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Giant Ice Shelf Snaps
Popo writes "Sattelite images have revealed that an ancient 66 square-kilometer ice shelf, the size of 11,000 football fields, has snapped off from an island in Canada's arctic. The Ayles Ice Shelf was one of 6 major shelves remaining in Canada's arctic and is estimated to be over 3000 years old. The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 km away picked up tremors. Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
Does 3000 year old ice make a good margarita?
FairTax baby!
11,000 football fields. Yeah, there's an easy-to-visualize image. What a helpful comparison.
It lasted a good deal longer than any shelf I've ever put up.
Dang it! I thought we told those Penguins that they couldn't keep dancing like that!
If only we could have stopped global warming 10,000 year ago! Then those of us in the northern US states could've skied year round!
Seriously, is there anything happening in the arctic or antarctic regions that IS NOT the cause of Global Warming?
the size of 11,000 football fields
NFL? Canadian? European kickball?
Besides, this is a nerds site. Don't make athletic references.
Volkswagen Bugs or Libraries of Congress would be more appropriate.
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
So what was the cause 30 years ago?
It's a fair question, yes? Like when I hear "such and such place recorded the highest temperature in 150 years this week!" I think "What caused the previous high 150 years agp?" My brain has a pesky habit of continually asking questions. All those X-Files episodes, I guess. Trust no one. Ideologues hate me.
And it only took a year and a half for anyone to notice. It must have been quite amazing. No wonder Florida has disappeared under the waters.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
If only all those explorers could have waited a few hundred years...
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Got to wonder at what point the government surrenders and admits to human induced climate change? It's like down turns in the economy, things like the housing market. They deny there's a slow down until they can anounce recovery well they never admitted to the slowdown in the first place so what are we recovering from? If they are waiting for the climate to improve on it's own before admitting to global warming they are likely to have a long wait. Even a minor shift can take hundreds of years to reverse and this one isn't looking minor so it can take thousands of years. Do we have to loose coastal Florida or New York City before they admit there's a problem?
huh?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Global warming had to be the cause, not the fact that this was *an ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields!*
Laborare Est Orare
The implication is that 30 years ago there was a larger event. So if a smaller sheet of ice broke off now than the one from 30 years back, doesn't that mean the problem is going away?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Man it's about time that worthless chunk of ice fell of the island. This world needs some change for a change, melting ice caps and glaciers are a good thing and I can't wait to see more beachfront property opening up at the top of the world! Think of the land rush! I'm getting in early.
... Nice messages and heck, I even support some of them, but save me the indigination while we're all tapping away on our keyboards, jamming with our ipods (or a zune or zen if you're an idiot) and in general consuming stuff at viral levels.
Global warming, climate change, blah, blah, blah. I know the knee jerks like to make alarmist press about the warming of the world (slashdot being filled with knee jerks), along with their peak oil theories, and what not, but really, Really, why should we care?
Stop polluting and spouting CO2, or
Yeah, I'm rambling so mod me down. Meanwhile, I'm saddling up my cow and going riding! Methane man on the way.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
This is the third millennium. Nobody argues anymore that global warming isn't happening. The debate is whether or not it is caused by man or something else.
Anything can look like a "clearly obvious fact" if it supports your own opinion. God forbid that nature should contribute to unexplained and random events involving large lumps of ice, given that it's usually so predictable.
How many hockey rinks is that?
"Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
From the article:
"The researchers suspect climate change may have played a role in the collapse but said they cannot definitively say it is a result of global warming."
MAY HAVE and CANNOT DEFINITELY SAY
Someone is spinning again...
I agree with you that the tequila is what makes a good Margarita, but you are wrong about your crap. Penguins do not frequent the same ice as polar bears. Repeat with me, polar bears are in the North, penguins are in the South. Not, they do not meet at the tropics.
I was hoping to get a quick translation of football fields to Rhode Islands, but Google couldn't help me. Anyone else with a better calculator available?
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Had he just spent a little more time at the pub, he could have waited for events like this to happen, and finally open up that Northwest Passage he was hired to look for. Just got impatient, I guess.
Btw, in more normal units, it's roughly 25 square miles, or 1600 sq furlongs. Thankfully it's ice, so nobody has to mow it, though I feel for the zamboni operator charged with its upkeep. (I presume a sheet is flat ice, and therefore probably covered in hockey players this time of year)
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I don't have a problem with global warming. The earth has been warming up for the last 10,000 years. Good thing too, else we would not have been here.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
i for one welcome our new polar bear overlords.
"This is the third millennium. Nobody argues anymore that global warming isn't happening. The debate is whether or not it is caused by man or something else."
I guess George W. is not a nobody, not to mention Stephen Harper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Harper) as they both have argued that global warming doesn't exist.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Yah know, those cave men must have lit huge bon-fires to warm their caves and bring on the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago... Maybe they all had Hummers...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
that in 20-30 years ice this thick must have melted (as a result of global warming)... Puhlease.... It takes more than 20 years for ice this thick to melt to a shelving point... So either global warming has been going on long before previously thought or this shelving was not necessarily "caused" by global warming but rather than an ongoing process of many many years....
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
If you look closely, you can see where explosives were planted near the base. There is no way the self could have collapsed on its own. And isn't it strange how no penguins came to work that day?
Canada should totally start rebuilding that ice shelf just to show those terrorists that NOBODY messes with Canada, eh?
As the movies have taught us, when an ice shelf snaps the entire northern hemisphere freezes solid. All y'all up there in the northlands are f**ked. And where I live in San Diego, housing costs will soar. :)
What percentage of the ice has to melt before you are prepared to say that there is enough evidence to make a conclusion?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I think I see where your going with this ie. is it a new event or just a re-occuring event. I'm a guess and say the first. You figure 30 years ago the ice shelves/glaciers were as much as twice as big as they are now. It all comes down to proportion. let say 30 years ago ice shelves represented about 500 square miles of area (ficticous number) this number proportionally wasnt' much. now lets reduce the total square footage of ice sheets by half, then break of the same amout. Yes it's the same as 30 years ago but proportionally it is significantly larger than in the past.
Author: Sattelite images have revealed that an ancient 66 square-kilometer ice shelf...
Article: Satellite imagery shows the ice shelf breaking away.
I would have thought an error like this would have been caught by the editor, apparently not.
Canadian football (not soccer) is still in yards. Like: 4th and 2 (yards) to go. (Yes 4th)
We're also in the "Third Cycle" of modern Doomsday predictions. It's only "Popular Opinion", driven by an incessant output of articles repeating the party line. There was a time when "Popular Opinion", enforced by the political power of the time, said the world was flat. "Popular Opinion" is rarely right, if ever.
Prior to "Global Warming" and its bogus Hockey Stick "study" it was Glaciation and/or Nuclear Winter, complimented by the Club of Rome "studies". In the last 25 years Time Magazine has had it both ways, but the solution is always the same: "Progressive" policies (read: Socialism/Communism).
It's common for the Extreme Left, and their fellow travelers in the Media, to invent disasters from selected data so they can save us all by the application of Socialism, at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
You have to read it with a Rap groove. Then it still doesn't make sense.
Most of the stuff on
I don't have a problem with global warming. The earth has been warming up for the last 10,000 years. Good thing too, else we would not have been here.
So, the rate of warming means nothing to you?
Let's take your assertion as truth. The earth has been warming for 10,000 years. It's warmed X degrees globally in that time.
For the sake of argument, let's say that in the past forty years, the temperature has again increased by X degrees. Do you see the problem now?
The first question is really the focus of things like Al Gore's movie (which has been criticized by better men than me for exaggerating risks and playing up fear, uncertainty and doubt). The second is the focus of debate about, say, the Kyoto Protocol, whether it will actually accomplish anything with developing nations growing their economies, whether the costs are going to cripple anyone... The third is the realm of things like hybrid cars (hardly mainstream yet, but getting closer day by day - because it makes sense, and people will like it) and the electric car (still waiting for the uber-batteries after all these years, and a failure since it doesn't really make sense) and better insulation and more energy-efficent homes and lighting (LED lighting? still not hitting it big, but breaking into the Christmas light market).
Oh, and things like corn-based ethanol, a topic which is very good at demonstrating the power of lobbying and the superficial appearance of "environmental friendliness" and other such fluff to obtain big fat government subsidies for people who are after them ... which is about what you can expect to see if you think the government should spend lots of money on "alternative energy"...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Hard to say. There is no standard size hockey rink: just a minimum size and maximum size.
Canadian football only has 3 downs.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I need to know how much this weighs. In terms of Volkswagens.
So how many Olympic sized swimming pools or libraries of congress is that?
This is off-topic, but it's interesting.
Two old MiGs against a dozen Corsairs--who do you think would win?
But since MiGs go for millions each, even older ones, and a Corsair would cost maybe a hundred thousand, you can afford a dozen WW2 planes for each enemy MiG. And it's simpler to maintain a Corsair than a MiG. You do need more pilots, but since each plane costs less, your pilots can train more.
I suppose it's simply a governmental / military desire to have the biggest and the best, even if that means you have less of it. Illogical, but no less true.
Does this mean the Sea Level will rise?
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Because 11,000 football fields is easier to imagine than 66 square kilometers.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Hook the ice shelf up to some powerful tugs and drag it down to Australia! They're having a drought y'know and could use the fresh water
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
I'm guessing the write up in Nature will be brief. It may, in fact, be as short as this: OH SHIT.
Clearly the cause is Al Gore and his liberal whiners who are jelaous of the success of the hardworking oil industry... :)
What an inconvenient truth.
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
This global warming this is obviously a hoax put together by the major thermometer companies of the world. 1) Slowly adjust new thermometers to read warmer temperatures. 2) Scientists notice the the temperature is going up. 3) Scientists buy more thermometers. 4) Profit!!!
Hobby Robotics
The left is not who I'm worrying about when it comes to curtailing personal liberties.
Wow, when you said off topic you really weren't kidding!
Yep, they've seriously underestimated the needed capacity for the International Space Station.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I can't wait for the anti global warming types to downplay that CLEARLY OBVIOUS FACT that global warming is the cause.
I don't want to disappoint you, so I'll just say tut tut, this is not at all clearly attributable to global warming.
If it were, then it's clearly obvious that someone would have predicted it. Since no one did, then it can hardly
be attributable to this thing that you seem so sure of.
If you insist on attributing it to the result of carbon dioxide being blasted into the atmosphere at unprecedented
rates, then I'll have no choice but to ask why you have chosen to position yourself as an enemy of freedom and progress.
That's what the ultraconservative lunatics who happen to be politically savvy would do with you on a debate floor.
Seriously though, we're way past having any more "anti global warming types". Anybody who is "anti global warming"
is an absolute crackpot and should be treated as such. Don't even begin to give them their due, or acknowledge that
they can downplay anything. As soon as you see one open their mouth, just start pointing at them and laughing.
There are now enough of us that know what's going on that we'll join in.
Was it warmer between the last ice age and 1,000 b.c.?
at the expense of our personal liberties
Funny how on the extremes of both ends, personal liberties are what we lose. How do we stay in the middle? Also a good question if you're stranded on a melting ice shelf...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Yeah - and like the time when they invented the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so they could save us all - at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
Oh wait - it wasn't the LEFT that did that, was it? It's the extremes that are the problems. True liberals and true conservatives both care deeply about personal liberty.
It's common for the Extreme Right, and their fellow travelers in the Media, to invent disasters from selected data so they can save us all by the application of Fascism, at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
Extremists are extremists.. plain and simple.
The only difference is which liberties they want you to surrender & why.
To be fair, sometimes they ask you to do it for the common good
and not because of some boogeyman.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Maybe he should have worked there longer. Follow this link.
. pdf
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic39-1-15
In 1984 this study was done in Canada. The first page kind of says it all.
" Between 1959 and 1974 a total of 48sqkm calved off from Milne and Ayles ice shelves. In addition, the Ayles Ice Shelf moved about 5km out into Ayles Ford"
Not quite 66 sqkm but close. And it sounds as if the shelf broke off rather recently within a few decades, and somehow reattached itself. No mention of that in the story, but there is a significant emphasis that the ice is 3000 years old and ancient. Making it seem as if this has been the same for 3000 years. Next at the bottom left of the first page.
"The largest observed ice calving occurred at Ward Hunt Ice Shelf (just north of Ayles) where almost 600SQKM, broke off between 1961 and 1962.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm not sure why the parent was modded insightful, funny would be pushing it... It's logic seems to be on the flawed side, setting up a situation like this:
1. Something of a large magnitude happened thirty years ago when global climate change wasn't really an issue.
2. Something of a large magnitude happened recently.
Therefore, because things of a large magnitude have happen in the past uninfluenced by climate change, climate change is not playing a role in current events of large magnitude.
Now I'm no expert but I don't see how this conclusion actually follows.
To answer the question of what happend thirty years ago; Simply a large chunk of ice fell into the ocean. Why, I don't know. Maybe it grew too large to support itself. The fact is that climate change impacts the frequency and magnitude of natural events. The last time a comparable event occurred was 30 years ago, and who knows when the one before that occurred. But I would be willing to bet money that the next one, and the one after that, are not 30 years away.
How does asking a sensible question and thinking critically make you an idiot?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
It's not older because it's floating. Ice is less dense than water, so it floats. In an ice shelf, snow falls on the top every winter and ice melts in the bottom all the time, unless the sea is shallow and the shelf become so thick and heavy that it hits bottom.
The shelf thickness will be constant when conditions are such that the mass of ice that melts every year from the bottom is equal to the mass of snow that falls on the top. If more ice melts than snow falls, the shelf will become thinner. In this case, perhaps less snow was falling on the top, or perhaps the sea water flowing under it became warmer, so the shelf became too thin to whitstand the stresses caused by currents.
> Two old MiGs against a dozen Corsairs--who do you think would win?
Indeed. However the MIGs are on the same side as the corsairs would be, Ethiopia.
I think that in situations like Somalia and Afghanistan, old bombers would be highly cost effective. Especially for countries that don't have much or any air support in the field to begin with (UK, Canada, Netherlands, etc).
Is there a good phot of this anywhere, with a helpful set of outlines or what? I am seeing the news article photo, and yet somehow I see a bunch of craggy areas, a bunch of brown areas, a bunch of snow.
Oh the horror!!!
Which way is anything here?
Somebody please draw a diagram on this image which indicates 1) the north pole, or the direction it is in, 2) the island, 3) the shelf, and 4) the direction of said shelf's geologically-sudden departure....
~
Jerry, you're a retard.
IT'S THE LIBURAL MEDIA VERN!!!
We've heard it before dumbass and nobody but you and your angry dittohead friends believe it.
We're in the middle of what meteorologists described as a "once in 1,000 years drought", had our hottest December night on record (minimum 27C/81F) and a 4 days later it snowed on xmas day.
Climate change?
That's just a myth put about by people who believe what they see when they look out their window!
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I don't have a problem with global warming.
What if global warming doesn't stop?
As in... We have surface temperatures of 200F?
Would you have a problem then?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I would have to mention that realclimate "debunked" the global cooling myth. It was never considered as a mainstream scientific belief, it only existed because of the popular press. The press gets most things wrong, can't distinguish between global dimming and global cooling. As for Nuclear Winter - thats the least of our worries if that many nukes were to be detonated in order to either cause an effect or not cause like that. It is a doomsday scenario, quite unlike global warming.
I have for a long time realised that categorizations like left or right don't make sense in the case of 80% of the population, especially across countries. Some of my ideas for an optimal society have socialist touches, but I also believe that personal liberties are not contradictory with them, quite the opposite. Even though the classification is quite flawed, I have to add that most of the civilized world is "extreme left" compared to the USA. Facts have a liberal bias and all that.
Anyway, back to the topic. Global warming is not the popular opinion. Or if it is, it is irrelevant. It is the peer reviewed mainstream scientific consensus. Science is powerful, and self checking. Many scientists have tried to falsify the conclusion that global warming is happening, but didn't manage to, thus we accept it as our standing theory in relation to the projected temperature change of the planet. That's how science works, by testable theories.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years...
We had global warming 30 years ago? I thought we were all supposed to fear global cooling back then.
Seriously, if we had an event of this size a mere thirty years ago, it obviously isn't the one-of-a-kind end-of-the-world-in-twenty-years event the media is portraying it to be. What is the frequency of such events?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Or...
It's common for the Extreme Right, and their fellow travelers in the government, to invent disasters from selected wars so they can save us all by the application of Fascism, at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
But seriously... If popular opinion is not correct, then are you saying democracy (or representative forms of government) is not correct either?
I don't support socialism a bit, but if a nation got together and 95% of the people wanted it... Would not democracy entail that it is right to do so?
Otherwise we might as well be totalitarian.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Exactly the mentality at least 52% of Americans have.
...this apparently happened in August, 2005, and we've just realized it now.
The English vineyards bit is a standard contrarian talking point. The problem is that (a) it's not clear that vineyards tell you anything about climate (rather than economics) and (b) at any rate there's far more wine growing in England now than there was in the past.
6 /07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/
See the discussion here
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
I have never seen a reference that claimed that English wine was "better" than French wine, so that seems to be new and made up.
"since MiGs go for millions each, even older ones"
No they don't. It took me about two minutes of Googling to find a MiG 21 MF for $60,000, and a two-seat trainer (more in demand) for $88,00, and these prices were for one-offs: if you are willing to buy in lots of ten or more, you can get them from various ex-Eastern bloc countries for a _lot_ less (around $11,000 each, although you'll need to add transport costs).
So your WWII planes (which cost a _lot_ more than $11,000 in flying condition) would actually be facing off against several MiG-21 MFs each, which given the MiG's climb rate of 58,000 ft/min, max. speed of Mach 1.8, on-board RADAR, and twin Vympel K-13 air-to-air missiles, would find your WWII fighters and blow the lot of them away before their pilots knew that there was even a threat.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
you might as well try inserting adsense code into your comment while you're at it.
From what I know of physics, ice sticks out of the water as much as the density of the ice is less than the water around it. (10% or so) So when the ice melts, shouldn't the sea level stay the exact same?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
What kind of MiG? Are we talking MiG-15/17 or something newer? Those old MiGs are pretty damn cheap I would think.
Not that it matters. Even a lowly MiG-15 would blow the hell out of those Corsairs. A MiG-15 would be easily more than 50% faster. That's a hell of a difference. The Corsair wouldn't even be able to get behind a MiG to get a single shot in.
And since you're talking "millions" for the MiGs then that would buy much newer versions that would completely shred the Corsairs before they even saw the MiGs.
and biting the bull's balls to hold on.
Though I don't follow the PBR all that closely - that move might be the "ball-peein' hummer" of which you speak.
What kind of person drives a vehicle named after a blowjob?
This sounds like algore ....
I just saw a Coke commercial at the movie theater with polar bears AND penguins...And the penguins played with the baby polar bear. Coke wouldn't do that if it weren't true, would they?
That is not the point, global warming is a fact, global warming is the cause of melting ice, global warming is the cause of warmer oceans. That is not what is being contested.
What is being contested is the cause of global warming. There are two podiums here, one is for arguing the cause is man made, the other is for arguing that it is a naturally recurring event.
The first has little evidence to support it other than (slightly) higher co2 levels in the atmosphere. The second of which has strong evidence recorded in, what else but the ice itself as well as in fossil records.
You cannot argue that there have been global warming events in the past but you can argue that man couldn't have been the cause then.
So I guess we are in agreement? Global warming is a CLEARLY OBVIOUS FACT.
Let me put that football measurement into something a slashdotter can relate to. It had the area of screen on a 728,000 inch monitor.
Here's an interesting paper (pdf) that goes into more details about ice shelves and their collapse and/or calving significance - http://www.arcticnet-ulaval.ca/pdf/asm04_Mueller.p df
To sum it up, shelf collapse has been an ongoing natural change (we have been on a warming trend, with the 1930s and 40s seeing high global temperatures) quite possibly augmented by human activities.
But you have to agree as long as we have a massive chunk of ice fall in to the sea every now and then, it should cool the seas...
Thus solving the problem of global warming once and for all!
"But..."
ONCE AND FOR ALLLLL !!!!
It weren't scientists who started bringing political motivations into this subject. It has been known for many years that the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes what has been called the "greenhouse effect". The fact that burning fossil fuels causes climate change had been perfectly well established and was a consensus among climate scientists, until the government of the USA started throwing their weight around.
Good science allows one to predict global warming from fossil fuel burning. Bad science, wandering from the truth, is when politicians start picking at straws and claiming more studies are needed until they find a stooge who is willing to sell his scientific integrity for thirty pieces of silver in the form of federal grants.
For an example of particularly bad "science", check this site. Notice the use of sentences like "Only 13 percent of the scientists responding to a survey..." and "More than 100 noted scientists, including
How would you like to defend your thesis, to be able to present it before a board of scientists, or to have a poll conducted among a number of unspecified people claiming to be scientists? Which method do you think is better science?
At the north pole, isn't every direction south?
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
Once again, Slashdot evinces its scientific illiteracy by placing scientists in a monolithic block of true believers. Not even climate scientists, either. Just "scientists."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Are you claiming it snowed in the summer there in Australia? That's like it snowing in the Northern Hemisphere on June 25th. Ergo, I'm assuming you must either live in the mountains and/or very far south. Even if you live in Tasmania that's not as far south as Minnesota is north. I'm not at all familiar with Australian weather, so forgive any ignorance on my part. (Actually, I'm not really familiar with Minnesota weather, either.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Is it man? Is it cows? Is it volcanos? Is it aliens? Is it something we don't even know about? I'm a "Creationist," but I also believe that the Earth is billions of years old. This rock has survived that long, it's somewhat arrogant to think that we humans are going to be able to destroy it in a relative blink of the eye. What caused the Ice Ages? Was that the lack of people, cows, and volcanos? What caused the Ice Ages to end? A sudden increase in people, cows, and volcanos? What were temperatures like in the days of the dinosaurs? Perhaps we're going back to dinosaur weather. Maybe the reptiles are causing it! They need warmer weather so they can overthrow us silly warm-blooded humans.
Identify the problem *then* apply the fix. In that order.
That's my big problem with the Al Gore crowd. You have yet to prove to that man is causing it and can therefore actually do something about it. You just assume man is the problem. I, for one, am not ready to give up hundreds of years of human advances for a liberal guilt-trip. My conscience is clear.
I'll keep burning my fossil fuels, thank you. I'm not going to pay 10x as much to heat my home or drive my car just because you're feeling bad about maybe being a cause of rising global temperatures. But I also realize that fossil fuels are limited so I fully support alternative energy sources. Build hydro-electric plants. Put up wind farms. I don't even care if they block your precious view of the ocean in Massachusetts. I think wind farms to quite nice to look at. Put solar panels on every rooftop. Pave the roads in solar panels if you can. And until you prove that a coal burning power plant is killing all life on Earth, I'm gonna burn coal too. Or, since I'm an evil capitalist, come up with a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels. Then you don't have to try to legislate your guilt on me, I'll do it because it's cheaper.
I'd like to add it to the end of a spa cd or a dentist office music cd.
Are people really so dumb as to need every size estimate in "football fields?"
Or 1/50th the size of Rhode Island
Which one seems bigger to you?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I tried to convert the area to square smoots but then my calculator collapsed into a horizontal line and I couldn't read the answer.
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
That should be enough to make us pay some atention to the _real_ global warming.
It would be funny to make some cool drinks, but would be even more funny to see
surfing in Everest....
Serious, it is _very_ sad.
He has bad habits of not taking advice from experts (so he wouldn't know in the first palce) and dishonesty when it is politically expedient.
66 (square kilometers) = 1,630.89552 square furlongs
And you can't have a furlong without 40 rods:
66 (square kilometers) = 2,609,432.83 square rods
In WW2, the US devoted about 38% of its GDP to the war effort. That's the equivalent of roughly 5 trillion dollars per year in today's terms, something like ten times the size of the current US defense budget.
Simpler aircraft had something to do with it, but so did the amount of effort devoted to production. No doubt some improvement would be possible thanks to modern manufacturing -- lasers, robotics -- but I don't think we're orders of magnitude better at banging on sheet metal than we were then. (And I'd bet we're not nearly as good at woodworking, if you should decide you want to build Spitfires or Mosquitos.)
Even the machines know it to be true.
wait wait wait... this was in canada, right? NORTHERN canada. I'm in upstate NY and its fscking cold. In the middle of winter. Ice is breaking off, in the middle of winter.
damn. I've just been convinced.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Both of these are nutcases so they don't count, regardless their fame. :-p
Seriously, that a global warming is going on is easy to get evidence of, the hard part is what and who's causing the bulk of it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Not only have you applied logic to a question posed on Slashdot, but you also spelled (and used) the word "loose" correctly.
In some countries that'd get you arrested. Well, okay, the United States.
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.
And here I just thought the melting point of ice was going down.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
What? ®
I find it depressing how each relevant news item causes an almost identical repeat of circular arguing from the standard positions on Global Warming. Nothing as yet has caused a "tipping point" of reconsideration from the average population. I'm just not hearing it from the charismatic speakers of divergent groups that Yes Indeed This Is A Problem.
This doesn't cause me to doubt it exists, or that we've caused it. It causes me to doubt that anything will seriously change. Business As Usual.
This shelf detaching (and then refreezing later) is a potential for Greenland. If we get a sudden few feet in ocean water (unlike an ice shelf, Greenland's ice will move from land to ocean), then an extended European winter, mass fishing industry havoc and the economic ripples everywhere - it may wake everyone up.
Or it may not. History has shown that death itself is the most effective societal teacher.
A Library of Congress is generally believed to be 10 terabytes of printed ASCII text. However, I don't think anybody ever wrote anything on that ice sheet. A better comparison may be how many slurpees can be made from it. So considering that it may be 20m thick and 20 sq km in size, while a slurpee is 500ml, then that would be about 80 million slurpees. Not even enough for everyone in North America...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A Volkswagen Beetle weighs about 810kg. So a 20sq km ice block, 20m thick, would be about 100,000,000,000 VW Beetles...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Not really. Global warming is being caused by humans pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. There is debate on this but not serious scientific debate. Bigger temperature changes had happened in the past but probably not on these time-scales. In any case, all the proposed natural phenomenons have been ruled out as insufficient as a cause for the observed warming.
But the real question is why do people like you keep making arguments that are obviously wrong. I mean it should be obvious to anyone that the fact that natural global warming had happened in the past is a very weak argument for the case that the current warming has natural causes.
On the other side we know that CO2 and temperature levels have strongly correlated in the past. We know a physical mechanism by which rising CO2 levels lead to rising temperatures. So it seems reasonable to conclude that warming is caused by the rising CO2 levels and, by extension, human activities.
If someone wants to challenge this he should at least put forward some alternative mechanism. Increased solar activity doesn't count, it was shown to be insufficient. When you ruled out all the unlikely explanations you must accept that the most likely one is indeed true.
...volkswagons full of backup tapes is that? Does someone have a VWDU (VW-Data Units) to Football Fields conversion charts? Also, are we talking about European football where they kick a ball with the foot, or US Football where they play with a foot shaped ball?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
yeah like New Orleans
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If the climate shifts, and everything goes to hell, will it be a Mad Max world?
Perhaps it's that the absorption of IR due to CO2 concentration is nearly at saturation and has been for quite a while.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Ever heard of a planet called Venus? Do you think the 450C temperatures are due to something other than massive amounts of carbon dioxide?
Imagine you could contain the pure water from a fully melted iceberg inside a sphere. In the same way an iceberg floats and sticks out of the sea, the ball of pure water would float in the sea with 2.5% of its volume sticking out above the sea surface. If you let the water out of the sphere, the 2.5% volume of pure water that was above the sea level inside the sphere will spread out across the planet's oceans, raising the global sea level.
The iceberg mentioned in the article was 40metres thick and 66 square kilometres in area, so the ice volume is 2.6 billion cubic metres. Ice is 8.3% less dense than pure water liquid , so when the iceberg melts, the volume of pure water will be 2.4 billion cubic metres and 2.5% of that is 60 million cubic metres. The world has 360 million square kilometers of ocean, so adding 60 million cubic metres of pure water will raise average global sea level by 0.17 microns (thousandths of a millimetre)!
Scroogle
Although the source wasn't one Slashbots would likely find credible, I read once that symptoms similar to global warming here had been recorded on a number of other planets in the solar system. If that were true, it would tend to imply that terrestrial global warming was not due to human presence, since we aren't present on the other planets.
The ice shelf collapsed 16 months ago...
It just took a while for the news to reach us....
The two causes you mentioned are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The question is rather if we accelerate the rate of increase in mean temperature anomaly. The Sun is still and will always be the dominant factor for changing the weather on Earth.
Uhh... Is it 11,000 american football fields or standard football fields? Has anyone ever played football on that ice shelf? Do polar bears play football?
so many questions left unanswered....
--- sig moved for great justice.
Is it just me who is wondering why these GW denier posts are continually being modded up. I'm shocked at the way these skeptics arguments seem to dominate any discussion here. Are we nerds really this stupid?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Barring of course global thermo-nuclear war, asteroid impact, massive volcanic eruption, El niño and La niña... Not necessarily in that order.
(I'll give you those last two.)
... the new island formed by the 66-square-kilometre fragment, which could be up to 4,500 years old, could present a serious risk to oil platforms in its drift path in the spring. ...
Well, if we would hurry up and run out of out, then we could use Wind, Water, and Solar, (just like was used before the Oil age).
Just start using cow fart......Uhhhh..... Methane.
Either way, a majority of humans will die, so what is the point of debating the cause of global warming? How about we all concentrate on a solution instead of arguing a theory that we may not be ever able to prove or disprove?
"If you insist on attributing it to the result of carbon dioxide being blasted into the atmosphere at unprecedented
rates, then I'll have no choice but to ask why you have chosen to position yourself as an enemy of freedom and progress."
So let's say that I'm working a machine that will, in some magical way, spread freedom and progress throughout the world. The only problems are that this machine are that the machine produces an inordinate amount of smog and the room the machine and I are in has no ventilation.
My question to you is, should I not care that I will die? Freedom and progress are important things to be sure, but, to quote Keynes, "In the long run, we are all dead."
As another poster mentioned, the third world is going to get hit hard by this. Take Bangladesh for example; through no fault of those people, their country is going to end up underwater all so you can drive your SUV. That's not humanity'f flexibility, that's par the course for the western world.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
African Delegate: Maybe it just collapsed on its own. ...you got seventy-two hours. See ya.
British Delegate: We can't take that chance!
African Delegate: You always say that! I want to take a chance!
Hank: "Collapsed on its own"? You sch... (takes a breath)
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
how relatively minor changes in the already tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is responsible for this?
CO2 is about 0.04% of the earths atmosphere, humans might conceivably changed that value to 0.041%, so what ?
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Same people who spam the site whenever "evolution" or "gun rights" comes up. Guaranteed 800+ posts, all exactly the same as last time the trigger words were uttered. Whenver Taco et al want to spike pageviews, they can just do an article with one of those topics mentioned, however little connection it actually has with the story, and watch the creationists/global warming deniers/gun nuts blurt out their "talking points", getting a similar reflexive response from their opponents.
from the article at the end:
"The researchers suspect climate change may have played a role in the collapse but said they cannot definitively say it is a result of global warming."
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Arctic ice shelf collapse poses risk: expert
Whose English is that ?
Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
I shouldn't respond to a troll, but here goes...
Climate change has always occurred, which has been properly recorded. This is on a geological timescale. Timescales are important. To give you an idea: if one ice-age cylce would take one day, such that the ice-age occurs at night, and the warm intermediate period would occur during the day, then the global warming we are seeing now would take only 45 seconds. Different timescale.
Your statement that CO2 levels are slightly higher is bull. They have risen over 30% and doubling of the CO2-level with respect to pre-industrial levels will likely take place early this century.
I was comparing to historical highs that span hundreds of millennia. The highest being around 300ppm and current levels at 360ppm. I really don't think we'll hit 600ppm this century, but I could be wrong.
When discussing geologic conditions, newspapers should be forced to adopt a geologic timescale. 3-5000 years old is not ancient dammit.
Note that the dates are pretty much precisely 150 years ago.
I stand corrected: it is indeed 110 yards, which is 100.584 meters. As others have said, it is ten yards in three downs.
One thing to remember is that we came out of a little ice age about 600 years ago, so who know mabey in like another 600 hundred years we will get a another ice age.
If I wanted your opinion I'd ask Noam Chomsky.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
And you claim the Bush voters are the ignorant ones? Did it ever occur to you that intelligent and caring people might have different opinions on the matter? I voted for Bush. I care about the environment. I am far from ignorant.
I, for one, do not believe that Kerry or any of the Democrats had the political will to do anything really significant to address global warming. What's more, I do not trust them to do it in a way that is least damaging to the economy. Talking vaguely about hybrid cars and other such pie in the sky technologies won't get us very far. How about really getting behind nuclear energy? Expressing strong support for carbon trading? Supporting significant gasoline taxes (OK, neither party supports this one) instead of trying to push them down when they go up slightly? How about acknowledging that a couple more hybrid cars on the road isn't going to make a real big difference? How about admitting that most Americans overwhelming purchased faster/heavier/less-efficient cars despite cars getting 2x the MPG being offered by industry (instead of just blaming it on the car companies)? How about admitting that maybe there are bigger issues at stake than just the nominal proposals made by the Dems on the environment? How about acknowledging that the science on global warming is far from well understood (especially several years before)? How about admitting that dramatic cuts in carbon output in the short term will require a dramatic changes in lifestyle for most people in the West and that it could potentially have devastating effects on the world economy?
Important facts.
$sig not found
For any article about climate change, I change my threshold to see all the articles. Slashdot seems to have become a major target of global warming denial spam. It also seems the moderation is biased in favor of the denial spam, such that the key denial spam posts are marked as insightful. By viewing all posts, I get a far more realistic idea of the discussion.
So in a sense I am putting up a bit of a white flag to the GW denialist public relations campaign, and so they have achieved part of their objectives. If you want a real discussion, go to realclimate.org . You'll still see the denialist spam there, but it is responded to convincingly by experts knowledgeable in the field of climate science.
I believe it is a strong likelihood that much of the GW denialist spam is connected in some way to oil interests. Oil companies face billions of dollars in losses if their primary product is regulated. Anyone who doubts that such oil interests wouldn't provide a paltry few million dollars to protect their future profits by funding people to post denialist spam to discussion groups such as Slashdot is I believe quite naive. It's just self interest.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Scientists are not arguing that we are going to destroy the world. They are saying that we are going to change it in serious ways that could make human civilization less tenable. I am aware of geological events of the past, and the Earth has gone through much worse events than us. For example, there is evidence that the Earth was at one point covered almost entirely with ice, a state that would have wiped out most life. Comets have hit the Earth, causing mass extinctions, including of that of the dinosaurs. Ice ages have come and gone, wreaking havoc on the lives of many species.
Evidence indicates that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide at current rates, we will change the climate in significant ways. In the Earth's past, the most recent period when carbon dioxide levels reached the predicted levels was likely about 50 to 60 million years ago. During that time, the polar regions had a climate that was almost tropical (as evidenced by tropical plants found in polar sediments). Such a change would significantly modify weather patterns, and would likely make our current agricultural systems difficult to sustain. Imagine what would happen if the yield of global crops dropped by 10% or more. Do you think that this would not have an impact on civilization?
And if you have been taught that man is too small to impact the Earth, that only God can do that, then you should imagine what would happen if the president decided to press the launch button for America's nuclear arsenal. What kind of an impact would that have? The fact is that man can have an impact on the climate. If you believe that God created the Earth, then our current actions could hardly be viewed as good stewardship of His creation.
Enlightened environmentalists are not arguing that we give up our modern technology. Far from it, they are arguing that we should learn to use the gift of energy more efficiently. Believe me, it is possible to reduce our consumption of energy while preserving our standard of living. If you could buy a car that was indistinguishable in most important ways from an older car except for its high efficiency, why would you want the older version?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
"Perhaps it's that the absorption of IR due to CO2 concentration is nearly at saturation and has been for quite a while."?
More carbon dioxide = more greenhouse effect. Period.