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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."
FairTax baby!
Seriously, is there anything happening in the arctic or antarctic regions that IS NOT the cause of Global Warming?
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.
I think good Tequila and mix will make the margarita better than 3000 yr old ice. Besides, that ice has been outside for a long time with penguins, polar bears and what nots crapping all over it. That is NOT good eats!
While it would be absolutely foolish to dispute the reality of global warming, many of the arguments for it actually being human induced are somewhat specious, simply because global temperature records do not go back for enough to make a statistically meaningful analysis of the cause.
I'm not saying that we aren't the cause, but before the last ice-age this planet was a whole lot warmer than it is right now, and it managed to chill eventually. This whole thing could just be part of the normal geological cycle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
70 million tons of CO2
Should be 70 million tons of CO2 a day. But I'm sure it's the sun "surging" or something. Let's organize a space mission to toss giant ice cubes into the sun!
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.
I don't know, but one event is not enough for a conclusion to be made. I know this is definatelly true.
This is not the same as saying I approve of global warming. I'm merely saying more data is required. I would be quite happy if the US and other lesser polluters stopped ripping into the ecosystem, but last I checked I'm not a global power, so I am unlikely to be able to stop anything the power hungry are doing.
Such feeling aside, my point remains.
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
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!
Not an environmental scientist, but I am a scientist, accustomed to developing hypothesis and establishing the correctness or otherwise of same.
How many vast Ice sheets have cracked recently? I haven't heard of many. This may be a natural event, it's certainly on a scale we are not normally accustomed to envisaging. To definatelly point to a cause for a thing, it must be seen more then once, preferably many times. What if, for instance, Ice sheets crack constantly? Until the 19th century there was little interest in keeping an eye on Ice in the arctic, that's not much time for events on such a large scale to be observed.
Ice is melting all over the arctic it seems, and there are tentative links to global warming. However no-one has proven that these are not natural events slightly speeded up.
I'm not interested in getting the facts from whatever group can shout the loudest, or who succeeds in worrying the most people, I'm interested in knowing the precise cause, or combination of causes, before resorting to being scared to voice a variant opinion.
This is aside from my views on pollution. Even if it weren't allegedly messing with Ice sheets I'd still think pollution was a bad thing. I am very wary of jumping to conclusions though.
If you're going to lash out with a really big number, at least put it in perspective, yes?
Well, you didn't bother to. Why should I?
The point of my post is that we have fewer carbon sequestering plants each day while the rate of CO2 deposition into the atmosphere is growing each day. There's evidence the CO2 deposition into the oceans is causing them to become more acidic, affecting calcium carbonate-dependent sea life - i.e. all of it.
Yes, oceans and trees absorb CO2 - at a constantly declining rate due to the finite capacity of water to hold dissolved carbon at atmospheric pressure and biological constraints - and in case you hadn't noticed, there are fewer trees globally every year - and usually because they're burned, which puts that C)2 right back into the atmosphere.
The earth's capacity to self-sequester C02 is declining at an increasing rate while we are depositing CO2 into the atmosphere at a constantly increasing rate. Is that clear enough for you?
How does asking a sensible question and thinking critically make you an idiot?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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!
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.
Tell you what: let's have one Earth where GHG emissions are eliminated, and a second Earth where GHGs continue to be produced at their current, increasing, pace. Then we can see if it is a precise cause, based on whether or not each Earth becomes uninhabitable.
You can live on the second one.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
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)