Slashdot Mirror
ICE Satellite Maps Profound Polar Thinning
xp65 writes "Researchers have used NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite to compose the most comprehensive picture of changing glaciers along the coast of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The new elevation maps show that all latitudes of the Greenland ice sheet are affected by dynamic thinning — the loss of ice due to accelerated ice flow to the ocean. The maps also show surprising, extensive thinning in Antarctica, affecting the ice sheet far inland. The study, led by Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, was published September 24 in Nature."
I'm no climate change skeptic, but from just looking at the images it's not clear that the reduction in some places is not balanced by the increase in others. What is the net effect? Can these data be compared to model predictions?
I see on the maps that some areas are thinning, near the coasts, and other areas are thickening.
I wonder if that is the usual pattern, or if they are seeing something unusual.
The article didn't mention that, as far as I could tell.
The increased temperatures of west Antarctica are more than compensated by decreased temperatures elsewhere in Antartctica. It is especially interesting that there is so much growth inland of Greenland.
Those who demand "proof" of climate change before we do anything to fight it will find some way to ignore this. They'll keep pretending there's "no evidence" and that it's a "librul conspiracy" until it becomes undeniable (I'm betting til the dams surrounding a port city fail) because they don't believe in doing anything proactive.
Then when the engineers say it's too late to do anything except build a 300 foot tall dam around every coastline in the world, it'll be their fault for not fixing it.
Where is the massive coastal flooding that was promised to be caused by this?
I have beachfront property. Or I will have as soon as the much promised flooding arrives.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That would be sensationalism. So far, it is measured in cm; by the turn of the century (90 years from now) it is projected to be a few meters,
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
I say fuck the polar bears. Why? Because we need polar-bear human hybrids in order to survive the coming pseudo-ice-age warming period. Also when the magnetic field flips from north to south, our polar-human descendants can track the pole as it migrates over the period of M_PI years. I mean if anything can track that, it'd be a polar human.
I thought carbon credits would have someone parked on the poles with a couple of ice making machines (perhaps like they use in a hotel but not as loud) and they'd be scooping fresh ice out to keep it topped off... why is this not happening? Have we been lied to? Where did all that carbon credit money go to? Just when I thought for sure I could sit in my apt and do something really fucking meaningful from a distance to help save all those future generations by buying offset credit every time I got on WOW and played for two days... this just has destroyed my entire weekend and trust in humanity.
Congratulations!! You just explained by analogy how melting ice pack (ice cube), that is ALREADY floating in the water, will have no meaningful effect on sea level.
Now try this, take that same full cup and put two chop sticks side by side across the top of the glass. Now place a few ice cubes on the chop sticks and watch them melt, what happens to the water level in this case?
What is worrying is ice that is currently NOT floating is showing signs of melting, which will have an impact on sea levels.
The climate is changing, it doesn't mater if its caused by humans or some natural cycle, we have to start thinking about how we are going to adapt now if we are going to survive long term.
Remember that what happens elsewhere in the world DOES have an effect on you, it may be slight but it does. Ever notice how milk costs more when petrol prices go up because of political unrest in the middle East?
Another POV... http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/09/25/lawrence-solomon-hot-and-cold.aspx
He points to a National Geographic report saying the opposite.
That would be sensationalism. So far, it is measured in cm; by the turn of the century (90 years from now) it is projected to be a few meters,
I would think both of those outcomes would be awful for a few dozen cities on our planet that are only a foot above sea level.
yea but the stench will finally be out of NY city. I think that's worth it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Ahahahahaa.... This is similar logic to saying that drinking and driving isn't dangerous since you've never died doing it yet. Total falsehood. Just because we haven't all died yet doesn't mean we haven't been in danger. And to assert that is a complete logical fallacy.
BTW look up aerosols. They may have doomed us all, but luckily we stopped it in time, aerosols are used a very very tiny fraction now compared to what they were at their peak. Since we averted the crisis does it not count?
1) No, no scientists think this. It is changing more rapidly than it ever has in past. Except possibly for extinction level events which wiped out almost all life on the planet.
2) Dear god no, it will likely cause harm measured in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Perhaps the hundreds of millions of lives.
Do tell me the last time the entire scientific community united to 'cry wolf' over anything in past? Aside from aerosols which I mentioned. Give an example, impress me.
That's vertical meters, not horizontal ones. I would expect a few dozen to a thousand horizontally for a few meters, depending on what kind of conditions there are.
But "profound" thinning isn't sensationalism? Is there a scale of hyperbolic adjectives that maps to physical volumes or thicknesses? If there isn't then "profound" is an invitation to make an assumption unsupported by the facts.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
It would be a bit more comforting to see some numbers to accompany your estimate. I say this, because, on the one hand I know that in the space of 100 years Florida when from barely populated to what it is today (my great-grandfather moved there there in the early 1920s, now it is 6% of the US population), but on the other hand, in the town I live in today (some miles inland, but in the Charles and Mystic river watersheds), there's a thousand or so houses too close to sea level. One town, a thousand homes, $.5M/home, pretty soon we are talking about real money.
How we plan to cope is what I find interesting. If you figure that there is a range of human expectations (optimist to pessimist), you can well imagine that optimists will push for drainage infrastructure and personally invest in better sump pumps ("swamps can be drained" and lots of Houston, including Rice U., used to be a marsh). Pessimists already own property quite a few meters above sea level (would you believe I checked this in 1994? I did.)
The problem for some coastal places, in particular Florida, is that the rising sea will not only make land uninhabitable, it will also reduce groundwater resupply. Simply reducing the surface area of the state, will reduce the amount of rain that falls on it, and reduce its natural water supply. There's workarounds for that, too -- Tampa already has a desalinization plant, and last I heard, there was much discussion of whether they should take the money saving step of recycling sewage instead of seawater (it's cheaper, less dissolved salts).
So, interesting times (probably) ahead.
Wrong.
Or is less than half truths. Most of Antarctica gets colder, some of it gets warmer. By reporting on the parts that get warmer, media tries to sell disasters just because it sells better than the whole truth and nothing but the truth. West Antarctica has according to climatologists always behaved differently from the rest of Antarctica.
Climatology news is starting too resemble a boxing match where only the strikes delivered by one of the boxers are being reported.
The question is, over what time period are we seeing rises and falls in coverage? We have no proper data before the satellite age. So all we know is that there has been recent shrinkage. We have however no idea what the standard deviation is of gains and shrinkages over a period of centuries or millenia, so we have no idea whether we are looking at an event close to the mean or one that is several standard deviations away from it.
At this point people usually ridicule one for not being prepared to take action until there is proof, which is usually projected as being some natural disaster like New Orleans.
The argument is mistaken. It is quite reasonable to wait for proof, because 'doing things' in the absence of proof is a risky and expensive business. It could have quite dramatic and unexpected side effects depending on what the situation really is.
It would enormously help us figure this thing out if all the climate scientists would just publish their raw data and algorithms. That way we could at least verify their work so far. The ones that need to publish? Well, just about all of them. They supposedly have evidence that the present warming is a very rare event, but they decline to publish it. They just publish studies based on it, summaries of it, processed forms of it. We need this data, and we need the code that was applied to it.
Without that, its not science, its arm waving. There is probably nothing more important than to establish the climatic history of the last 2,000 years, and if we could establish ice coverage and density in some way, that too. Without the scientists publishing, I do not see how we take this debate any further. It is, to say the least, curious that the main workers in the field, the ones who find the present trend most alarming, are the ones who refuse to reveal the data that would prove them right.
Where, for instance, is Mann's algorithm, the one he refused to supply to the Wegman Committee? Where is the data underlying the HADCRU series? Where is Thompson's ice core data?
If we cannot see it, how do we even know it exists?
If the ice pack is indeed thinning "Profoundly" there should be other noticeable effects. I chalk this one up to sensationalist summary, not sensationalist comments.