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North Pole Ice On Track To Melt By September?
phobos13013 writes "Recently released evidence is showing the North Pole ice is melting at the highest rate ever recorded. As a result, the Pole may be completely ice-free at the surface and composed of nothing but open water by September. As reported in September of last year, the Northwest Passage was ice-free for the first time known to man. The implications of this, as well as the causes, are still being debated. Are global warming experts just short-sighted alarmists? Are we heading for a global ice age? Or is the increase in global mean temperature having an effect on our planet?"
Has anyone thought that this is just the planet recovering from the ice age?
Mod me down if you will, but I heard one report that ice levels right now are higher than at the same time last year.
The NW Passage has been open in the recent past from (1905 - 1948). Accurate measurement of the "melting" began in 1979, probably about the time ice coverage peaked. As a cursory search will show, it has also been open in the more distant past as well.
The freeze/thaw of the arctic is clearly cyclic. Whether it is clear evidence of global warming or not is a question to be considered. Man's impact on this warming, if the warming is actually happening, is another question altogether.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
That's a possibility, but I don't think it's an overly likely one.
My bet is that the difference between Northern and Southern ice cover trends is a lot more obvious if you care to look for it: Soot.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=impure-as-the-driven-snow
Money quote: "and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming."
Not that this is Scientific American talking here, which is hardly a hotbed of AGW skepticism, to put it extremely mildly.
So "just" clean up all those dirty soot-emitting Chinese factories, and the Arctic will start freezing more.
This policy has the advantage of being A Really Fucking Good Idea(TM) whether you're a true believer in AGW all the way over to denying it completely.
Of course, in the real world, not only do we not discuss China's possible particulate-based contribution to GW, we even exempt them from even discussions about adhering to Kyoto, despite the fact that they've been the largest global C02 emitter two years running now and the rate of increase is accelerating...
I just finished reading 1421, and my completely-layman, don't-know-enough-history-to-comment opinion was that it was interesting (and, sure, possible), but the author seemed to play pretty fast and loose with his evidence. Some of his claims (like the idea that the Bimini Road was a construction to slide ships back into deeper water after repair) sounded pretty outlandish and not well researched. Others, such as his analysis of old maps and the routes ships would have taken, seemed plausible, but I don't have the background to evaluate them.
I've been looking for a good analysis of his claims, but haven't been able to find much beyond "he got detail X wrong, so it's all bogus." I'd like to read some better thought out critiques. If you have any links handy, I'd be much obliged.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Well, what would have given them all that hubris? Possibly scientific education and specialisation? Years spent studying the planet's climate?
Well no shit Sherlock.
As a PhD in control theory, I can solemnly declare you a charlatan. Space shuttles are controlled. Nuclear fission reactions are controlled (and they are both nonlinear and unstable). Hell even chaotic systems are controlled. And I am supposed to believe a Sci-Fi writer that has been called a moron by every competent climatologist that hey, you can't help complex stuff? I don't believe in penis-enlargement pills, therefore I don't believe in Michael Crichton.
Your foolish statement may be reworded as "Since you cannot understand a system as complex as the human body, you cannot possibly cure people".
You know, I have this sick, sad habit of looking at politically incorrect sites. Nazis, racists, holocaust deniers—it's a little philosophical exercise, to think how the would would be absurd if these retards actually were right. There is however a line to draw, and Crichton, in that video, passed it after five minutes, when he said that Chernobyl was not really that much of a disaster because only "50 people died". Such a claim indicates a spectacular level of intellectual dishonesty: he's counting only the firefighters who died in the accident, and since nobody traced the isotopes, well, all those malformed children born in Belarus, all those cases of thyroid cancer, they could all just be a statistical anomaly, right? And that's only counting deaths, the really alarming numbers are the people who develop conditions because of the poisoning: in the Ukraine alone, the authorities estimate that 2.4 millions people were affected by the radiation. Note that Ukraine did not even get most of the fallout, Belarus did.
Well, that's enough to make up my mind for now: he's a shill paid by industry lobbyists to deliver lies. Call me up when they actually find a climatologist backing him up.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Alas, I hail from an earlier time, when people thought that what they did mattered, and that the future was somehow our responsibility.
Fear not my contentious friend, when a massive die off of humanity roles over our planet it will take such slacker attitudes with it as it passes. The fewer other humans are left, the more important the contributions of each remaining human become. Reputation, not just for quality of work, but for quality of character will be far more important in a world where it is possible to know everyone who lives in your community. When a person's best and worst qualities both get lost in the crowd the slacker approach makes sense. A few decades of stringent, nature enforced Darwinism might do well to counter our current trend of dysgenics. Humanity thrives in challenging situations... at least the survivors do.
We are all just people.