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Large Ice Shelf Expected To Break From Antarctica
MollyB sends this excerpt from CNN:
"A large ice shelf is 'imminently' close to breaking away from part of the Antarctic Peninsula, scientists said Friday. Satellite images released by the European Space Agency on Friday show new cracks in the Wilkins Ice Shelf where it connects to Charcot Island, a piece of land considered part of the peninsula. The cracks are quickly expanding, the ESA said. ... The Wilkins Ice Shelf — a large mass of floating ice — would still be connected to Latady Island, which is also part of the peninsula, and Alexander Island, which is not, said professor David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey. ... If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level because it is already floating, scientists say. Some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse."
Fresh water from ice and salt water in the oceans have different densities. The volume of salt water displaced by 1000 kg of frozen fresh water will be less than the volume that those same 1000 kg of ice occupy when melted, since the salt water is denser.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I believe that if done correctly, cap and trade is a valid temporary solution however I think that the ultimate solution to the problem is to knock out any regulatory restrictions preventing a viable market based on the trade of carbon dioxide as a resource. It may be possible to start with a cap and trade system and ween the economy off of it and on to a market that stands completely on its own. The big problem as is being seen to an extent in Europe is that it is somewhat difficult to quantify CO2 offsets in many cases. Too many permits in the wild can also cause the system not to work as efficiently as it should however auctioning the credits may solve that problem. A green shift in taxation may also improve conditions. Shifting away from our current very complicated tax system toward one that both functions to discourage wasteful consumption and simplifies the tax code [eliminating many tax loopoles in the process] may actually offer an overall economic benefit outside of the environment its self.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The researchers found Antarctica's ice sheet decreased by 152 (plus or minus 80) cubic kilometers of...
An error margin greater than 50%? Presuming that this is based on a typical 3 standard deviations...
...the chebyshev limit says there is still a whopping 11% chance that the actual value is outside the range...
I don't see any statistics experts mentioned in that link, so I gotta assume that we cannot expect a normally distributed error, that in fact they have no idea what the distribution might be.
"His name was James Damore."
"Are there some countries that are exempt from the global regulations? Is CO2 actually a "pollutant", and how do we define pollution? Has relatively recent human activity actually been proven to be the cause of something we can't even measure properly? What percentage of the atmosphere does CO2 actually occupy and what is it's molecular weight?"
No, Yes, A resourse out of place, Two incorrect assumptions in the question render it meaningless, Very small, Irrelevant.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It is hard to get a sense for the scale and the magnitude from the article's pictures. So, I looked it up on Google Earth.
That "ice bridge" protecting the Wilkins Ice shelf is narrow, only about 2 km wide, or slightly more than mile. And it is that which is breaking up. The floating ice area behind it (i.e. to the east) is huge, about 100x100 km!
Once that bridge is broken, sea currents may more easily flush that ice into the high seas. And, what the effects will be then, we don't know I guess.
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Speaking of taking things out of context, note that psuedo-skeptics have reduced the entire enquiry down to "our committee does not believe that the climate is warming".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
An error margin greater than 50%? Presuming that this is based on a typical 3 standard deviations...
Actually, reading the paper, it looks to me that 80 km^3 is just 1 standard deviation. (They say the GRACE errors were calculated as 1-sigma, and the ice volume error is obtained by sum-of-squared GRACE errors, so it too is presumably 1-sigma.) If so, a 95% interval includes the possibility of zero volume change (but barely).
I don't see any statistics experts mentioned in that link, so I gotta assume that we cannot expect a normally distributed error, that in fact they have no idea what the distribution might be.
Ah, the old "I don't like Mike Mann, therefore nobody in the world except a professional statistician knows what a normal distribution is" argument. Very compelling.
Anyway, if you want to know about the distribution of the errors, read this. They find that the aggregate residuals are normal, but the RMS errors — after standardizing against the spatial and time dependence of the residuals — are non-normal. They discuss the consequences of making a normal approximation. The normal approximation is what they used in the above Science paper.
To achieve a balance between good stewardship and knee jerk "reactionism", we are required to hold off doing anything until more is known... ...if we don't, that'll be as bad as when rabbits were introduced in australia, termites in hawaii, zebra mussels in the great lakes, etc, etc, etc.
Folks just want to "do something" about the "issue", and that is a rallying cry to politicians... which are, in their own way, another bane to out existence we introduced out of ignorance.
- real hackers don't have sigs -