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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!
West Antarctica was pretty dull anyway. At least East Antarctica is safe.
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...
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.
I'm assuming you're trying to be funny. The ice in the arctic is already floating in water, hence no sea level rise when it melts. This is why the melting of ice on land (Greenland, Antarctica) is significant.
-- Andyvan
How can the rate of an observation be "alarming" if it has only recorded 3 of 6,000,000,000 years of existense?
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."
>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
Amenties include:
*Refurbished Y2K model# 1D10T"
Power to the Peaceful
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.
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.
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.
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?
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
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.
because of the properties of ICE vs Liquid Water the melting of the Artic ice sheet actually lowers water world wide..
Errr... WHAT?
Time to do the math again, I guess. Every now and then this bit of ugly science rears its ugly head.
Useful numbers:
Density of Seawater: 1025kg/m^3.
Density of Freshwater: 1000kg/m^3 (rounded up from 999.98 at freezing point)
Density of Ice: 916kg/m^3 [same source].
Things to know:
The vast majority of icebergs are not frozen seawater, they break off from land glaciers and float out to sea.
Buoyancy tells us that X will float in Y if X displaces a volume of Y where the mass of the displaced volume equals the mass of X.
Hollowed out shapes can contain more volume than a solid block of mass (this is why metal boats float).
So, lets say we have a solid, convex iceberg floating in an ocean ever so slightly above freezing, consisting of exactly 1025kg of ice right about to melt. To float, this iceberg must displace 1025kg of saltwater, which by sheer coincidence is exactly one cubic meter. Thus, when this iceberg broke off the glacier and fell into the water, the sea level increased by the height of one cubic meter spread out really thin across the entire surface. If you lifted the iceberg out without letting it melt, that one cubic meter would come back and fill the hole where it was.
Naturally, the sea being ever so slightly above freezing and the ice being ever so slightly below, the ice absorbs heat from the ocean and melts. Thanks to wonderful conservation of mass, we know we now have 1025kg of fresh water at ever so slightly above freezing, with a density of 1000kg/m^3. Thus, we have 1.025 cubic meters of fresh water to fill that 1 cubic meter hole where the iceberg used to be.
So because the iceberg fell into the ocean and melted, the sea level is now 1.025 cubic meters (spread out real thin over the entire ocean) higher than it used to be. Even if the ice started in the ocean (as in the Arctic), it's still 0.025 cubic meters high! It gets worse if the ice is sitting on the bottom of the ocean (then there is more ice than displaced water)! Even if you assume that the seawater is less dense in the Arctic (a fallacy, as the freezing action actually increases the saline content of the water around the ice), as long as the density of the seawater is greater than the density of the water you get from melting the ice (almost always freshwater), you will get an increase in sea level from melting the ice.
Incidentially, arctic ice is not all frozen seawater, much of it is from precipitation falling on top of the frozen seawater, so you can't even claim that the water in the ice came directly from the ocean in the first place (not that that claim would really help any, because that water has been locked up for thousands and thousands of years, returning it to water would definitely raise the ocean level beyond anything in written history). Plus, once the water is liquid and continues to heat, it will continue to expand: at 30C freshwater is only 995.65kg/m^3.
Since I whipped out the math anyway, 1025kg of ice is 1025kg*(1m^3/916kg)=1.119 m^3. Since it's solid and convex we know that there must be 0.119 m^3 of ice above sea level. This shows that roughly 10% of the 1.119 m^3 of ice is above sea level, thereby supporting the old adage that 9/10 of the iceberg is below the waterline.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
You should see what Bush had to say about the global warming news.
That's probably a lowball estimate. Don't forget that basically every product we consume takes water to make, sometimes a whole lot of it.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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
"from the that's-polar-bear-country dept."
Actually, Polar bears are Arctic critters -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bears
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
In pure water there would be no effect, but in salt water there is a small one. Since the ice excludes salt, when it melts the ocean becomes less dense and raises the sea level slightly. See: http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html/
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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