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Disputed Island Disappears Into Sea
RawJoe writes "India and Bangladesh have argued for almost 30 years over control of a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have ended the argument for them: the island's gone. From the article: 'New Moore Island, in the Sunderbans, has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.'"
I'd say you're trolling sir. Unless you have really been living under a rock and don't realize that there are about a million other reasons to worry about climate change.
I don't believe in germs either. Do you believe in Ghosts too? Patrick Swayze is still alive, FYI.
~Mekkah
If a glacier that is already in water breaks off, the sea levels are fine. Hence, pieces of the Arctic breaking up isn't going to result in sea levels rising.
The ANTarctic is a different story. While sections of it are floating ice, it also has a massive land area that is covered in ice. Those can literally slide off into the sea and, like dumping a piece of ice glass of water, the level rises. Some of the ice sheets sitting atop rock are so massive that if they were to build up a little moment, break off, and slide in, they would visible raise the sea level.
Are they sure it's actually gone? Maybe Benjamin Linus or John Locke just moved it -- again.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Global warming isn't what we should be warming. Periods of high warmth (even higher than now) are when civilizations boomed and species thrived. It's when things eventually go south and get cold that we see mass extinctions.
Go back about 400 years and look at what happened during the Little Ice Age, it wiped out millions across the globe. Yet that was just a minor dip, still incredibly warm compared to the last true ice age. Temperatures in some areas averaged 20 degrees less than they do now, and the global average temperature fluctuations were in the neighborhood of 10 degrees (from high to low to high again) over the course of a few decades. That's devastating. It killed off all of the large mammals in the previous ice age, and the human population had been reduced to as little as 5 million people globally. This is when Sapiens emerged as the dominant human species.
So we should be preparing for climate change, but global warming makes things easier on us, not harder. Yeah, coastal people will be displaced, so what? They'll be even worse off when it all cools again. It's the cold weather we need to start preparing for, because when the ice age hits it will hit hard and fast, and hopefully we'll be in a position to survive it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
So what's the approximate value of "saving humanity from extinction?" That's what's at stake after all. You could say that saving us from extinction is worth any price, and thus the cost/benefit ratio is impossible to evaluate. So then you have to evaluate the likelihood of extinction vs the cost. A much harder value to calculate. And while you are doing these calculations, there's a very real probability that things are getting worse and you're wasting time calculating when you should be making changes. So again, what do? Given the other benefits of reducing carbon emissions, shouldn't we get started?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Strictly speaking, my assumption is that there is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something isn't done. My point was that "humanity not going extinct" has infinite value, which skews the cost/benefit calculation. If
cost/(probability of extinction)*(value of !extinction)
is the proper general equation, and (value of !extinction) is infinite, it doesn't matter how high the cost is, or how low the probability is, if the probability is non-zero (no matter how small), the cost will always be outweighed by the benefits. The real problem with doing this kind of risk assessment is, what do we do about the pesky infinities? I don't have an answer for that. That was my point. There may not be an answer for that.
For the record, I think the weakest assumption above is the actual value of !humanExtinction. It's arguable that the planet as a whole would be better off without us, but I think in the final crunch we as a species would not accept that. My feeling (and it's only a feeling) is that we as a species will place an infinite value on our own survival (but only when the threat is clear and immediate).
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
It's almost as if I wish Hitler had succeeded when it comes to the jews. Israel has been nothing but a problem now for over 60 years, a nuclear terrorist state. And nothing indicates a change over the next 60 years or 600 years, other than for the worse.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
So according to you the warming is a natural process ergo it won't make any difference if we cut back our output of CO2.
The increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere from 280 ppm in 1830 to 389 this year is almost entirely human causes either directly or indirectly. That's a 40% increase in 180 years.
Water vapor is still the big greenhouse gas in that it causes a greater percentage of the greenhouse warming than all the other gases put together. But the level of water vapor in the atmosphere is entirely dependent on temperature and once it reaches 100% humidity it precipitates out so water vapor can't drive greenhouse warming. CO2 and other greenhouse gases do not precipitate out under normal earth conditions and so they can drive greenhouse warming.
Maybe so but considering the likely consequences of business as usual I'm close to putting climate change deniers in a moral category close to that in which I put holocaust deniers. It sounds harsh but global warming could lead to far more human deaths than the holocaust. They will just be spread out over a longer time period.