Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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.
Except that weather is full of random fluxuations and anomylous local occurances. It is very bad science to say that every random weather patter that we can't explain is caused by global warming. It is fearmongering and political posturing, not science.
But is taking "action" any better when we don't know the science behind it?
They don't know.
To take action when one doesn't know what is happening could make things worse.
Of course we know there are oddities occuring, but that is the key word - oddities. Its odd when we don't understand.
The problem with Climate science is that it hasn't been all that long since we had the tools to truly understand it. Hell we have had only a couple of decades where we could accurate measure temperatures around the globe. The accuracy increases each year and yes we will learn something from it. Some things we learn will proven "common" beliefs to be totally wrong, others may actually prove some concepts.
That is the crux of the Global Warming issue. We don't know enough to be sure what all the causes are and if actions we take will have the desired effect. If we knew the climate as well as some think they do then why are simple things like weather prediction difficult? Easy, its difficult and not simple, its difficult because we don't know all the variables. We know the obvious ones, well at least we think we do.
So before flying off the handle we need to realize we are not as smart as we think we are.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yes, but nearly all of the "actions" I've heard recommended for dealing with global warming are just common sense, and would have other benefits. It's not as though someone has decided we should take an enormous glacier from the arctic ocean and drive it down to the equator to try to cool things off, change the orbit of the earth to be further from the sun, or some other fanciful suggestion. They're suggesting things like using less fossil fuels, looking into alternative energy, and reducing pollution and industry waste. I mean you cannot deny that any of these things are positive unless you're an industry shill. And they're actions we can safely take today, until we understand fully the science tomorrow.
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.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.