the burden of proof, not the other way around.
Why? Because humans burning fossile fuels in great numbers is the natural state of affairs on earth, and the risk from any deviation from it should be thouroughly assessed before starting?
Reality check: serious CO2 emissions by humans have started 150 years ago. Your sentence should be turned around: "If you are going to propose a hypothesis that CO2 emissions are harmless, you have the burden of proof, not the other way round".
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
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.