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Huge Arctic Ice Shelf Breaks Off
knarfling writes "CNN is reporting that a chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic. Just last month 21 square miles of ice broke free from the Markham Ice Shelf. Scientists are saying that Ellesmere Island has now lost more than 10 times the ice that was predicted earlier this summer. How long before the fabled Northwest Passage is a reality?"
YES! How long until it is 1906 again?
Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s. All that is left today are the four much smaller shelves that together cover little more than 299 square miles.
So this is a process that has been going on for ~100 years now? And that means it is indicative of, or news because... ???
;) )
Nothing to see here... (except my dwindling karma...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
How long before the fabled Northwest Passage is a reality?
From what I read the other day, it is open now...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I don't have time to find a source right now, but didn't a linked-to-by-slashdot article one or two weeks ago mention the variations in some ocean currents as the cause? Something about them delaying serious global warming until the next decade or so.
I read about it here.
Yes, ice melts in the summer and freezes in the winter. But due to global warming, the amount of ice in the Arctic has been decreasing dramatically over the past few decades. In several years, the Arctic could be ice-free each September.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The same goes for China.
Eh, doubt it. China's army shouldn't be taken lightly, but their navy isn't especially impressive.
Yes, the water is warming. Most of the current rise in sea level is due to the water warming, and thus expanding rather than to ice melting. That won't be significant until Greenland goes. Floating ice melting doesn't change the sea level, but merely absorbs the heat required to melt it. This is significant for absorbing energy without raising the temperature. But after the floating ice melts, then the seas can raise their temperature without the hindrance of needing to melt ice. (Note that this is also a block the other way to water cooling.)
A given volume of water can hold considerable more thermal energy than the same volume of air at the same temperature. As a result the oceans act as a ballast on the thermal variations...but as they warm, the balance point of the scale shifts. It takes a long time to warm the oceans, and then it takes a long time to cool them. This is important in understanding climate change.
Note also that warmer air can hold more water. This is important as a thermal transport mechanism. (I'm not a climate modeler, so I can't understand why this would turn some places into deserts...but I've seen complex interaction of subroutines, so I'm not surprised that things like this happen.)
But it's not that either the air or the water is warming, they both are. Just at different rates, and with differing stability.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You understand of course that extra energy in the system causes larger fluctuations right? The global average will increase, but so will the variance. Your colds will be colder, and your hots will be hotter.
That's not a prediction of the IPCC, who gather together and summarise the peer reviewed literature. Climate is variable because there are a lot of things that effect it, from solar influences, to the La Nina/El Nino cycles. Regional variation is greater than global variation. Due to that variation we can still expect extremes to occur: some years are just very cold (for a number of factors not related to anthropogenic warming), and some are hot, and that will continue, regardless of warming. However, as noted in IPCC assessment reports (TAR WGI 9.3.6):
In other words, individual cold days or years are not evidence against global warming, since they may well be a result of natural variation caused by other factors (and would have simply been even colder without global warming). To count as notable evidence against global warming you would need a significant sustained cold spell (5 to 10 years at this point). However, extreme cold days or years are not predicted effects of global warming. They may well happen, but there isn't any significant evidence that they are caused by global warming.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The "ice cover in the arctic is growing" claim is bogus, and they know it (or should). It keeps coming up and people point out that even the authors of the claim now say it's bogus (see linked thread) but the same claim keeps coming back, generally worded the same way ("the real inconvenient truth is that the ice cap is growing" or some such).
I used to think it was just cluelessness, but I'm starting to suspect trolls.
--MarkusQ
These are really really rehashes of thoroughly debunked arguments. We already know that solar output effects the energy that the Earth absorbs, we observe the output of the Sun directly, we know exactly how different solar output changes from year to year. We know the variability between solar output during solar output peak and trough -- it's 0.1% The total solar forcing can be calculated directly it's 237 Watts/M^2. So from sunspot peak to trough the forcing changes by .24 watts/M^2. We know the effect of greenhouse gas change (in particular CO2) since pre-industrial times on forcing. It's 2.43 watts/M^2 see for example The 2001 IPCC Report.
It is true that solar output is high especially high for the past 80 years see solar variation but even the change between now and the Maunder Minimum (.2%) does not compare to forcing from greenhouse gasses.
Not in the US. Many Republican politicians deny, or belatedly acknowledge, Global Warming. Mike Huckabee, I think but I'm not sure, speaking at the convention intimated Obama wants people to make sure their tires are properly inflated.
Many scientists love it because they finally get some of the spotlight and almost all scientific disciplines can be somehow linked to global warming. Just work GLobal Warming into your research title and it becomes trendy and "important".
That can work both ways, one groups of scientists getting big study grants for saying how bad Global Warming is while another group can get big grants also for disproving Global Warming. I haven't seen many of the later though.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Actually the big news in the actual cryosphere science science community has been the break-up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which is in the... Antarctic.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I don't know if you're being, or trying to be, sarcastic but there's a debate going on in the environmental communities on whether carbon credits are good or bad. Some saying are that they can help reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Others say people are just out for a quick buck. Still others say carbon credits are just a "feel good" measure, people can buy credits but then won't adjust their lifestyle to have a smaller carbon footprint.
As I see it, carbon credits can be all of them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If we were to increase the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere to 0.5%, there's no way green plants could handle it
Actually science has shown it works both ways. Some plants grow slower in a CO2 enriched environment whereas others grow faster. For instance Poison ivy grows faster and bigger with higher atmospheric levels of CO2.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Charter rates for the largest freight ships can be $40,000 - $70,000 per day. If taking the Northwest Passage can save such a ship 25 days at sea, then even at the lowest daily rates that's saved them a million already. Factor in fuel costs and Canada's apparently exorbitant fee could start looking reasonable.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"We also know that water vapor soaks up 25 times as much heat as CO2, and that there's a lot more of it, especially over the oceans. Of course, the Global Warming Industry doesn't mention this, because it would make people wonder how much effect CO2 really has, except over cold deserts."
You have been misinformed by the opposing "industry", scientists pretty much ignore water vapour for a very good reason. The atmosphere is saturated with water vapour. That means that the only way to change the amount of water vapour in the air is to change either the temprature or pressure of the atmosphere. In other words water is a feedback in a changing climate.
Now what the anti-GW "industry" never mentions is a little thing called the dew point that explains why dew drops form all over the world every night, even in deserts. In a (globally) stable climate you can pump as much H2O as you like into the atmosphere and all that will happen is that it will fall out as rain/dew over the next few days.
Here is a short list of some other old and tiresome misinformation that is midlessly regurgitated every time GW is mentioned...
Climate change on Mars/Jupiter
Sunspots.
Cosmic rays.
Volcanos emit more CO2 than mankind.
No warming since 1998.
Global cooling was all the rage in the 70's.
There are many more but the point here is that people simply spout off what they read in the opinion pages without having a fucking clue as to what they are talking about and a complete lack of desire to find out. They assume that the thousands of scientists that make up EVERY national science body on the planet are lobotmised fools who haven't got a clue about what they have spent a good portion of their lives studying.
A couple of minutes googling would have busted the ridiculous myth that you are propogating. If you or anyone else reading wants to be treated as a skeptic and not a 'denier', then act like a skeptic. Go and question your own assumption and try and prove yourself wrong. When you fail to do so then you may just be onto something worthwhile and ORIGINAL. Picking out pre-spun factoids that happen to fit your worlview is nothing less than the triumph of politics over science.
Disclaimer: I picked on you because I was looking for the H2O meme and you were the first one I saw. If you are interested in some genuine science I can give you some links but I suspect your mind is made up and firmly closed.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Clouds WILL absorb and reflect and refract incoming energy from the sun. They will also absorb, reflect and refract LW radiation.
Water vapour will mostly only block LW.
But clouds DO block.
The modelling of water vapour is HUGELY modelled. There are radiative specialists trying to work out what the feck is going on. What ISN'T modelled is the formation of CLOUDS.
But since clouds are not water vapour (about the only thing you got right) and they can either cause cooling or warming based on height, their effect is to randomise the measures rather than force a bias upon them.
So they are OK to ignore for climate purposes. No climate forcing: no need to model in a climate model.
But water vapour? Modelled to hell and back.
Epically wrong.
You can see the sea ice as it is right now at the above website (or link here).
That said, it was last year that my brother sent me an email showing this, and showing that the NW passage was open at that time.
So how long before the fabled NW passage is open? Last year. Not the ultimate in slashdot old news, but yes... old.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
No, there is less. As the graph from the article you site shows, the present sea-ice coverage area is very slightly larger than it was this time last year (which was a record low), but the thickness of the ice is steadily decreasing, and as a consequence, so is the total amount of ice.
In fact, as the ice melts and breaks up it tends to spread out, temporarily increasing the "sea area with > 15% ice" which is what the graph shows.
--MarkusQ