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Arctic Sea Level Falling?

HRH King Lerxst with a link to BBC News' report that "Arctic sea level has been falling by a little over 2mm a year — a movement that sets the region against the global trend of rising waters. ... It is well known that the world's oceans do not share a uniform height; but even so, the scientists are somewhat puzzled by their results."

5 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gets you Al Gore! by DesireCampbell · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    "There is a scientific consensus that it exists. "
    There was a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat. There was a scientific consensus that Black people were inferior to White people. There was a scientific consensus that Iraq had WMDs.
    Remember, it's not 'who' says it, it's 'wha's being said'.


    And one degree isn't much. Disregarding that fact that there's no reason to think that temperatures won't go down, disregarding the fact that there's no reason to think that 'surface temperature readings' can be held with much validity over such a short timeframe, disregarding the fact that 50 years ago these same kinds of figures would indicate that the planet is cooling... I lost my train of thought - but hopefully I've derailed he 'Global Warming express' too.

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  2. Fossil Fuels are a Single Point of Failure by mosch · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    There are a lot of comments in these threads from people who argue that we shouldn't do anything until we have a known problem. But as any decent tech knows, that's not how you create a reliable system.

    If your goal is 24/7/365 operation (and that's surely our goal for society), then you create redundant, reliable alternatives. If those alternatives aren't needed, great. But without those alternatives, you're betting the whole of society on a single point of failure.

    The idea that we should wait to develop them is flawed. Do you wait until your net connection goes down before you install a secondary line? Do you wait until your first data center burns down before you install a backup?

    The idea that climate and energy requiret less careful treatment than a corporate data center is absurd.

  3. It's always getting either warmer or cooler by ccmay · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Sure, one degree doesn't seem like much... but to an extraordinarily balanced system, it's a big deal.

    Pooh. Earth is not nearly so "balanced" as you seem to think. It is always getting either warmer or cooler. Glaciers are always either shrinking or growing. The Earth has been twenty degrees cooler, and twenty degrees warmer, before cavemen tamed fire. Dinosaurs and palm trees once lived in Arctic regions, and there was a time when most of North America lay under ice a mile thick.

    The anthropogenic component of global warming that has the Gorebots so scared is mere statistical noise by comparison, if it exists at all.

    -ccm

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  4. Re:Could Be A Number Of Things by sholden · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Is it fun being completely retarded?

    Why don't you just try the damn experiment and see what happen.

    Hint: there isn't the ia bottle surrounding the ice floating in the water and hence some of it can be in the air above the water - by some amazing coincidence the mass of water it displaces will happen to equal the mass of the ice... Sure "lighter than" isn't the best way to describe less dense, but it's good enough: for a given volume the ice will be lighter because it is less dense.

  5. Re:Could Be A Number Of Things by budgenator · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    And we all know anybody that's smart enough to invent the internet is smart enough to know all about climatology and glaciers and stuff like that!

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