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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."
Funny things happen when you have solid H2O in liquid H2O that, on a large scale, are probably not well understood. I'm not a physicist but you have heat dissipation as Newton's Law of Cooling goes into effect and a multitude of climate issues. I can speculate on a few things:
- As the water becomes warmer, it is more prone to evaporation on the surface from the sun. Previously, less water would evaporate and keep the water levels slightly higher but now the difference in temperature at the surface is less making the water more easily transferred into a vapor.
- Gravity pulls down on the free floating icebergs and it displaces the water. These icebergs are shrinking or being reduced greatly so the water height in the vicinity lowers slightly while the water levels around the world rise slightly.
- The tides are becoming stronger and as the amount of water on the surface of earth increases, so does the effect of the moon on it. The moon pulls least on water at the caps and even more so on water near the equator.
- Some force (moon, internal gravity, spinning of the earth, sun, etc.) is causing the water to accumulate at the equator which in turn reduces the water at the poles.
Like I said, this is pure speculation and I haven't thought out in advance the above propositions. But I'm going to speculate that there's an unknown effect that occurs when massive bodies of ice are half submerged in water on a planet. The basis of this effect is probably known in physical and chemical fields of science but we just haven't put them together to figure it out. Hopefully we can figure it out as these "discoveries" are oftentimes the foundation for more work and more discoveries that benefit mankind. Translation: curiosity spurs innovation.If there's one thing that Slashdot is good for, though, it's testing half cooked theories! My fellow colleagues, I welcome you to point out the scientific flaws in my above hypotheses!
My work here is dung.
There has been periodic change in water levels for thousands, if not millions of years. While it may seem alarming, and probably does have a large effect on our climate, it is not just CO2 emissions to blame. I'm sure the tectonic plates shifting (I'm no geologist) and various other natural phenomena contribute a significant amount to the change in the earth's water level, just like they have for a long time before we were around.
Aaaaaah! Panic! Global cooling is BACK!!!!!
Time,
Newsweek,
etc.
-Peter
You don't need to be proven that Global Warming doesn't exist, you should force people to prove it does exist. That's how science works, you start assuming what you've always assumed and the new theories must be proven.
Personally, I've never cared much about this 'Global Warming' because even the alarmists (like Greenpeace and Gore) give incredibly non-frightening information. They say we're warming up at an unprecedented level, but the worst figures I've seen say we've increase one degree Fahrenheit in the last two-hundred years. One degree? For the largest polluting, greatest industrial achievements in the history of man? That sounds pretty damn stable to me.
But the biggest problem in proving 'Global Warming' is not conflicting evidence like this article. It's not the fact that the same theories and reasoning and 'researchers' told us that we were headed for an ice-age thirty years ago.
It's the fact that even non-scientifically minded people can poke holes in the alarmists' theories. 'Global Warming is caused by humans' - how? How do we know that? Do cars give off a unique chemical that we can see directly makes the Earth warmer? 'Global Warming has caused more natural disasters than any previous year and it will only get worse' - really? I don't see how one degree could possibly cause more hurricanes, I mean, perhaps there are other causes to such a development. 'Global Warming will destroy civilisation' - uh, perhaps not Nervous Joe.
Anyone, anyone, looking even half logically at this 'Global Warming' hype can see through it.
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I wouldn't take seriously any explanation posted here. I've read through a few of them, and although I myself am not a climatologists, they do strike me as being scientific-sounding rationalisations of an existing opinion.
Climate change is a kind of political topic, and this means that everyone who has a political opinion pretends to be an expert on the subject.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Or should it ?
Phletora of things related to climate oddities happening here and there, yet there STILL are people that are passing them as 'localized' occurences.
Yea, hordes of localized occurences all over the world. Sounds like 'global' to me.
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You don't need to be proven that Global Warming doesn't exist, you should force people to prove it does exist.
There is a scientific consensus that it exists. The controversy is over how much humans speed it up.
the worst figures I've seen say we've increase one degree Fahrenheit in the last two-hundred years. One degree? For the largest polluting, greatest industrial achievements in the history of man? That sounds pretty damn stable to me.
You do realize how much energy it takes to raise an entire planet by a degree, right? Sure, one degree doesn't seem like much... but to an extraordinarily balanced system, it's a big deal.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned recently in the comments on Slashdot is the idea of the Precautionary Principle (http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80841e/8084 1E0o.htm#12.%20The%20precaution%20principle/. By its very nature, good science is uncertain- its investigations rarely produce evidence that points in only one direction, and the whole point of the scientific method is to avoid coming to dogmatic, unjustified beliefs.
This produces problems when science and politics come together, because of the way science is treated by popular culture and popular politicians. Essentially, science is popularly viewed and portrayed as being a source of certainty. This is why the extremely small number of global warming naysayers always are referred to as scientists (irrespective of whether their credentials are respected or relevant). It creates the illusion that "science" has yet to arrive at its intended goal: absolute certainty. But as any good scientist will tell you, scientific truth is always provisional.
Thus, the trouble with doing something about global warming is that there is a disjunction between the sort of certainty (absolute) that politicians facing re-election and pressure groups want before acting, and the sort of certainty (provisional, always subject to revision) that scientists can, in good faith and following the strict methodology of science, give. Enter the precaution principle, which basically states that if you have a reasonably likely possibility of really bad future outcomes, you should try to do something about it, even if it's possible those outcomes don't come to pass. To me, global warming fits this scenario.
warmer = more evaporation = more water vapor in the air = more heat trapped and so on
... ... ... -> more cloud formation -> wetter weather -> more vegitation in once barren areas -> more CO2 uptake from vegitation -> less GHG and more O2
It means nothing of the sort my friend. In fact as scientists analyse global climate, they seem to be slowly, subtlely distancing themselves from the theory/term of "Global Warming". Have you noticed that authorities on the subject--even the most ardent supporters of things like the Kyoto initiative--now almost NEVER use the term anymore? The correct term is "Global CLIMATE CHANGE" because EVERYONE agrees that the earth is not universally warming up (some areas are, and others are getting cooler), and they aren't even convinced anymore that the AVERAGE gloabl temperature will continue to steadily rise. What they DO agree upon is that the climate is CHANGING--they point to evidence of changing weather patterns and more "extreme weather"--we'll get more Katrina's in the Gulf of Mexico and huge, freezing blizzards in maritime Canada and expanding deserts in Africa. The general consensus is still that CO2 from human activity exacerbates the problem--it's just that scientists now cover their butts with more general terms like "climate change" because truthfully, NOBODY has a handle on what exactly is going to happen.
The situation might go as you state, but there are a number or drastically different predictions as well:
warmer -> more evapouration -> more cloud formation -> sunlight blocked -> cooler
or
or
warmer -> melting polar ice -> lower ocean temperatures -> shifting weather patterns -> more "even" climate (warmer & wetter towards poles, cooler in the equatorial region)
NOBODY knows what will REALLY happen--it is all guesswork (albeit really educated guesswork). Although those who say human activity/CO2 emissions have no notable effect on the planet are generally dismissed as crackpots (and rightly so), the scientific community is finally acknowleging--at least a bit--that they don't know the ultimate effect, which is significant becasue high-profile research organisations really hate to admit they don't know something (almost as much as they hate admitting they're wrong). And here is one to cheer you up--there is a growing contingent of scientists that say "yes, human activity has altered our climate, but the can is open and the worms have long since escaped--we are past the point of fixing things".
The problem I have with Kyoto is that if we assume the worst case senario (that humans are the primary cause of global warming and the result is destruction of our way of life etc), that it still is a pretty inneffective way of reducing CO2 emissions. It would be far cheaper to give developing nations some of our pollution reduction technology and pay them to build their societies to function with less energy requirements (far cheaper to build a new building with efficiency in mind than retrofit existing buildings) yet the only nations required to cut emissions were the developed countries. I wish there had been some thought about cutting emissions in a more efficient manner globally.
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