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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?"
The day the NWP is a reality is the last day of Canada as an independant country.
I'm not ready to give up my home and native land that quick. But how am I to stop US forces, or worse, Russian or even Chinese, should they set their eyes on the NWP?
Because it is not reforming as ice. Over the last 100 years, pieces of the shelf would break off and then other ice would reform and take its place. But over the last few years, ice is breaking off and it is too warm for other ice to form into the shelf.
One of the effects is that fresh water environments were formed on the shelf. When the shelf breaks off, salt water rushes in and kills all the organisms that grew there. Some haven't been studied well, and the chance to study them has been lost.
Another affect is more political. If enough ice breaks off, there will be a NorthWest passage where ships can sail around the North of Canada.
On July 30 of this year, scientists predicted that a chuck of ice would break off. The chunk that actually broke off was 10 times the size predicted. Not sure why the big difference, but that is a bit scary to me. What is it that these scientists missed? Were temperatures warmer than expected? or did they just make a bad judgement with the info they had?
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
The climate change proponents will probably try to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is. I take the stance that I'm not educated enough on Earth's climate to have a valid opinion on climate change, but I do find it strange that they never mention the tropics have been colder than usual these past few years. I live in Mackay, Queensland, and this year's winter was probably the coldest I've seen here (though I have only been here eight years).
You aren't educated enough. The climate models call for more extreme climate shifts both colder and warmer with the over all average being warmer. Also the tropics change the least and the Arctic regions change the most. The models have been around for years and so far the biggest errors have been underestimating the rate of change. There will be years when the changes will reverse simply due to yearly variations it's the general trend that has changed. Saying you had a colder winter so global warming is wrong is like saying it's warmer in August so winter cooling is a myth. Weather patterns are measured decades, hundreds of years and thousands of years not months and years. Yearly changes are meaningless when talking about long range trends.
Normally I don't reply to people who reply to my comments, but I really must know:
Why in the world would you start your quest to prove me wrong on a corrolary point by quoting an article about a man-made structure constructed some 2 million years after the geologic event I was referring to?
FanFictionRecs.net
I find it arrogant to condem the entire species for the logical errors of a few dirty, dirty hippies!
Kidding about the dirty hippies part, but I do have a real point: the debate about global warming is non-scientists using non-scientific arguments to advance their non-scientific prejudices reguardless of truth.
Emphasis on the non-science part there. Just want to clarify that it's not that no one is trying to prove cause and effect, it's that most of the noise has nothing to do about hypothesis testing.
I also don't know about calling it arrogance. We know CO2 soaks up heat and we know there's a lot of CO2 being released. That right there to me justifies taking preventative steps. Of course, there are a powerful few very opposed to this. The resulting controversy is very predictable. It would be nice to pre-empt that with hard science, but it remains to be seen if proving it wrong or right is possible. It would also be great if we could just deal with it once we know for sure, but of course we have reason to suspect that would be a foolish way to go.
The flaw in the species that I see is the inability to see things as more than a dichotomy. It seems like too many people have boiled it down to "Do we save the environment or the economy," been unable to answer that, and settled for which advocates do they like better, the hippies or the lawyers?
From http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/01/30/DefendNorthwestPassage/:
If the US resumes that path, and there's no evidence they will right now, it'll lead to a fundamental change is the perceived "special relationship" between Canada and the US. Americans would be surprised at the change in attitude that would result.
However, I believe things are quite a bit different now compared to 1969. We have Russia making macho territorial claims all over the place and Canada (plus Denmark) are in the best position to legally defeat those claims, not the US.
Also, there might be some recognition in Washington that treating the NWP as the high seas could easily result in an environmental mess of biblical proportions because, for example, dumped oily bilge water in the cold Arctic water doesn't disperse like it does in warmer climates. A large oil spill up there would be an unmitigated disaster.
Finally one would assume the US would like to know, via Canadian tracking of ships in it's territorial waters, who's going where. Canada would have some rights to actually board and inspect ships which is much superior to what the US could find out if the passage was international waters in which case they would be limited to satellite, radar, or airborne tracking.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Spoken like a person who's never read a paper on the subject.
People like the GP divide the world into a few groups when it comes to belief regarding climate change:
1) "Sheeple" who believe the circumstantial evidence we have proves that global warming is a real and likely man-made phenomenon.
2) Clever, educated people who listen to people with no background in science quote scientists (trying to collect data or refine existing models) out of context. These people learn from their TV/Radio/Blog gods that global warming is a liberal conspiracy. See #1.
3) Scientists, who are either duped by the liberal universities and left shaking their hockey stick plot of T vs. t, or who are ignored by the mainstream (did I mention liberal?) media when they show that global warming doesn't seem real.
This actually reminds me a lot of the creationists' response to evolution. They seem to think that any new evidence describing something previously unknown to the scholarly community is proof that evolution is a broken theory.
I think that it would be better to divide the world (only in our minds) into:
1) People who don't have the background or interest to know whether global warming is real or not, but who are generally pretty strongly polarized one way or the other.
2) People who do have a pretty good idea how likely it is that global warming is a problem and that it's man-made. These people are generally ignored by those in group 1, though they're quoted ad nauseum by both sides of the "debate" held by that group.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)