Slashdot Mirror
Inhabited Island Vanishes Forever Underwater
PhreakOfTime writes "For the first time the rising ocean levels have washed away an inhabited island. Lohachara island was at one point home to some 10,000 people. It, along with several other spits of land near the Indian mainland, is now permanently underwater. From the article: ' As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago ... the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.'"
Ergo, there's no need to panic here on Earth.
[Republican parody mode off]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Christmas day was a bit of a wash out then.
...Nothing to see here anymore...just the sea....move along...
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
Short-term changes in sea level like waves, tides, and storm surge mask the effects of rising sea levels. When the signal-to-noise ratio is that low, you end up with news articles stating that the island in question became uninhabitable 22 years ago.
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but compared to serious examination of long-term sea level trends, one island isn't a very useful measuring stick.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
for rising ocean levels to take California next.
I live not far from the Sydney Opera House, and though I haven't been measuring things there, I haven't seen any sign of it getting closer to the water. Certainly not a whole island worth of closer. Likewise I would expect somewhere like Venice to be in the news if its gradual descent into the ocean were suddenly to accelerate, threatening all that tourism. Ditto the pacific islands; or anywhere people have jetties or wharves that would need rebuilding.
Is it possible that sea levels could change in the Indian ocean while remaining constant in other parts of the globe? That's what seems odd here. Or is this likely to be local, run-of-the-mill geology at work, and people seeing what they (justifiably, IMHO) expect to see?
This post was sponsored by Hummer, Mercedes and the American/European way of life.
Hope you liked it folks!
As far as Venice is concerned, it is sinking under its own weight. This may be exacerbated by changing global sea levels, but is at base a strictly local phenomonen.
At Thermopylae the 300 held off an army of 100,000 to 1,000,000 (depending on who you believe) men for two days in hand to hand combat. That was after a larger army had held them off for a week before withdrawing from the field.
At the time Thermopylae was a pass bordered by cliffs on one side and the sea on the other so narrow that one man with a spear could hold it.
Now it is wide enough that a tank battalion could traverse it side by side.
Things are not always as simple as they might appear and the world is not, nor has it ever been a static place. Islands have both dissapeared and appeared throughout mankind's term on this earth.
Works of man may certainly nudge things here and there in particular directions, but the idea that the world as it is is "normal" and must, nevermind can, be held in its current form is arrogance born of ignorance.
The only thing constant is change.
KFG
Also, this probably isn't unprecedented in human history. For example, the ocean levels rose substantially after the end of the last ice age. It's quite likely that human inhabited islands became submerged during that time. We also have land that is in the process of sinking, eg, along the southern part of the north sea or southern Louisianna to name a couple of locations that experience substantial sinking of land and have been populated for a fair bit of time.
George Bush didn't cause the submerging of this island. His policies may cause other islands to be submerged in 30 to 50 years, but this island sank due to carryover from the Industrial Revolution and the massive industrialization of the developed world in the last half century.
Blaming GWB in this conversation is petty. You can oppose his policies without blaming him for events that he didn't cause. But blaming him for everything you see is just intellectual bankruptcy.
Another slashdot dupe; this article was posted in 1984.
Logic, reason, and rational thought are unwelcome here.
Now, back to the gravy train...
Telegraph India has a map of the island and some islands nearby in 1969 and in 2001, and Google Maps has a Satellite photo.
Or just till the next ice age? Seriously, it would reason that if the sea level lowers, it might become exposed again, right?
The small island of "Jordsand" was inhabited in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, rising water has since then made the island vanish entirely. I visited the island in the 1980s before it vanished entirely. More info here:
p .png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordsand
Plate tectonics means that some part of continents are rising, and some are falling. In Denmark, the northern part is rising, and the southern part is going down. Jordsand was located in the area that is going down. This means, that measured relatively to the ground, the water is "rising" in south Denmark and "falling" in north Denmark.
Here is a picture of the remains of the "Ferry farm" in Ræhr, Denmark:
http://www.saarup.dk/saarup2/johannespedersen.htm
From this place, there was once a ferry going to "Boat farm" in Hanstholm. Today, you drive this distance by car instead. Both farms are located in the middle of this map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hanstholmen-ma
What has once been a collection of islands, is today countryside with a few lakes. More information about the former island of Hanstholm is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanstholm
If this island has "been covered" (as opposed to having "sank") where are the rest of the islands that should also be completely covered by the sea?
Could it just possibly be an issue of that island sinking?
If not, then I think you've gone past blind faith.
A BBC article from September, 2003, Fears rise for sinking Sundarbans indicates that the island mentioned in the Slashdot story, and others, sunk a long time ago. Perhaps the Slashdot story article gave the wrong name.
A July 29, 2003 article GOP disputes global-warming cause gives the Bush administration's position then: "... the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee question[ed] not only the evidence for warming, but also the link between human actions and climate change."
The issue in the United States, of course, is not when an island in India sunk, but the fact that there is ongoing damage, and that the Bush administration has tried to delay action as much as possible.
Believe it or not. According to this Wikipedia, the city of Dwarka has submerged many times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarka/
I for one welcome our new, many-tentacled, overlord.
Right.
He just beat a real rocket scientist for the presidency. Twice.
But that's what's liable to happen when you let just anybody vote. It is fortunate though that while global climate change is contentious the natural supply of uninspired invective far exceeds the demand.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The other day there was an article about the dolphins in China disappearing. Sure we clamour, "OMG, it's terrible. If we don't stop soon, we might be screwed. Aw, but what can we do, it's so hard. So uncertain, so...hey, can I have one of those bagels? Oh, yum." The other day I was talking with a group of 10 people about glacial melting and the rising sea level. They all nodded seriously and said, "Sure, but that is a theory and even then it would only happen in 50 years." I assure you, if I bring up this article, people will look just as serious, and then hop in their Hummer and drive to the gas station so they can go hiking on what used to be ski slopes.
Until about a million people are absolutely, beyond any doubt--beyond even the ability of the most resolutely blind dumbass moron I know's ability to doubt--are going to relocate or drown in their home because of rising sea level...and it has to be a first world country because otherwise, reminder: Nobody Really Gives a Fuck...until that point, I do not really want to hear about it.
Why should we all have to suffer with our feelings of the awful terrible things that will likely happen (but hopefully just after we die happily in our old age so our children can deal with it instead), when elected or otherwise empowered people will never act fast enough to ever avert any true crisis. I say, bring on the disasters. One after another. Because getting some practice at actually dealing with problems just might start building a habit of acting and instill some fear in a real problem, rather than the lurking possibility of a boogeyman or an Osama or little microbes that people will only act on enough to deprive others of their liberties, but never act on enough to actually address the issue since the issue isn't there yet. Isn't it ironic how proactive we are at doing terrible things when faced with a real problem, and how inactive we are at doing the good things? Well, it's not ironic at all. Good things are invariably more work and most people are inherently lazy, which is why 5% of the world has 90% of the wealth, and they wealthy are too busy driving around in hummers.
Wake me up when we're all drowning.
Maybe one of you can answer my stupid question for me, because it's been bugging the hell out of me. I saw a NASA photograph a few weeks ago which showed the emergence of a new island from underwater volcanic activity in the pacific. So are events like this a direct result of the melting glaciers? Or does all that lava being spewed out from below the crust have a noticeable effect on sea levels?
I believe global warming is happening however I don't believe this is the first time a island has gone under. Tsunami/Katrina anyone?
Get up!
Sorry. Back to the climate change trolls.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
your point about "no normaility" is good, but I hope you aren't trying to push a "both sides of the argument" point of view. just because there are always two sides doesn't mean they are equal.
the fact is people have historically settled very near water and if that water moves real people get screwed. it's no comfort that there's a bit more land on the other side of the world when your house is under water.
humans have always rebuilt the world to suit their needs, whether by making changes or preventing changes.
From what i understdand of oceanography, which is by no means a great deal, oceans may have slightly different sea levels, i.e. the great lakes are quite different, hence the need for the locks in sault ste. marie - despite the fact that superiour and michigan are connected, thier heights differ by quite a few feet... i believe this is true of the atlantic and the pacific, which may be part of why locks are needed in the panama canal... in as much as oceans are contiguous, other factors like the sea bed, crevaces, etc., all have an effect upon what is measured when "sea level" is measured...
It's a bit of a stretch to believe that a phenomenon that is (so far) too small to even measure with confidence could erase an island big enough to have a substantial population. It's a bit hard to tell because of the "noise", but it looks like the total sea level rise in the 20th Century was maybe 4-6 inches ... at most.
So what really happened to this island? Who knows -- either erosion or local sinking one suspects.
Wikipedia has a long article on global warming href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise" >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise.
And here's an article that says that the Sundabaran Islands of which Lohachara is (was?) a member are sinking at 3.4cm (about 1.4 inches) a year which is maybe 20 times the estimated rate of sea level rise from global warming. href="http://membrane.com/global_warming/notes/tig er.html">http://membrane.com/global_warming/notes/ tiger.html
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
this island sank due to carryover from the Industrial Revolution and the massive industrialization of the developed world in the last half century.
Either that, or the same ordinary process of erosion that sunk the former islands (now seamounts) of the northern part of the Hawaiian chain.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Good, sensible questions from someone starting from a base knowledge of nil. May I politely suggest Wikipedia as a good source for some introductory background reading?
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
step 1: spread the word that the inhabitants of those islands are thinking about suing some state for huge gobs of cash
step 2: a whole hurd of weasely frivolous lawyers stampede to get there as soon as possible
step 3: they get there but there is no way out
step 4: water level rises
step 5: happy times!
See? Every cloud has it's silver lining.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Ahh the great KFG. I've been reading your posts for quite some time. It is an honor.
Is man arrogant to think he could destroy all meaningful life on this earth? Is he arrogant when he tries to cultivate it instead of letting it be destroyed? Whether islands and other low lying areas are being covered in raising sea levels caused by us, barely nudged in that direction or even through a process totally unrelated to our actions. We change our environment to suit us. While that isn't totally encompassing, who is to say that won't one day be the case?
Do you not see a progression? Building homes, cutting down forests and farming land, herding wild animals and domesticating them for our own benefit, building dams thus forming lakes, making man made islands. True given adequate time, the elements would take back such unnatural changes and find a balance.
Whether the rising sea levels be our fault or not, is there nothing we can do? I place my hope in mankind. If the water is rising because of us then we can stop it. If not, then at least we can try or alter the effects it would have on us by doing what we have already been doing. Perhaps that is foolish and we can never achieve such change, still I rather be foolish than accept it the way it is.
Indeed, the only thing constant is change. Perhaps it is arrogant and ignorant of me to believe, that we can change it back.
It might be and might not. Most likely it is but it hasn't been proven either way.
Gone!
You do know that I was joking, right? :)
Yeah, like this has never happened before. How many people lived on Atlantis?
> George Bush didn't cause the submerging of this island.
Yes, and fifty years from now the US Administration of the day is going to throw their hands in the air and claim "It was'nt US! ".
Nice try. We blame you *now* for Kyoto.
Are you sure? Given the number of islands that have come and gone through out the millennia you can't say that.
while I don't believe atlantis was home to some supper advanced civilization I do believe the island itself existed. The details of which is long gone.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
your point about "no normaility" is good, but I hope you aren't trying to push a "both sides of the argument" point of view. just because there are always two sides doesn't mean they are equal.
What I am doing is pointing out that the idea that there are "two sides of the argument" is an idiocy. There is no "argument" in the first place.
the fact is people have historically settled very near water and if that water moves real people get screwed.
I currently live on a flood plain. Before moving here I lived on an estuarial flood plain. I'm now simply a bit further inland on a tributary to that estuary. I have twice this year watched the waters rise toward my house. They never reached my house, but my small collection of crops was untterly destroyed. I have had to help neighbors leave their homes by boat.
I am not ignorant of the devestation that flooding can cause. The farm my mother grew up on was ultimately permantly destroyed by the one-two punch of the Great Hurricane of '38 (her entire town went eight feet underwater. My great-grandmother lost her store) and the hurricane of '44.
If you could excavate the bottom of Long Island sound you might very well find evidence of human habitation. 12,000 years ago it was a fertile valley; now it is a branch of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing people did either caused nor could have prevented this.
What "other side of the argument" is there in this? Shit happened. Shit always happens. Get used to it. It doesn't stop the shit from happening, but hysteria is not a very effective coping mechanism.
KFG
http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?news
(Kolkata Newsline)
Careful measurements of sea level change around the globe show similar numbers. Larger reported changes are usually due to subsidence (sinking land), erosion, annual rain (monsoon, hurricane) related flooding and poor land management. Talk a walk on your nearest beach and figure out how many years it would take at three mm/year before anything interesting would happen. Or be noticed.
Few now remember the Waponis, a cheerful island-dwelling people with a bizarre love of orange soda and no sense of direction. Technically, their fate was not so much due to a rising ocean, as it was to a sinking volcano.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Islands in that area are sinking and would be doing so regardless if mankind ever discovered fire. It's amazing for a bunch of tech geeks who are willing to believe anything that sounds like a disaster, if the other political party can be blamed for it. Go back watching your pr0n, it's more realistic then your AGW religion.
Dammy
There is no need to blame this on W since it he will be responsible for future catastrophes.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
No he didn't cause the island to sink, he did contribute though. Look at his environmental record in texas for example.
The important point is that we should stop listening to GW and his ilk when it comes to this subject. They have been wrong repeatedly and they have no credibility left.
evil is as evil does
At least the sea took Cthulhu with it!
[ home ]
Is man arrogant to think he could destroy all meaningful life on this earth?
He is arrogant to think he defines which life is "meaningful."
Whether the rising sea levels be our fault or not, is there nothing we can do?
Walk uphill? (And I say that as someone whose family fortune is dominated by the fact that we own harborside property in Marblehead, MA, some of the most desirable; and precarious, real estate in the world of man).
Survival is not, ultimately, achieved by holding things static. It is achieved by effectively coping with change.
This can, perhaps, be best seen in realizing that in order to attempt holding things static you must change something. The Army Corps of Engineers has been very active in my "backyard." The land has been transformed.
Perhaps it is arrogant and ignorant of me to believe, that we can change it back.
The moving finger having writ. . .
Or, put in tech terms; The Second Law wins.
It is intelligence to be able to adapt the environment to your needs (we no longer drag the boats up on the beach at Marblehead. We tie up to the dock), it is, however, wisdom to accept and move on from where you are. Every day is a new begining and there's nothing you can do about that. Grow where you're planted, but always keep a bag packed and be ready to run like hell.
KFG
WTF? How are entire islands being wiped out and we know less about it than how many celebrities are pissed about hurricane katrina? I mean I know less, and I've never heard this brought up as a topic of conversation before, so I assume nobody I know was aware of this either.
This shows that the current state of our media (even with the advent of the Internet) is abysmal to say the least. Not to mention it kinda shows how self-centered we are (forced to become).
You're nothing; like me.
Check out these articles for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_locks
Right, so can you please point us to some island that has been built up in the time when Lohachara island disappeared?
The simple fact is that river deltas are disappearing all over the world. A lot of this can be blamed to causes like bad water management, by building dams, canals, and levees without proper planning. But even if the rising sea level isn't the only cause for the problem, it's certainly not making things better.
It certainly is a litmus test for Democratic gullibility.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
A common misconception is that will could wreck the earths ability to sustain life, but this is wrong. The most we can do is wreck it's ability to sustain *us*.
Yes some animal species would go at the same time, but again Earth has bounced back from vast extinctions in the past. Indeed we emerged because of just such an event.
If more people drove hybrids, like I do, Atlantis would still be around.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I'm Dutch and us Dutch have something with water. Did you know that one of our small islands (located north north/east of our country) has also been swallowed by the sea at the end of the last century? No? Guess thats because they didn't invent global warming at that time. At least not in the extends they have now. For us it was a very simple process, one which has been part of our 'folklore' for millenia now: "The sea gives and the sea takes.". Every year we have parts of the country which flood over ("uiterwaarden"). When the sea finally retreats it sometimes leaves enough soil to build on so such a terrain is then "added" to the main land (easily put ofcourse). However that doesn't mean that this is the end of it. On the contrary; mostly these new terrains were used for agraculture. And why? Simple; because it has also happened numerous of times that the sea rose again and took away the newly given land. No global warming, no environmental problems, just the work of Mother Nature.
And on that subject. I could be mistaken here but I always learned at school that ice, in contrary to other materials, expanded when it was frozen. Thats why you get your broken waterpipes if they freeze up. When it melts then the water shrinks again. So how does the melting of the polar caps make the sea rise when the whole mass is actually shrinking?
Open Google Earth and search for "21.90N 88.11E"
Congratulations! You appear to have gotten your wish. How's that working out for you? PS in the future please to be wishing disasters upon the residents of your own city instead of mine kthx.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Measuring values with lots of background noise can be done with great accuracy, it's just a matter of how many data point you have and how you calculate the averages. Scientists do it all the time, a lot of the effort that goes in review of scientific papers is checking that the data was collected correctly, without statistical bias.
The problem with rising sea level is that when that really big storm hits, a few inches can make all the difference. Those islands were very low to begin with, perhaps they would have disappeared without global warming, but the rising sea level made the process worse and quicker.
All life has meaning but some things are more meaningful than others. Lest we have the choice to either save a human or a mouse. What would be your decision? I believe more meaning should be given to the human no matter what state, than to the mouse or any other beings on earth. Though I believe we can coexist, when it is the choice between one life or another. I'll choose the one that seems to have more potential.
"Walk uphill?" Hah, great one. How about we build a hill beneath us so we don't have to walk up it?
Survival is not, ultimately, achieved by holding things static. It is achieved by effectively coping with change.
Yes we can cope with change, the larger the change, the more detrimental it seems for us. Could we cope without fire, perhaps.. Would we have ever achieved what we achieved without it and be so successful? Doubtful. So surviving is coping with small changes. Change some fundamental thing like gravity and how would one cope with that? Surviving is adapting to changes to a certain extent. Beyond that we are doomed.
We used tools to overcome our own shortcomings to become the dominate species on this planet and spread out farther than any other animal. Take away our ability to wisely use such tools and what advantage would we have left over everything else?
"Grow where you're planted, but always keep a bag packed and be ready to run like hell."
Awesome comment by the way. Yes, but if something disastrous happened to the earth tomorrow, where would you run? Do you have a spaceship ready to fly you to another planet, solar system, galaxy?
Intelligence is adapting. Wisdom is seeing that something is beyond our natural ability to change. Survival is using our intelligence and wisdom to keep it at an acceptable level of change or find/make some place else better suited for us.
If more people drove hybrids, then some wouldn't be able to throw it in other people's faces and try to use it as a means of feeling superior or tell others that they are "beneath them".
Well, the Pope says that because the technology will only extend your mortal life and maybe get you a one way ticket to Hell. Meanwhile, those singing crappy tunes to God will be granted an immortal life in Heaven. At least, that's the theory they operate on...
Yea, it's a shame when that happens.
One of the good things about the rising sea level is that there will be more room to cultivate train oil to replace petrol products.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
No, its like firing a shotgun. A few pellets may miss the target but most will hit.
And its funny.
Hell, I'm Republican and I still like playing the "blame everything on Bush" game.
Wow And which administration do we blame for the Ice Age. Although I do believe that we humans, with our industrialization did indeed contribute to a global rise in temperature, the planet itself normally goes through temperature shifts. See, it pays to know our history. Not just a limited view of it. What? Warming you say must have been caused by the addition of Greenhouse gasses? That warming could only be blamed on humans and the damage they caused? Hmm... how did the earth get OUT of the last Ice Age? Didn't that involve warming? Wasn't there a distinct LACK of industrialization when we came out of the last Ice Age? But but but... what about these islands that have "sunk", right? You do want to point out that THIS must have been the direct cause of our own human failings and our not taking care of our environment... right? Well, agaiin, I direct your attention to history, and the fact that, again, our planet goes through all kinds of miraculous changes in geography, all on it's own, without our assistance. How much land was lost (and gained) by tectonic shifts... you know, the kinds of tectonic shifts that created our current continental structures. Maybe we did hasten the process. We didn't cause the process. We certainly aren't going to be able to stop the process.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
First off, sea level increases, assuming the sea level IS rising, is happening in mm per year, not meters. Unless these inhabitants are extremely small, a few extra mm of water is not covering a whole island.
Secondly, it's not unprecedented. In fact, as other posters have pointed out, islands have come and gone for all of recorded history.
Thirdly, the island appears to actually have dissapeared 22 years ago. It's part of a freaking river delta, guys.
I'm not smart enough to make a call on Global Warming. Maybe you guys are. But I do know enough to see that for all of recorded history, there have been large sections of the population that believe the world is ending. In EVERY instance, this is due to some sins of mankind. Repent! Say the believers. Repent now and perhaps we will all be spared! If this same slant was in a technology article, most of you would be calling FUD. Well I call it on this. This article is total crap.
That's not saying GW is false, that's saying that when trying to extrapolate long-term trends from short term inputs in a chaotic system a little humility is in order. Articles like this one make the whole GW movement look like a bunch of knee-jerk idiots. The science deserves better treatment than this. The public deserves a higher level of discussion than stories that can be tossed out after five minutes of inspection. FUD is no way to make a technology buy, or have a serious discussion about science.
Or use offshore drilling rigs where there used to be land.
While others have commented on the fact that the oceans are not rising (and will not ultimately rise very much) it is useful to note that the land on which the island rested could be sinking. You have both (a) the problem of sea floors being driven under the continent plates (subduction) as well as (b) the fact that islands which are built out of sedimentary material are going to be compressed (and sink) over time. So before everyone runs off to cite this as an example of global warming at work it would be useful to know whether other processes may be contributing.
He can be blamed for being arrogant about the effects of global climate change. The fact that he didn't cause this particular island to submerge is a pointless distinction to make, because he'll be partly to blame for future island losses anyway. This is not blaming GWB for *everything*. It's a valid and keen point the grandparent raises.
Lest we have the choice to either save a human or a mouse . . .Though I believe we can coexist, when it is the choice between one life or another. I'll choose the one that seems to have more potential.
.Dead in the morning and born at night, so man goes on forever, unenduring as the foam on the water. And this man that is born and dies, who knows whence he came and whither he goes? And who knows also why with so much labor he builds his house, who knows which will survive the other? The dew may fall and the flower remain, but only to wither in the morning sun, or the dew may stay on the withered flower, but it will not see another evening."
I am a vegetarian. I find I cannot make that determination. I cannot even adequately define "potential." It certainly seems likely that I would choose my own life, or that of my daughter's over that of a mouse; it's an issue of kinship and responsibility. I'm not so sure about yours though. I am not convinced there is any real distinction between the two of you. Perhaps you are a stranger, but the mouse is my friend.
So it's a good thing for you I need not make that choice.
Yes, but if something disastrous happened to the earth tomorrow, where would you run? Do you have a spaceship ready to fly you to another planet, solar system, galaxy?
You are going to die. So is mankind in time. In the meantime all we ever really do is muddle through the best we can, because we happen to be here. I am not arguing against muddling through, simply pointing out the fact of it.
"Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation. .
-Kamo no Chomei; circa 1200
Intelligence is adapting. Wisdom is seeing that something is beyond our natural ability to change. Survival is using our intelligence and wisdom to keep it at an acceptable level of change or find/make some place else better suited for us.
Ahhhhhhhhh, but the tricky part is adequately defining "better." Some guy named Henry wrote whole book about his experiments in attempting that definition. I'm not sure he succeded, neither was he, but the attempt had some importance.
KFG
A small factual error you made there: this is an Indian island, not a Hawaiian one.
The image of the submerged island is here:
0 128,88.112411&spn=0.033209,0.080338&t=h&om=1
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&z=14&ll=21.90
BTW: In Holland, we simply elevate the dikes. I live several meters below sea level.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
The need for more research in giant domes capable of keeping out the sea is clear.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Excellent point. This sudden panic about global warming being man made just show what megalomaniacs humans really are. We actually believe it's in our powers to destroy the entire planet! Earth is several billion years old and has gone through alot worse than we can ever dream about creating.
Nature is a slow moving thing. A few million years is nothing. And it has an amazing ability to take care of the problem and bounce back. Og course, natures current problem is us, and that problem is obviously addressed since we are killing each other off at an amazing rate. A few hundred years from now the human race is probably gone, the problem is solved and Earth will go on living for millions of years to come.
That's actually a wounderfull thought.
GWB is part of the problem -- and the US, to the extent that he is the President and you follow him as sheep, allowing the government to even censor the truth coming from scientists.
And you are, too, every time you come up with such retarded excuses like that ("he' not guilty of what happens now, just of what will happen later"). How dumb do you think you can be? How dumb do you think we are to believe such idiotic argument?
He could have done lots to improve Earth's situtation, if nothing more by setting an example for China to follow. Now China will pollute even more than the US, and you are gonna resort to double standards again. The usual phrase which always comes up is: "they can't do it because they will pollute _our_ air, but if someone can do it, better be the US, huh?".
It's not just a lame President. It's an entire nation of lame people. Congrats. We humans are so dumb we are 90% identical and cannot even agree to clean our rooms in our common building.
i hate to be cynical, but this is nothing but an orchestrated effort to lay the groundwork for a monetary claim against "The Rich Industrialized West" a.k.a., the U.S.
t ion=readEditorials&itemid=125&language=1
First off, the article doesn't even have the date correct for when the island disappeared..22 years ago (that would be 1988). So let's dispense with accuracy right there..
Second, the river delta in question is FAMOUS for flooding and killing/displacing hundreds of thousands...geez it's the drainage basin for the freakin Himalayan mountain range...
Bangladesh is in bottom quintile in per capita GDP.
and finally, lets not forget this article..
'Bangladesh floods: rich nations 'must share the blame'
http://www.scidev.net/Editorials/index.cfm?fuseac
pretty much lays it out...they're after money..
'In future, therefore, when affected countries demand assistance from the rich countries of the world in helping address climate-related disasters such as floods, it will not be for a request for charity but for compensation, appealing to their moral responsibility, if not their legal liability, to make good the damage and destruction for which their activities have, directly or indirectly, been partially responsible.'
this is all sponsored and written under the auspices of that famously neutral organization the U.N.
this is a giant effort at laying the groundwork for demanding monetary compensation, not aid, for flooding that has been going on FOREVER in that country. These islands didn't "sink", they where washed away 22 years ago from flooding, that has been going on for millenia....
in the enviromental arena...it's never about the enviroment, it's always about money, and getting someone who has it, to fork it over to someone else, who wants it.
Yes, but what is the sound of shit happening?
Brown 25.
KFG
Even though you are a stranger, I'd choose you over a mouse which was my friend. While the mouse's life is precious and I really liked it. If it had to give its life to save yours of whom I do not know and I had a choice, that would be my decision. Perhaps it is a petty thing to say but a mouse can't look you in the face and thank you for saving it. You can. But that's not the point. Might as well ask which has more meaning, you are grass. Since you are a vegetarian, you don't eat meat. So you feel vegetables are of a lesser value than animals that walk around and with which can be more easily identified.
I'd rather not muddle through and would rather like to renegotiate the terms of the arrangement.
Better is relative to everyone and everything. What is better to me might be better or worse for you. It is better for me that I get to live and try to contribute to society. It is better for you to save a mouse which is your friend, for I am neither a mouse or your friend.
Not to mention R'lyeh !
See ? It happens all the time !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
First of all this is not the first inhabited island to disappear "forever" under the sea. Several others around the globe have done this 1000's of years ago. I am sure even more did so when the last ice age came to an end. "Land Bridge disappears forever". Second of all the word forever is something that can never be proven. A colder climate could cause this island to pop right out of the ocean again. Despite what some people would have you believe the earth has never "always been the same". Even in the short geological time of 5 million years the earth has had massive changes in climate. Changes that man could not have caused.
Is man causing changes now? You bet. Is all the warming because of man? No one can say that. If they do then they are lying. Man has been on this earth a very short time. We have been around maybe 5 million years, tops, and that is counting a lot of monkey time. The dinosaurs were around for 150 million years or more. Imagine the changes they must have seen. Life has survived and probably always will until the sun becomes to warm and makes life impossible. The best guess on that happening is another 1-20 million years. Much sooner than the 5 billion years we thought we had several decades ago.
People like to point fingers at other people on global warming but if you are posting on this board you can pretty much point the finger at yourself unless you are running a "green" computer on solar power, don't drive.....at all, don't live in a wood house, don't use plastics (opps so much for solar power) and many other things the people do to pollute.
Who on Slashdot actually follows links, especially when they are in signatures? I think everyone in this thread was trying to be funny, including me.
Signing Kyoto would do NOTHING to correct the environmental imbalances that already exist. Signing Kyoto would do virtually NOTHING to correct any impending environmental disasters. It is too little too late, and sacrificing the U.S. economy on a symbolic gesture is arguably even less responsible than the decisions that have brought us to the point we are at now.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
So you feel vegetables are of a lesser value than animals that walk around and with which can be more easily identified.
I feel they are less kin, but that I shall have to return myself to them anyway, because I am them.
I'd rather not muddle through and would rather like to renegotiate the terms of the arrangement.
Reality does not care what you would rather. You may study it and turn its nature toward what you perceive as beneficial to yourself, but you cannot negotiate with it.
And the reality is that you muddle through; and fail.
I am neither a mouse or your friend.
I'll need proof.
KFG
Ahh yes, but we are special. We are the only organism in the entire 3 billion-year history of life as we know it that was able to single-handedly knock the beautiful, complex ecology out of equilibrium. And we did it in just 2000 years--most of it in the last 200! That should give you pause. First, because it's disgusting, and I agree with you that we all deserve to be destroyed as a result. Second, this isn't a normal planetary event we're causing, or even an extreme version of a normal one. This is something completely new. And I'm not sure that nature really does know how to deal with us.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Thank you for bringing a modicum of sensibility to the discussion. Thirty years ago the same people who are now screaming that we must fight global warming were screaming that we needed to fight global cooling. A study of media coverage of the issue shows that popular opinion on the issue flip flops every 15 - 30 years, dating back to the 1890's.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
Until then, go fuck yourselves.
And the Earth.
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
We haven't reached Kyoto levels of pollution in Europe, so we really can't beat our chest loudly. Further more the levels of pollution are that of 1990, which still means quite heavy pollution: remember the biggest industrial base in the world is in Europe and although European factories and plants do clean emissions, they aren't 100% clean. Actually what is happening in Europe largely is that by trying to achieve Kyoto levels we only have been able to decrease the increase of pollution.
Just to make my point more clear, here are some excerpts from Wikipedia article about Kyoto Protocol.
On June 28, 2006, the German government announced it would exempt its coal industry from requirements under the Kyoto agreement. Claudia Kemfert, an energy professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin said, "For all its support for a clean environment and the Kyoto Protocol, the cabinet decision is very disappointing. The energy lobbies have played a big role in this decision."
To date (October 2006), there is no legislative framework in place within the UK to guarantee year-on-year reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases.
The position of the EU is not without controversy in Protocol negotiations, however. One criticism is that, rather than reducing 8%, all the EU member countries should cut 15% as the EU insisted a uniform target of 15% for other developed countries during the negotiation while allowing itself to share a big reduction in the former East Germany to meet the 15% goal for the entire EU. Also, emission levels of former Warsaw Pact countries who now are members of the EU have already been reduced as a result of their economic restructuring. This may mean that the region's 1990 baseline level is inflated compared to that of other developed countries, thus giving European economies a potential competitive advantage over the U.S.
The good thing is that we are really doing something to make a difference, but we aren't making real progress in the issue. Further more many countries in the European Union have really unrealistic energy politics going i.e. Germany and Sweden who both made political decision to stop using nuclear power and who now buy more and more gas from Russia and electricity from other member countries. Today only Finland is building more nuclear power and France is the next country to do the same. If not all member countries don't educate their citizens and start to have rational energy policy which includes nuclear power, we as Europeans don't really have a position to shout to the US or rest of the world "Fuck you, you irresponsible pollution loving lunatics" when we are just as bad.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
And as we all know, Hawaii is the only place in the universe where erosion occurs.
The important point is that we should stop listening to GW and his ilk when it comes to this subject.
Actually, that's exactly wrong. We should be listening to (and watching) them, analyzing their words and actions, and we writing about what's wrong. If we ignore them, they won't go away; they'll continue their ongoing efforts to make maximum short-term profit while slowly degrading our world. The only way we can successfully fight such things is through knowledge and understanding, not by ignorance.
Remember the old adage "Know your enemy". And, we might add, publicise your enemy's behavior.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You want to watch out; hysteria is the rule of the day when it comes to global warming.
The facts don't support that global warming causes "sinking of islands." If islands sink, they do so for (relatively) local geological causes. The amount that the seas have risen in response to the (highly doubtful) global warming trend people so badly want to imagine is a matter of centimeters (currently running about 10 per century), and I submit to you all that if an island was mere centimeters from being overcome by the sea, then calling it "inhabitable" was stretching it a bit in any case. Yes, yes, the sea can rise a centimeter and a wave can get over something it previously could not, but really, storms produces wave action you can hardly imagine if you've not been out in the ocean on an isolated island.
The bottom line? Even if global warming is absolutely on target, it had nothing whatsoever with this island succumbing to the sea.
Before you have a cow about current sea level rise and what effects that might have, perhaps you should peruse this. Pay particular attention to the graph; note how unusual our current relative stability is over time, but look at the bottom line; sea level rise simply isn't enough to demonize for eating islands. Some land features will succumb to the sea in the normal course of events, and that is all we have here.
It never ceases to amaze me how readily people will accept a pointed finger if "global warming" is inserted anywhere in the accusation.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you are indeed them, then why do vegans refuse to eat you?
By negotiation I mean I'll build a hammer and smash a rock into small pieces and move on to the next rock until there are no rocks left or I need to build a better hammer and continue on. Or I work out a deal where the rocks smash against themselves, perhaps through a medium of moving water, and I can sit back and relax.
I am not a mouse by the simple fact you can't bribe me with cheese or peanut butter and you can't use those commonly used things to catch me in a trap. Also mice can't talk and pinky and brain are cartoons and fake.
I am not your friend because, well you don't have me listed as one in your profile.
"The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented."
1 word.
Atlantis.
An extensive impact study of the Asian Brown Cloud can be found Here.
Also some "Quick Facts" on the Asian Brown Cloud may be found Here.
And well, if you just Google it, you can become a complete expert!
Could Asia be doing itself in here? Surely, the ABC has a significant impact on their environment that simply cannot be ignored -- unless, that it, your goal is to milk the West of money. But hey, perhaps the ABC is having a significant impact on our climate here in the West and perhaps we should be bilking them for money!
Ain't Geopolitics grand?
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
If you are indeed them, then why do vegans refuse to eat you?
I have no explanation for vegans.
I am not a mouse by the simple fact you can't bribe me with cheese or peanut butter and you can't use those commonly used things to catch me in a trap.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think you have just provided a compelling proof that I am, in fact, a mouse. So now I know how to answer that question.
KFG
Blaming Bush for everything is a DNC talking point.
Blaming Bush for everthing means he is God.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Even if every nuke on the planet went off bacteria would still survive ... given another hundred millions years or so an entirely new and different ecology would evolve. Granted, we wouldn't be a part of it.
Actually, if anything survived such a radioactive holocaust it would probably be cockroaches. I shudder to think what they might evolve into.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Since we will not get instant gratification from our selfless sacrifice to clean up our CO2 emissions, it isn't worth doing.
That is the most dangerous "stinkin' thinkin'" going on in the US today. Great Gramma and Great Grandpa are to blame for the CO2 problem we have today, so technically it is not my problem. If I'm to blame for the CO2 problem that my great grandkids have to live with, then at least I'll be dead and won't have to listen to them complain.
At the very least humans have muddied the environmental waters to the point that we cannot pinpoint exactly what we have caused and what is natural cyclic environmental behaviour. And because of this we have no way of knowing how much we are accelerating any natural cyclical events beyond what is natural. And yet, any mention of sacrifice or change on our part is still dealt with viciously and remorselessly.
Unfortunately, those who believe that change and sacrifice are for those other countries will never realize that they are giving up a perfect opportunity to create multiple industries that can make the oil and coal industries look like child's play. Their panicky death grip on the status quo will never allow them to see the opportunities that the US has missed already, or what we will soon be completely missing out on. Those who have been fighting change the most viciously are the same ones who, in ten years, will be shrieking "Why are we licensing wind and solar technology from Europe? Why can't our auto manufacturers sell to Asia or Europe? Why is our economy slowly weakening while Asia and Europe are getting stronger?"
It's a matter of economics. A majority of the rest of the world gets it, but so far we have not and that does not bode well for America's future.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
That's Cheney, not Bush, that shot the guy.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Atlantis didn't succumb to Global Warming. Ascended beings can control Global Warming.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I believe this happened to Gilligan's Island.. The Professor said so!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Are you suggesting that back then the Earth's temperature never changed?
Like most errant children, he's gotten away with so many things we didn't see, that he ought to be glad this is all he's being blamed for...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Perhaps it is arrogant and ignorant of me to believe, that we can change it back.
Probably it is. Humans have both an ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions, and a capacity for modifying said environment shared by no other creature on Earth. But I have the feeling that after the past century or so of changing things we'd best get set for a round of adaptation. We're going to have to be pretty damn flexible to survive the next century, whether or not anything is done about global warming now, whether or not global warming is even a problem.
In any event, "the environment" and "global warming" have become such bastions of international politics, power-mongering and economic chicanery that I don't trust anything I hear on either subject if it comes out of the mainstream media or from anywhere near the White House. Or any foreign power's government either, for that matter. There's nothing I can do, personally, about global warming and even if I could, odds are that anything it is suggested I do will be for someone else's benefit rather than any serious attempt at redress. Nothing substantive can or will ever be done about global warming because it has become a tool of influence, to be used to control or decimate national economies. The powerful no longer care about the future, they only care about the now. The rest of us are going to have to follow them over any cliff they lead us to, whether we want to or not.
People on all sides of the issue claim to have "all the facts" and that "the bulk of scientific evidence supports our conclusions". Since I don't have the requisite scientific background to examine the raw data and judge this for myself, I choose to presume that everyone is either mistaken or outright lying to me. There are multiple points of view (there is global warming, there isn't global warming, there is global warming but it's not serious, there is global warming but it's not serious yet, there is global warming and we're all going to die tomorrow, etc. etc. etc. ad-bloody-nauseam.) and they can't all be true.
Sometimes you have no choice but to believe that those in power know what they're doing even when you know, in your heart, that they don't give a damn. Consequently I'm not going to worry about it. I have plenty of problems as it is.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hog Island was a pig-shaped mile-long (1600 meter) barrier island destroyed by a major hurricane. It was off the southern coast of the Rockaways. That is just off Long Island, NY.
On August 23, 1893 a Category 2 hurricane hit it directly and wiped it off the face of the Earth.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What you said will be true if the so called "sea level" is a perfect flat surface. However, the Earth, as a water ball is quite bumpy and is shaped by gravitational force, tidal force, structure of the seabed, and ocean current. The few centimeter overall difference can easily be magnified locally by the factors above.
Erosion of river delta is an ancient process. New Orleans will cease to exist in less than a century because of this. This is no Global Warming story.
I'm amazed that this got modded "insightful". Calling the gloabal warming trend "highly doubtful" is inflamatory to say the least. There is no serious doubt that the planet is warming. My bogometer pegs every time I listen to one of the GW deniers, and the damn thing nearly broke when I read the link. As a climber, I have seen glaciers all over North America and Europe as they vanish. Colorado scientists tell me that mountan glaciers all over the world are contributing more then the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice. To the tune of several feet of ocean rise by the end of the century. We are in for a rough ride, folks.
I agree with parent about one thing: In the long run we are at the mercy of natural forces. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanos are familiar disasters which occur in a timescale we easily comprehend. There will be another ice age, and the oceans will drop 120 meters again (as they did at the peak of the last glacial episode 20,000 years ago), but history is incapable of recording such long-term changes. The sea levels will plummet and rise again just as fast, mocking our current period of stability. However, we strongly disagree on this: If there is a likelyhook that human activity is precipitating a change in sea levels that will affect human life across the globe sooner than it would happen naturally, then I believe we owe it to ourselves to honestly evaluate the causes and effects, then take action as appropriate even in the face of (or because of) uncertainty.
When Yellowstone is about to blow up, you'll all come running with your great economy for refuge in Europe.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
The only issue really is (with a few apologies to the Tuvaluans), are we going to do anything to help those places about to disappear beneath the waves, or are we going to shrug and tell them, "sucks to be you?" We really only care because modern air travel and modern technology make modern terrorism by disaffected and newly damp populaces a possibility in our own back yards. Ten thousand Tuvaluans will be relatively easy to relocate. 144 Million Bengalis are another issue.
So, the issue isn't really, are we ruining the holy earth and should we immediately move heaven and earth (so to speak) to restore it to some static, Platonic, ideal. The issue is, are we prepared to deal with the human fallout when 144x10^6 Bengalis decide they 're not going to quietly slip beneath the waves to avoid inconveniencing us. Foreign aid directed towards building Polders in affected areas, controlled migrations starting now while low-lying areas are converted to non-permanently inhabited farmland, and similar moves are probably warranted, unless you want to take the chance that some enterprising soul isn't going to come up with the "relocate us to Kansas or we set off a Nuke in NY Harbor" solution.
It was a lot easier for a few hundred to few thousand proto-Hamptonites 10K years ago to move inland and to higher ground when there was less competition and fewer of them. A last minute exodus from some overly-inhabited sub-tropical delta into higher-ground already occupied by a couple hundred million current inhabitants is going to be less smooth a transition.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
Never happened before? Better tell that to the archeologists who are studying ancient civilizations whose ruins have been, and still are, flooded.
Sea level has been rising, on and off, for thousands of years.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Because they're SAND BARS.
Turns out life is messy. Who knew?
KFG
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You must be....no...I can't, it's christmas.
Hmmm how interesting. I was on Kiribati three months ago, it was above water then. Perhaps the author is referring to other low lying islands in the vicinity that are prone to being swamped by high tides and big waves. What I find interesting is the idea that somehow global warming is a republican caused problem or that this issue could have been prevented if only the republicans had jumped on board with the meaningless Kyoto accord or that this issue (global warming) is something that only started happening in the last 8 years. I am not a fan of the current administration. Nor am I a republican. But come on, they (republicans) didn't invent terrorism OR global warming. The real debate is to what extent humanity can even affect the temperature of the planet. There seems to be evidence that we were (are) coming out of a global period of cooling (the tail end of the last mini ice age) and that this period of warming is just part of the natural cycle of the planet. Is it possible that our life forms are just coming to the end of the hospitable period of the planet's history? The period that made it possible for such a feeble (physically) life form such as humans to exist in the first place? It is a bit like a gambler whose winning streak has come to an end, desperately clamoring to find out what he/she can do to "bring back" their luck. I guess my perspective is a bit different because I view the planet not as a gift from god but as a naturally occurring phenomenon, during which I am fortunate to be part of the surviving life form that has been able to achieve both self-awareness AND self-loathing. In this context the earth warming is not so shocking. Let's face it, the only reason people care about global warming is the effect it will have on them. The rest of the species on the planet have had their environment adversely effected by humans for some time. So this is no shock to them. Who knows, perhaps with less people on the planet the fish will make a comeback and so will the whales, lions, great apes, and gazillions of other species that have been hunted to near extinction or perhaps all life will cease to exist and the planet will just be another hot rock spinning in space. That is until the sun blows up and vaporizes it. Either way, humans are but a small itch (if that) on the butt of the universe. Merry Christmas
That's one way of looking at it, and if we were discussing wildabeast, I might agree. However, we are talking a large number of mobile and at least nominally educated people capable of saying, "you know, we don't have to just sit here and take this." A few dozen with an abstract grudge have managed to directly motivate thousands of followers, and made us spend an inordinate amount of money and time defending against them. A population of a few million with a rather concrete grudge are going to be a lot harder. We might decide that in our own self-interest, a little engineering assistance could be in order.
Or we could take the Atlantis option, and sink them first.
Yes, life is messy, but I'd rather it didn't get messy around here the way it is in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Baghdad, or Bogata. Maybe you already live in that world, so it's perfectly normal to you, but the one I'm in doesn't include the risk of being suicide-bombed by the disaffected on a daily basis. I could do without that kind of excitement.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
The alarm bells went off for me when I saw platitudes of "never" and "forever". Neither of those hold true when we talk about the earth. And this sort of thing is going to happen irregardless of mankind's contribution to global warming. No matter how much or little mankind is affecting the earth's temperature, it's clear the earth is on an up cycle and would be warming to large degree on it's own. That doesn't mean I reject the relatively youthful science about man's contributions, simply that if let's say that 75% of the warming would've happened on it's own, there are quite a few of these low lying areas that would be toast.
that is the land subsiding. To the people concerned it makes no difference, but confusing plate techtonics with global warming is simply alarmist.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Good for you!
Closes eyes and smiles
Thumbs up!
You do not by chance live in San Francisco?
What information are we intended to draw from that link? That mean sea levels have riden ~120 metre in the last 20,000 years? That the current climb as shown in the top graph would appear to be a mere insignificant variation of the general 8,000 year trend shown in the last? Or that the Sydney Opera House is more than 5" above sea level?
Plate techtonics. Almost the whole coast of India is subsiding, but the Himalaya mountains are rising. The US gulf coast from New Orleans all the way to Florida is subsiding. The european coast of Turkey is subsiding, but the asian coast - just a few kilometers to the east across the water, is rising. The northern coast of Africa is subsiding, while the southern coast is rising. All these things have nothing to do with atmospherics.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
As a result of... global warming.
Granted not anthropogenic global warming, of course.
The question is not whether climate change occurs exclusively in response to anthropogenic effects. Nobody believes that to be the case. There are really three questions: (1) are we currently in a global warming period; (2) can human actions stop it; (3) if human actions cannot stop it, can they effect the rate of change enough to matter.
If your answers are yes/no/no, then we should burn all the fossil fuels we can, and use the wealth to relocate humanity to higher ground. If your answers are yes/*/*, then we should just burn all the fossil fuels we can and stop worrying.
One interesting possiblity would be yes/no/yes: that we are in a warming period, there is nothing we can do to stop it, but we could affect the rate of change. A temperature change that looks vertical on a geological time scale is anything but on a historical one; there's a big difference between a ten meter sea rise in a hundred years and a ten meter sea rise in fifty. Neither is a happy scenario, but the hundred year scenario is probably manageable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
ROFL
.sig.
No, Arlington, VA. Should be buried somewhere in the story linked to in my
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
(1) are we currently in a global warming period
.there's a big difference between a ten meter sea rise in a hundred years and a ten meter sea rise in fifty.
Yes.
(2) can human actions stop it
No.
(3) if human actions cannot stop it, can they effect the rate of change enough to matter.
Nobody knows.
If your answers are yes/no/no, then we should burn all the fossil fuels we can, and use the wealth to relocate humanity to higher ground.
This does not follow.
. .
The sea is not going to rise ten meters.
KFG
wow, sounds like a great sequel.
and all thanks to global warming!
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
They come and go all the time.
You know, if there's a single reason why I am still a little skeptical on this stuff, it's the hysterically reported articles like this that, whan you really research them, evaporate.
No politics for me. I couldn't care less about the oil companies one way or the other. I have no agenda. It's just this bullshit journalism.
It doesn't mater if the cause is human, sunspots or some other natural cycle.
The climate is changing and Homo Sapiens need to start adapting or we will end up just like the Dinosaurs. Just like everything else on the planet, we are expendable as far as the Earth is concerned.
The sooner we start making changes the easier, and cheaper, its going to be in the long run.
No bite but a steadily increasing source of funds, which could be used for other transportation modes. Even free bus rides.
Or a nickel a month, that would really stir things up. In retrospect, 3 cents a month sounds more like it, $1.80 in 5 years.
Happy New Year 2007
(I see we have flying guys, where are the flying cars?)
Melt the sea ice at the north pole to offset the melting land ice.
Um, you did know that when floating ice melts the water level drops, didn't you?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Up in British Columbia, Canada, vast amounts of pine forests are being destroyed due to the mountain pine beetle - an insect that was formerly kept in check during extended freezes in winter. The pine forests here are just devastated - it's really shocking to see places that were green a year or two ago that are now all brown and black. We just haven't had the temperatures to control it and it's not looking like we'll get them any time soon.
While there may be positives to a global warming trend, they would most likely be balanced out by negatives - new pests and diseases will be able to make inroads that they weren't able to before.
~ Leilah
The man who has not seen The Groove Tube has not truly lived.
:)
No shit.
Thanks for reminding me
Merry Christmas.
KFG
Is man causing changes now? You bet.
e _031208.html/ 2006/19/image/a
Then please explain why the other planets
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-ag
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases
are also warming up? Are we causing THAT too?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Jethro Tull lyrics from that period.
Uh, it's not that the islands are sinking. The sea level is rising.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Let's see here, it is the USians that is destroying the Earth and it always have been the USians involved. The Chinese aren't doing it, neither are any other country. That is why Mr. Bush never signed the treaty. The only reason why you made that comment is your US centric view of the world.
Get your free pr0n atSoft-tits.com
Updated Daily
Don't forget this one.
Goodwin Sands, stretch of shoals and sandbars, c.10 mi (20 km) long, lying off the east coast of Kent, SE England. The shifting sands do not allow the construction of lighthouses, but there are several lightships and numerous buoys. The Sands were once a fertile isle called Lomea, the property of Godwin, earl of Wessex; Lomea was submerged by a great storm in the late 11th cent.
Actually you missed my point. I said man is causing changes but we have no idea what we have changed and what nature itself, the earth, the sun, the orbit in the solar system our orbit in the Galaxy, may be causing. In fact we may have saved ourself from an iceage that would have killed millions. We just don't know.
Nearly all scientist agree that in 1 million years the mean temperature on earth will be around 160 degrees due to the sun burning more fuel. That means no matter what we do global warming is going to happen.
I still believe that we are effecting the environment, I just don't point fingers at people like Bush. I don't believe in clear cutting forests but renewable logging is just fine. Some environmentalist are so overboard on saying what people should do yet they don't follow their own advice. Even Julia Butterfly who lived in the tree went to the lumberyard to purchase wood products to build her little house in the trees. How many times have we seen protesters playing an acoustic guitar made of wood and telling us we don't need to chop down trees.
I think the biggest environmentalist joke is Al Gore. He burn so much fuel going around the country telling people to save energy and he has his entourage in tow. I am no environmentalist but Al Gore looks like a toxic waste dump compared to my impact on the environment.
It would seem that you really don't have a clue what you're talking about.
and not just hidden by Dharma beneath some electromagnetic field?
Something else to think about: 1000 years from now, we will be going through the natural warming cycle again. If our energy habits have truly made it significantly worse, it would be real helpful if what we have learned was still available, and not so politicized as to be useless. It would be nice if it wasn't recorded in some secret encrypted Microsoft digital format. It would be nice if we didn't have the equivalent of the burning of the library of Alexandria (interesting that Islam was on the rise during the last warming as well).
Disclaimer: I have never owned a hummer, ride my bicycle to work, and generally agree with the sentiment that we have way too many cars - but not because of global warming.
Is Bangladesh's problem due more to global warming and sea level rises or is it due to crushing poverty amplifying the effects of flooding, storms, and rising sea levels?
The cyanobacteria and kin are laughing at you.
Not only did they wash away 22 years ago. They washed away because the islands used to be covered in a forest of mangrove trees which were completely clear cut away to provide a place for human settlement as they had been uninhabited before. Then, golly gee, after all the trees on a sand bar in a river delta were cut away, the sand bar suffered major erosion over the next few decades and is now no longer above water. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GLOBAL WARMING AND RISING SEAS. It is an ecological problem, but to blame it on CO2 emissions is to totally miss the point. The problem here was loss of forest, loss of vegetation, overpopulation, and clear-cutting instead of proper management of the flora. Even if the earth were cooling and the seas were falling, and given the same ecological problems in the area, THIS island would have disappeared anyway.
It's the domino theory of island obliteration! As environmentalists always warned, once Lohachara falls, that's it for Egypt.
Got that right, Geoffrey. I can't remember Lohachara ever disappearing previously.
By quite a margin, as it happens. Lean doesn't say so, but Lohachara apparently vanished two decades ago. So much for Lean's scoop; the event took place back when Lean had hair, and several years before he emerged from a coma. Some locals aren't buying that global warming line, by the way:
Not according to Lean, who evidently believes all weather change is due to Meddling Humans. And that's all change, whether towards cold or heat. In 2004, Lean reported that "Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming". Two years later, he asked: "So where has all the snow gone?" There's no pleasing Geoffrey.
UPDATE. This nonsense was republished in the NZ Herald.
UPDATE II. Lean has previously been convicted of sins of omission and other crimes against journalism.
UPDATE III. Jackalope Pursuivant: "I've seen worse cases of journalistic malpractice, but not much worse."
While GWB is not directly responsible for fate of these islands, he is reviled the world over for his willfull ingnorance that will cause far worse damage in the coming decades, he has justifyably become the last focal point of peoples anger. It's not because he does not conform to "orthodoxy", it is because he perpetuates ignorance to preserve the financial interests of what is now a very small club.
In other words he is seen as morally bankrupt, screwing all of humanity to pander to his base ("the elite"), for that alone he deserves far worse than just the ridicule and blame he draws.
OTOH: Bush, Murdoch and Howard have all acknowledged that AGW is a "serious problem" during the course of 2006. They are now busy trying to stitch up the economics of the nuclear fuel cycle so their "base" can safely move their money. Don't expect anything much in the way of mitigation from these clowns until ~2012.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You want to watch out; hysteria is the rule of the day when it comes to global warming.
Tell me about it! Some of these Kyoto-pushers are as loopy as PETA volunteers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
G W Bush is really just a representative of the people who still deny there is a problem or that people are in any way responsible for it.
People LIKE G W Bush definitely HAVE blocked, sidetracked and suspended efforts to address climate change over the past 20 years or so.
It is right and fitting that he be held up as a model of a politician you do NOT want. No one needs liars and deniers.
Only boring people are ever bored.
My understanding of Bangladesh is that it's kind of all of the above. If you can find it, the book "A Quiet Violence" by Hartman and Boyce is an excellent introduction, though centered on the countryside. It is interestingly written, and shows in great detail what day to day existence is like for the agrarian. The short answer is "miserable", with an economic system that ensures that farmers are basically sharecroppers on their own land, and any misstep (such as getting sick or the rains being a month late), will result in losing more of that little plot to the local aristocracy. There's virtually no chance to get ahead, and not much chance to break even.
For a somewhat urban view, while written in Libertarian Humor style, P. J. O'Rourke's account of Bangladesh in "All the Trouble in the World" is a short, entertaining, but unfortunately insightful look at the situation from someone observing the government and urban environment. The encounter with the "minister of jute" would have been more funny if I hadn't watched local governments in Upstate act with the same clueless enthusiasm. Some of the other arguments made in the other accounts don't hold up, but Bangladesh seems to be pretty spot-on.
In short, crushing poverty, sharp urban/rural split, virtual feudal system in the countryside, poor literacy, agriculture dependent upon uncertain monsoons, and the whole place too near sea level and built of too easily erodible land. I used Bangladesh as an example since it seems to be the standard point of reference, given that it has a population similar to Japan or 1/2 the United States. You can now add that the deep bore wells that were supposed to help even out agricultural production are contaminated with naturally occuring arsenic compounds, which has caused what is probably the world's largest case of arsenic poisoning.
These depressing items, plus an increasingly islamicized populace, is what is going to make them everybody's problem pretty soon. What are the Indians or Chinese going to do if they evacuate north and west after a particularly bad monsoon season as sea levels rise and their government is too poor or feckless to follow the Dutch example of building polders and reclaiming land from the sea? What are we going to do if they buy into the current anti-western violence and start volunteering for suicide missions in large numbers? Even if they remain peaceful, are we really prepared to watch a Japan worth of people wash out to sea? I don't have an answer to any of this, but unlike the island nations of the Pacific, which are small enough that we could just adopt them here in the USA and transplant them to half-abandoned cities in the rust-belt (and won't the Kiribatians be surprised when they end up in Buffalo), the Bengali are going to require greater logistical exertions. Tying future foreign aid to their accepting our civil engineering and dedicating a certain percentage of that aid (or possibly repayments), to shoring up their coastline and not washing away might really be worth the effort now, before we have to deal with a decimillion person migration.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Maybe I missed it in a posting (it sure isn't in TFA), but HOW MUCH was the sea supposed to have risen to supposedly 'wipe out' this island (sandbar?)?
I've gone through a few dozen search results from google already and cannot seem to find a map of exactly where the island is/was, no aerial before/after images, and no definite numbers regarding how much the sea rose to erode it. But, yet, everyone agrees that it was a real place and that Man is evil for letting this happen.
The story would be a lot easier to swallow if _any_ of the "news" outlets had any substantive, verifiable information.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Yes, that's the top of a lighthouse sticking up out of the water.
:wq
The parent referenced sinking. Hence my addressing it (and discounting it.) I also spoke directly to sea level rise. Reread the post. Thanks.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm curious. Since the Indian Ocean is around the level of the equator, wouldn't the rising sea level be greater there due to a greater centrifugal force? i.e. The same reason the earth has an equatorial bulge. This would then make sense of islands in the Indian Ocean and Pacific becoming inundated while places closer to the poles are not affected as much. It would also mean the an average rise of a few centimetres might translate to something greater at the equator. It would be nice to hear some accurate numbers regarding ocean levels at the equator versus the poles; historic and current.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
This particular island sank two decades ago. Atanu Raha, director of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, said the islands were getting eroded by oceanic currents, not by rising sea levels. "Erosion and accretion are natural phenomena. Across the world islands submerge and new ones emerge. This is natural, Raha said.
I'm sure the loony ultra-left will still want to blame Bush.
-- Will program for bandwidth
And possibly because of the same causes for observed warming of other multiple planets in the solar system which have nothing to do with terrestrial atmospheric pollutants.
o lar_variation_theory ...
http://www.mos.org/cst-archive/article/80/9.html
A study of the ice caps on Mars may show that the red planet is experiencing a warming trend....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#The_s
The present level of solar activity is historically high. Solanki et al. (2004) suggest that solar activity for the last 60 to 70 years may be at its highest level in 8,000 years; Muscheler et al. disagree, suggesting
Global Warming: Fact.
Global Warming Caused by Human Pollution: Hypothesis.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Seamounts sink due to isostatic adjustment and a little errosion.Bangladesh is also sinking due to there being the worlds largest aluvial fan to the south pushing the crust down in isostatic adjustment.I dont think that Bush's corrupt policies are helping this.
... or these are coral islands suffering from local warming.
Coral are incredibly sensitive to variations in the salinity and temperature of their environment, in that if the mean water temperature wanders by more than two kelvin (up or down) or the local halinity drops by a few ppt they cannot sustain their symbiotic zooxanthellae and expel them. These stressors are at top of the list. Others include increased UV spectrum intensity, variations in notch intensity in phycoerythrin (and sometimes chlorophyll and other accessory pigment) absorption spectra (stronger intensity is worse). Many of these stressors are clearly driven by natural processes, however there is also significant evidence of human mediated stress upon coral reefs. One of the most readily demonstrated human-caused stresses on large reefs has fallen off in recent years: increases in local nutrient levels thanks to fertilizer run off and the algal blooms that result are very bad for the zooxanthella-coral symbiosis.
Ultimately when chlorophyll is forced to expel their photosynthesizing symbionts (because the latter essentially start poisoning the host when operating outside of its normal range) both tend to die. Coral can reuptake other "cohorts" of zooxanthellae which are interoperable in the new environment, if they are available, but the zooxanthellae essentially become food for other organisms.
(This can be especially bad since large expulsions of the zooxanthellae can worsen local stresses upon not only corals but other phototrophs, including potential replacements, and other organisms which are sensitive to metabolic byproducts of whatever feasts upon them. Vicious cycles have been observed.)
The breakdown of symbiosis is usually called "coral bleaching" because visible pigments are generally concentrated only in the zooxanthellae and it's vivid wording for what coral masses look like (since coral is mostly calcium carbonate structurally) during and after a large expulsion event.
Not only is coral bleaching bad for the coral (killing it), and nearby organisms sensitive to the immediate impact upon the food chain (some heterotrophs consume coral mainly to get at the zooxanthellae, which they cannot consume in an unbound/ex-coral form; various organisms suffer from an increased concentration of unbound nutrients, decomposition, and so forth), but also many reef dwellers survive through camouflage adapted to the particular colouration of the zooxanthellae adapted to the local environment. Even if corals survive by being able to take up a new cohort of zooxanthellae after a change in the envieronment, those zooxanthellae are likely to have different colouring because of pigment differences (heritable changes in pigment ratio (and to some extent structure) changes are the main mechanisms by which zooxanthellae populations vary in their suitability to the coral). Consequently, beautifully coloured reef creatures that are good at hiding in and around a reef in a particular environment suited for a given dominant coral-zooxanthella phenotype pairing suddenly stand out (especially during a bleaching event, when the coral very quickly almost entirely white) and are often quickly eaten or starved.
Reefs can only grow near the top of the ocean (since their algal symbionts need to photosynthize) and the outside of reefs. During normal erosion, these are the bits that fall away, becoming foundational debris on which coral columns (coral islands) grow. When coral is stressed growth falls below the replacement rate, and the reef begins to erode.
This is not a normal process. Normal processes have reefs growing quicker (sometimes much quicker) than the replacement rate.
Reef shrinkage is clearly caused by environmental change. This is true no matter what impact humans have on the dominant environment changes various large reefs are suffering the hardest.
A great deal of human influence seems pretty obvious for a variety of reasons, but obvious solutions unfortunately seem expe
> What you said will be true if the so called "sea level" is a perfect flat surface. However, the Earth, as a water ball is quite bumpy and is shaped by gravitational force, tidal force, structure of the seabed, and ocean current. The few centimeter overall difference can easily be magnified locally by the factors above.
Insightful?!?!?!
Come on, guys! He doesn't understand basic physics!!! How on earth is 1 centimeter going to be magnified? With a magnifying glass, I presume? The only thing that can change the form of the Earth's water level is gravity and some occasional high tidal wave from a volcano, or a hurricane. Seabed and currents don't have anything to do with it (well, they can have as they influence the gravity, but that is so weak, that it is not measurable at all).
That said, how can you magnify the difference?
Hear, hear. The climate change crowd are behaving exactly like pious little old church ladies. It is religion for people who scoff at religion. What is the difference between the sole survivor of an airplane crash attributing his luck to "God's will", and the smug Prius driver attributing a normal spell of winter weather 25 degrees warmer than normal to "climate change" that can explain (at most) a tenth of that?
Global warming has its prophets, Pharisees, charlatans, and cultists. And boy, does it have its heretics. Lately some true believers have even begun calling for the organs of the State to suppress dissenting opinions.
Whatever the truth of global warming may be, nobody can deny it is also a gigantic grab for power and money by statists and socialists who know their harebrained, coercive policies would otherwise be repudiated at the ballot box.
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits... [C]limate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
--Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Any PR agency or in-house organization who isn't paying people to astroturf on controversial public issues simply isn't doing their job.
You wonder why some people seem to be here at least 8 hours a day, almost as if somebody was paying them?
Perhaps somebody is.
Ever noticed how whenever something that threatens a group of tards with money instantly attracts posters parroting their Party Line?
Examples being stories about the RIAA, MPAA, Microshit, and anything that embarrasses the Bush Administration in areas where the polls tell us there really isn't significant public support for their position, but their supporters somehow manage to find this place and materialize whenever there's a topic they can troll.
I actually don't object to this, as long as the "bloggers" post their sponsors in their sigs. But that's going to take Federal law.
Admittedly, it's hard to tell an astroturfer from somebody who's unusually stupid and sincerely deluded.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"Come on, guys! He doesn't understand basic physics!!!"
I'd be careful shouting things like that before actually engaging your brain yourself; he's totally correct. Say the sea level rises an average of 5cm over 50 years. This means there's an extra 5cm of water at every location there's ocean/sea. Now, if you move a massive object over one side, say, the moon, that has enough gravity to pull a huge amount of water over to one side of the earth... well now that 5cm on the one side of the planet has moved and added onto the 5cm on the other side of the planet. With more water, there's more water for the moon to pull. So, on the side with the moon, the water has gone up by the original 5cm, and all the extra being pulled by the moon.
(this is why the word 'average' is used; it implies that it's higher in some places, and lower in others)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
The snow and ice in the antarctic (south pole) are well above sea level. The snow stacks up as it falls to the ground. This vertical storage is a much bigger factor than density changes with temperature.
l
Imagine a glass of water with 2 ice cubes in it. This represents the situation you're imagining - and in this case the water level doesn't change much when the ice melts. The Arctic (North Pole) is just ice floating on water and follows this example.
The Antarctic (South Pole) is a proper continent, with ground and dirt and such. A better model for this is a glass stacked to the brim with ice but only has water to the halfway point. The melting ice will surely cause the water level to rise. The overall volume of water decreases, but the level of the water increases as it runs off the higher points.
The ice sheets of Greenland and Canada, as well as salinity effects complicate a rigorous examination. Someone with much more time and talent than I has already done the math:
http://www.radix.net/~bobg/faqs/sea.level.faq.htm
Short answer:
South Pole: definite effect.
North Pole: much smaller effect.
Hardly surprising. The oceans have been rising for a few thousand years. Look at all the stuff off the coast of Egypt. That's all been under water since before the industrial revolution. Global warming is a cyclical thing that we can't stop. Better to spend your time figuring out how to adjust to it than how to stop it.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Cows and other livestock are more likely to blame:
n ge+of+the+cows%3A+They're+going+to+kill+us+all!&ar ticleId=692b0da2-7464-4bf6-909b-cc48f59c7465
http://unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Reve
You're certainly correct on the amount of arrogance and self centeredness of the ignorant and their presumptions that man is important, especially in a negative way.
That article was pure propaganda for man caused global warming and does not deserve any title or reference without the words 'political propaganda' in it. Of course it is typical of the global warming crowd.
One simple fact which was not mentioned would have totally negated the article. What is the change of the mean sea level. As I recall from elsewhere, fairly recent changes in mean sea level are in the 1-2 millimeter range and not all of these changes are increases. That fact alone proves the article to be totally in error, unresearched, unbalanced and nothing at all but another attempt by some nitwitt to promote his beloved religion of socialism to protect mistress earth from the mythical manmade global warming monster.
It's obvious that river deltas are very unstable. However, it doesn't take a river delta location to sink beneath the ocean. Of course over there in that region of the earth, there was a huge tsunomi and earthquake just two years ago which killed many tens of thousands and shook the entire earth to its core and evidently even affected the tilt of the axis. Such events do affect the height of areas since shifts can be in feet.
Even that isn't necessary for shifts in altitude. There is subsidence on the upper texas coast which has been going on for many years. Around Kemah texas, there are roads and houses slowly sinking into Galveston Bay. High tides bring salt water into the drainage ditches along some of the streets there. A coastal highway around Beaumont Texas is evidently partly under water during high tide now. Even well over two hundred miles from there, my town's railway station has a 'benchmark' plaque indicating that in 1917, it was 75 feet above sea level. Modern measurements over the last thirty years indicate it is really about 68 feet, suggesting that either that the original measurements were way off or that the area has also been sinking
As for Mars getting warmer - that is just one of the planets undergoing global warming right now. It's been detected that several are. Of course Mars is the exception - it's obviously manmade global warming. Being smaller than the earth, it appears those two sawed-off robotic electric go-carts must be causing the global warming there. Well, so much for electric vehicles being a good 'clean' alternative. We don't know the martian global parameters concerning its global temperatures, nor do we know much else about it but we do know there's two rovers there polluting the planet in some unknown fashion. And, as our ultra intellegent elitist rulers (congress critter sheila jackson lee from houston) have previously asked "Can you command the mars rover to go over and take a picture of the flag that the astronauts planted on the apollo mission?" She's the one that will be fixing man's global warming problems - by force of government arms. Be afraid, be very afraid because fear is part of the survival instinct.
I think I would consider that the bulge is already there, meaning that the water depths are already equalized as to height vs tides, equatorial bulge, and any local gravitational anomalies. Googling, the consensus seems to be that sea level is an equipotential surface. If this is the case, were enough water were added to increase the depth 1 cm world wide, I don't think you'd get any more at the equator than you would at the poles — just 1cm everywhere. This is because the bulge is already equalized.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm thinking it's a distribution thing. If I am right, bad for the equator. If you are right, all coastal dwellers learn to swim at the same time. Bad deal overall.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I'd be careful shouting things like that before actually engaging your brain yourself; he's totally correct. Say the sea level rises an average of 5cm over 50 years. This means there's an extra 5cm of water at every location there's ocean/sea. Now, if you move a massive object over one side, say, the moon, that has enough gravity to pull a huge amount of water over to one side of the earth... well now that 5cm on the one side of the planet has moved and added onto the 5cm on the other side of the planet. With more water, there's more water for the moon to pull. So, on the side with the moon, the water has gone up by the original 5cm, and all the extra being pulled by the moon.
... let me think, 0.0005% more water for the Moon to pull!!! Yes, I am sure that explains the sinking of the whole damned island!
You're absolutely right!
With the average depth of the ocean at least 1000 meters (I'm not sure how much, it is at least that much) an average 5 cm are
No, if I am right, no one need learn to swim at all, because sea level is rising at a rate of 10 cm / century. 10 cm is about four inches. If four inches destroys your coastline, or submerges your land-mass, you were already in trouble, nothing to do with global warming. Likewise, if 100 years isn't time to get out of the way of four inches of water, turtles are going to trample you to death you before the water drowns you. The whole sea level rise thing is way overblown in general, and specifically with regard to this article.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Underwater forever assumes that ocean levels will never recede in the future. Not to mention that low lying islands have disappeared before in the days of sailing ships, the islands are in a river system, storms contributing, etc, etc. Poor examples don't really help convince people of anything except the weakness of claims.
Translation--they know how much snow and ice fell on the "Enderby Land region" (what they are referring to with "this region") from published reports by other researchers, so they know independently that the ice mass in this particular region should be in balance--i.e. NOT increasing so dramatically. They then speculate that the increase they measured is due to either snowfall no one knows about ("unquantified snow accumulation") or a problem in their modeling of post-glacial rebound ("more likely due to unmodeled PGR"). The latter, BTW, would imply no actual ice mass gain.
At no point does the abstract refute the current consensus regarding global glacial mass loss, or state that Antarctica as a whole is in mass balance.
No, bzzz, wrong. What it actually says is that in West Antactica they measured a loss, which is consistant with an earlier study. But in East Antarctica they measured a gain, which is NOT consistant with an earlier study. Hence the speculation at the end, which you conveniently cut off.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Current markets are regularly and effectively distorted all the time by government laws and regulations. In this context the argument that environmental regulations are inefficient distortions is at least questionable--you'll have to prove to me substantively that their particular distortions are somehow worse than the other thousands of market distortions in force today.
At worst that sort of statement is lying by selective communication--implying that most subsidies/taxes/regulations have no effect, but these particular environmental subsidies will distort an otherwise perfectly natural market. It's just not true.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In the realm of basic physics, you are absolutely right. But in the context of more advanced physics... I'm not quite sure.
When we say the sea level is going to raise by 5cm, we mean on average. But locally it may be very different. To cite some facts, there in the lake Michigan, the average water level in May from year to year changes only by a few cm, if we don't see some very unusual weather. However at some location in the lake, the water level actually changes by meters.
Driving a Hummer and looking for a cheap excuse, huh?
"It's not my 3tonnes car, it's the 500 kg cow upon the hill!"
I live in France, and traffic _is_ the #1 cause of global warming.
But it's true, by comparing masses, there are more cows than French guys in France, and they do account for a lot of CH4 emissions.
Anyway, neither our actual transport habits nor our actual eating habits are sustainable, and we have to change both (oh, and a lot of other things BTW) if mankind wants to get a decent chance to survive for 100+ years
As I recall from elsewhere, fairly recent changes in mean sea level are in the 1-2 millimeter range. . .
.and not all of these changes are increases.
.I try not to let it make me stupid.
And yet one of my other respondants talks about the sea level rising 10 meters. in the next 50-100 years. It leaves me nearly speachless with the practical cluelessness of it.
Where does he believe all that water is going to come from, the water fairy?
. .
Here's a hot tip that seems to allude many people; land moves up and down. Nevermind challenging someone to go down to the beach and try to measure the water level to that degree of precision.
At this point I should, once again, point out my personal bias. I am one of those Buddhist, bike ridin', tree huggin', anti-big corp liberal bastards who tends his own organic garden and who refuses to harm the gophers who steal the bulk of his crops, even though they make good trout flies (I scrape my gopher off the road).
But, and it's a big but. .
KFG
water is supposed to come from that glacer flow way down south. The one that has been speeding up because of the melting goin on about 10,000 feet down. Like magic, manmade global warming is heating up and melting the ice about 10,000 ft down - without waming any of the top 10000 ft. Of course, in reality - theres volcanic activity heating up a bit and melting the ice down there- causing to slip out into the ocean.
Whether there is actually enough landlocked ice to raise the oceans by any consequential amounts is a question and the assumption that all of it can get to the ocean. Of course ice floating at the north pole will not affect the ocean levels were it to melt because since it is floating already - it is already displacing its own weight so the ocean levels will be the same whether it's all melted or just as solid as it is now.
Nuthin like wasting scarce resources on things that are most likely not even a problem that can be addressed, if it indeed is a problem.
Seabed and currents don't have anything to do with it (well, they can have as they influence the gravity, but that is so weak, that it is not measurable at all).
Not so, the sea level differences due to gravitational variations of the seabed have been used to generate maps of the entire seabed
Not that this has anything to do with rising sea levels.
I didn't say 5cm would be enough to sink an island, dumbass. I simply explained how a small overall difference can be aplified to have larger differences in different places since you couldn't understand it, but I guess it wasn't quite as "simply" as it needed to be for you, so let's just call it "magic".
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Uh, not exactly. And you get a tax refund if you install solar power panels on your home which makes the net costs cheaper over the lifetime of the system than if you just bought the electricity off the grid at prevailing costs.