Slashdot Mirror
100-Sq.-Mile Ice Island Breaks Off Greenland Glacier
suraj.sun sends word of a 100-sq.-mile (260-sq.-km) ice island that broke off of a Greenland glacier on Thursday. "The block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland. It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962... The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada. ... [NASA satellite] images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf. There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to 'keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days,' said Prof Muenchow." The Montreal Gazette has more details and implications for Canadian shipping and oil exploration, along with this telling detail: "the ice island’s thickness [is] more than 200 metres in some places... [or] half the height of the Empire State Building." The NY Times has a good satellite photo of the situation.
It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962...
Folks, we've got a BIG Petermann floater..
Whackaloons on both sides start flinging poo at each other.
"It's the thrilla with Vanilla"
How big is this thing?
Why do you think they called it "Greenland"?
Yes, you can. The ability to do so was added back during the Jon Katz nonsense as I recall, so it's not like this is anything new.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Perhaps we'll get a repeat of the Titanic disaster?
My web domain.
I actually thought it was one of his better efforts. Even though it is about glaciers he resisted mentioning global warming and provided an imperial to metric conversion for its area. He also linked to the BBC rather than a 12 page advert laden blog while adding two additional links of his own rather than just posting the story.
Oh and by the way, if you think stories being "about a day late" on slashdot is somehow strange, well then you must be new here...
I'm curious what technical challenges would have to be overcome to actually recover this frozen water. Many parts of the world are undergoing severe freshwater shortages. A very large block of frozen water seems like it could be very useful to answer that problem. Could getting at least part of it into into a reservoir be technically / economically possible?
Off the top of my head, I was musing about getting it into the Great Lakes, but the channels and locks in the Great Lakes Waterway are obviously far too small to move something this size. If it were eventually towed to a port, what could be done with it? How fast would it melt?
the thing looks fairly landlocked to me, from the photo it doesn't look like it could make it to open water.
Can I plant a flag on it and claim it?
It's O.K. to own Haliburton stock sonny, but perhaps you're advertising it in the wrong place.
But global warming is a lie by the liberals! It's all made up, Fox told me! How can this be happening?!
Global warming refers to a general trend. Even if there is global warming, it can still be colder one year than the other, even though the trend is upwards.
The fact that the temperature was warmer on average for several years in the past, could mean that there was more melting, causing ice to be more brittle, or more likely to break when ice re-froze.
In other words, damage could have happened to the glacier over time that caused certain regions to be less stable or less sustainable, even if the pattern for a later year had been colder.
It's not 2010 that matters alone, it's the group of large number of years.... 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
You can't just take one year out of all those, and use temperature or other changes during that one year to show that there IS or IS NOT atmospheric gas pollution causing global warming, or if global warming did or did not result in an event.
The mass might break off due to past global warming, even if it happened to be colder this year.
The mass might break off even if there is no global warming at all.
Global warming might effect the probability that large pieces break off of glaciers over time, rather than being a single cause of any deteoriation event.
So anyways, the fact temps cooled alone is no proof that global warming did not result in this.
If you really have an argument, bring it forth instead of just acting smug as if you have some secret knowledge which is somehow not obvious/available to the AGW crowd.
In related news, Arctic ice cover gained 100 square miles.
I hear BP has some PRIME ocean front real estate down in the Gulf for sale, CHEAP!
Me, I'm not claiming anything, but most of the graphs you link to show a long term upward trend.
I'm not a glacier expert (fjords are much more hip), but it strikes me as a phenomenon simply related to gravity and temperature. If the temperature on the long term is increased, the process will be sped up. Comparing a single year or "today" to say the 1920/1930s is not really useful and just cherry picking as a truthiness weapon in your never ending battles against the evils that have actually not posted yet, because the extra effect on the downward forces by the increasing trend of the previous years would already have done its work.
From the data he posted, it doesn't look like the 2000s, or even any multiyear period between 1980-2010 was exceptionally warm in the majority of the measurement sites with a reasonable amount of historical data. That doesn't say anything about globlal warming, but it would seem to suggest that a big iceberg calving in Greenland might not be global warming related. A bigger one calving in 1962 also supports that.
The majority of scientists in the world that agree that humans are causing climate change (some of which hopefully read Slashdot), or the FOX watching sycophants who lack a basic understanding of science and have the reading comprehension of a gnat? Or are you just one of those people who talk in the third person all the time?
This has nothing to do with AGW.
It is normal glacier behavior, glaciers flow to the sea, and calve off.
Indeed, glaciers receding (opposite behavior) is usually touted as AGW evidence.
This is only indicative of positive mass balance for this glacier, nothing more or less.
Let's nuke the bastard. That'll take care of it. It worked in Armageddon.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
I can hear the commenters all across the internet now - "I've never studied anything about the arctic or the antarctic ice caps, climatology, or for that matter earth sciences in any real depth, but I KNOW this is proof of (insert really bad thing here)!"
Of course, to save time, most folks leave off the pre-amble and get right to the "I KNOW this is proof of (insert really bad thing here)!" (The not knowing what you are writing about is just assumed...)
Ken
According to the article this is the largest iceberg since 1962, early 60's global warming?
Passionately Indifferent
I know they have some serious water supply problems in Africa ... so ... thoughts on just how hard it would be to tow this thing there? What are the challenges beyond boat power and grappling such a large yet fragile mass? How much would melt by the time it arrived?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Gets used here.... alot.
Arguments both for or againsts a scientific problem should be framed as defendable proofs.
We know that the top of Earth's atmosphere receives 342 watts of energy, in the form of sunlight, per square meter. Note that 107 W/m2 of this energy is reflected or scattered back into space by clouds, the atmosphere, and high-albedo features on Earth's surface. So, only 235 W/m2 (342 - 107) of energy actually make it into the atmosphere, and shines down upon us giving me women in miniskirts and the ability to grow food (both of which are....awesome)
Furthermore, we know that 67 W/m2 of the incoming energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, and another 168 W/m2 is absorbed by Earth's surface. When energy is absorbed, it raises the temperature of the substances that absorb it (the atmosphere and surface of our planet, in this case); this causes those substances to radiate away that heat in the form of IR radiation. We can all agree that these are not simply my opinions right? For those of who are are unfarmiliar, these are called facts, lets keep going.
About 390 W/m2 of IR energy starts upward from the surface, this difference being caused by longwave radiation needing an atmospheric window that does not have a lot of water vapor or gas molocules containing three or more atoms (i realize this is incomplete, i am atempting to simplify). The more of these conditions present in our atmosphere, the harder it is for longwave radiation to escape. So when we spew into the environment, and what we need to agree on is that adding vapor and GHG's to the environment increases the GW potential... right? Keep your fucking anecdotes to yourself, Using these things called facts we can see that keeping equilibrium becomes more difficult when we insist on changing the atmosphere. So don;t tell me you got two colds last year and only on this year so we are getting warmer, or that your uncle your uncles garden got frosted early thid year so we are geting colder. Or about ICEBERGS, this is an atmospheric issue, give me meaningful data about that and i will listen. Anyone who thinks that chnging the composition of our atmosphere will not result in temp change needs to back to school.
sig loading.......
I'm not a loon, it really is an envirocommunist worldwide conspiracy to overthrow the illuminati oil-lords. That only seems far fetched to those who uses non-rectal sources for their news. Step back a bit, look at the situation as a whole, and forget about the day to day details (facts at a high enough rate are just noise), then pull out a theory. Your colon can come up with interesting patterns, and facts are unnecessary ingredients for their assemblage.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
"From the data he posted, it doesn't look like the 2000s, or even any multiyear period between 1980-2010 was exceptionally warm"
The Artic is warming at about 3X the rate of temperate zones, the phenomena is called Polar Amplification, it was predicted by one of James Hansens models in the 80's and has since been confirmed by obsevation.
"it would seem to suggest that a big iceberg calving in Greenland might not be global warming related"
Somewhat tautologically the trend that shows AGW is causing ice loss is composed of billions of individual events, none of which can be said to be caused by AGW. It's like thowing dice that are loaded in such a way that the odds of snake's eyes are 10/36 rather than 1/36. You can never say for sure that a particular occurance of snake's eyes was due to the loading, but you can be certain the dice are loaded.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...just the size of Montreal.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
That may be, but the data the original poster posted does not seem to support that conclusion. If you have some useful information about that data then please share.
I remember solar radation at the earth surface being around 1000 watts/meter.
physics info Oh, 1.353 kW/m2
Must be global cooling..... :-)
Aren't they supposed to work to protect us from these type of stories. Does not /. rate a Patriot group, are we not as good as Digg?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
and who has in his computer a file called 'baby ruth-pool'
kept to print as needed when the pool will be shut down for events 'beyond our control'
I'm here to tell you bud, a candy bar sized object in the pool can CREATE SOME VERY FUCKING SERIOUS EXCITEMENT!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
How about a turd floating around in your swimming pool? I think that might actually beat the glacier in overall excitement.
Why would a headline be looking at area instead of volume? They give us some numbers (in statues of libertys). Do we not have any estimates?
It's like people that harp on Antarctic ice increasing, when most of that's because it's warm enough to snow and that new ice coverage is not very thick.
You can't take the average temperature increase of the whole fucking globe, and assume that because of that, an ice shelf breaking off in Greenland has been caused by it.
You might as well argue that a snowball melting in Norway is caused by all those cunts in Australia using their barbecues.
The A in AGW does NOT stand for AVERAGE, you dumb fuck.
The problem is that everything Katz posted was absurd so it made sense to filter him. kdawson does select a lot of moronic stories and make absurd edits but he is also occasionally on duty when stories that are interesting and really should be posted are in the queue and blocking all his posts would block those, too.
I know they have some serious water supply problems in Africa ... so ... thoughts on just how hard it would be to tow this thing there? What are the challenges beyond boat power and grappling such a large yet fragile mass? How much would melt by the time it arrived?
Well, this is true for lots of areas, not just Africa. If Australia suddenly had a LOT more water, look at all that western land they could irrigate, a'la California. The problem with just towing it is that even if you get most of it where you want, you still have the problems of getting the water ashore, and of coastal temperatures dropping rapidly.... but temporarily... and affecting local sea life.
The better thing then would be to build more coastal desalinators and simply pump the fresh water inland via pipes. By the time you finish with the expense of continually towing ices, breaking it up, moving it ashore, etc, you might have enough to just build a plant and essentially do the same thing. To compensate for the lost salt, I suppose you could send a C-130 to where the glacier is melting and just start spreading the salt left over from the plant process.
Who knows if all that is feasible, but since we do lots of desalinization already, I'd like to see someone address it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Hello? Mod parent up??
"If you have some useful information about that data then please share."
The average temp in Greenland has risen ~3degC in the last century.
You have the raw data and it's not hard to work out how to perform a least squares fit using a spreadsheet. Therefore you have everything you need to confirm/debunk my claim.
If you would rather read about science than perform it then you could start by looking here and here, or if pretty graphs are your thing then try a this random article that took me two minutes to find via a google search
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962
OK, so there was one this size or bigger in 1962 before George W Bush, all the iPods, farting cows and SUVs caused all the global warming. Interesting. If there had not been a "worse" incident in 1962, it would have been said that this was the worst since 1920, or 1830 or whenever or perhaps "the worst ever". Sensational rhetoric like this works on the young precisely because they have such a short view of history. We are all supposed to be so shocked by the size that we do not pay attention to the date. This is by design; it's a common tool. Any young person will automatically translate "1962" to "way back in time before I was born" which will place it somewhere in the vicinity of WWII, the Roman Empire and the ice age (The time of black-and-white photos and cave paintings)
Earth's climate has always been changing. The time to really worry is when the climate stops changing
1. How can tiny amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere affect the global temperature ?
There is only 0.039% CO2. CO2 must then have some enormous heating mechanism.
Has this heating been confirmed in the lab and/or is there a physical explanation ?
2. The weather-forecasters doesn't seem to be able to predict how much rain there
will be in, say, 2 days, with high accuracy. Yet, they claim there will be 30% more rain in
30 years. Why is the accuracy higher for long-term forecasts ? The same goes for
temperature.
Why do people always talk about whether the earth will survive, or whether it has survived something like this before? Who cares about this rock. Global warming won't kill the earth; it'll be here long after humanity has gone. It doesn't matter whether earth has gone through this before, because we're not trying to save the earth. We're trying to save us.
What matters is whether the current population of humans can survive a sudden, drastic temperature increase, not whether the earth can.
As a person sceptical about everything, and a scientist by training, I'd just like to see the data and the code they used to analyze it -- if you can't produce that then don't bother trying to convince me one way or the other. This goes for the AGW "scientists" Mann and family as well as the anti-AGW crew. Show me the data or get out of my face.
So you throw poo at everyone. Smart.
"Oh look at me, I'm sooo moderate!".
Arsehole.
Yes, it's called "the sun", not to be confused by the company recently acquired by Oracle.
Yes and yes. The physical mechanism is the different rate by which CO2 absorbs radiation at different wavelenghts. At visible light wavelength, at which the sun throws energy upon the earth, CO2 absorbs little radiation, so sunlight strikes the earth warming it. At longer wavelenghts, at which the earth radiates energy into the space, CO2 absorbs more radiation, so the heat is trapped.
This can be confirmed by very simple tabletop experiments. You can do it yourself in your kitchen with two transparent plastic bottles, some vinegar and baking soda or any other means to generate CO2, an incandescent lamp or even sunshine as a source of radiation, and a couple of digital thermometers.
That's because rain is binary, it either rains or not. What they predict is the probability of rain during a given period over a given area. Try averaging their predictions over a few weeks or months.
A simple analogy: no one can predict with better than 50% accuracy if a thrown coin will show heads or tails, but if you try enough times it will be 50% of each, for sure. What the weather people do is to analyze that coin and say, "hmmm, this coin is crooked, it will show 'rain' 75% of the time".
Seen the news lately? Global warming is causing huge floods, massive wild fires, and enormous landslides. These are three of the top news items today.
Global warming is a pact with the devil. There's no way you can profit from that.
What I've seen is usually that the "anti-warmists" claim that this insult comes up, but every refutation I've seen comes with consistent scientific arguments.
When you have sources with plenty of reliable scientific data, when you have graphs like this you don't need to call names.
I think you gave an answer to a question someone asked above:
"Why is it, when this topic comes up, so many people that are on the side that says human centric global warming is a fact; tend to use the argument that anyone who does not agree with them is a right-wing gun toting SUV driving mentally crippled slack jawed idiot?".
I think your questions, my answers, and your retort are a perfect counterexample to what he was saying.
A 100 square mile chunk of ice, at the most a mile or two, maybe three miles thick at most, the Atlantic ocean alone is 31,830,000 square miles.
A 100 square mile chunk of ice is not enough to even make a noticeable difference in the sea level or temperature when it melts.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
By the looks of it, he never outgrew his diaper, or is a randy retired senior citizen from Seizure World that falls asleep in the drivethrough for hours at a time. I was half-expecting him to wake-up to find his dead dog dog-knotted on his backpussy, and his own face lying in the half-eaten pile of sh1t. But there you go, I've now been sucked into the Twilight Zone and Slashdot is the little boy that controls reality or I randomnly die from it's angry stare.
Go lesbians!
I, for one, welcome our new measurement scale overlord: candy bars per swimming pool. We have all grown tired of Volkswagens per Library of Congress by now.
What he meant was that, of the somewhat more than 1000 watts/square meter that reach the top of earth's atmosphere, 342 watts are absorbed there and the rest passes through to the lower levels.
You said: The Artic is warming at about 3X the rate of temperate zones, the phenomena is called Polar Amplification [wikipedia.org], it was predicted by one of James Hansens models in the 80's and has since been confirmed by obsevation. (Emphasis added)
So, without any intensive investigation into the matter, it would seem that James Hansen had several different computer models, and this one model, the one that predicted "Polar Amplification," was proven correct after the fact. What of his other models? Were they all equal until one was "confirmed" by history? To me, this underscores that we don't really know about the climate, but we have lots of ideas.
I believe the saying is "thorw enough stuff against the wall, something is bound to stick"...
Ken
I can't wait until the Mainstream Media latches on to this and we get "Balloon Boy"-like coverage of this chunk of ice floating out to sea goes 24x7, until it melts, and the seas don't measurably rise (not that any reasonlable person on either side of th edebate would expect them to), they'll move on to the futile "disaster"...
Or maybe a better analogy would be that this will be the world's biggest slow-motion white bronco chase...
Ken
The data from GISS weather stations is pretty rotten in the arctic, DMI, Danish Meteorological Institute is much better, Air temperatures are primarily below freezing now, water temps guessed at between 0 and 3.4C, nobody seems to have anything working in the area of interest.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The reason is the same as for holocaust denier, or 9/11 troother : once a certain critical mass of fact has been cumulated, it makes any hypotheses ignoring that mass of fact, immediately falsified upon inception. People holding such hypotheses as true (holocaust never happened/9-11 was controleld explosion/there is no AGW) go square agaisnt such a fact. And you see the same tactics :
* Stuff which has been debunked many time over get always served in such conversation, usually in rotating fashion (argument 1 , thena rgument 2 , then argument 3, and then abck to already debunked argument 1).
* When advised to look at certain source, those source are prejudicied assumed to be paid off/not wanting to go agaisnt consensus for their carrier.
* anecdotal evidence (falsely) is taken as falsification of trends.
See, exactly the same is happenning for all those denialist. There was a time where one could DOUBT, due to lack of fact, there was a time where skepticism could have been warranted. But the mountain of fact continued to cumulate for AGW. Sure one need to be open minded, but at some point one also have to recognized that the contrary explanation has an extremly low probability.
We are frankly past that time, and this is why AGW denislist, are put in the same camp as holocaust denialist, or as 9-11 troother : they are qualified as IDIOT, because they keep rehashing the same 100 time debunked factoid, without coming with a REAL falsification of what they want to decry.
Open minded don't mean to have the rbain fall out. Denialist of all sort simply don't want to accept that their pet theory goes agaisnt scientific or historical findings.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
see, that's how nature captures the excess CO2 from your SUV ...
atmospheric CO2 being more soluable in fresh water then ice.
if anybody is having a fit, it's probably the plants:
"WAT? the water is now salty and absorbing my precious CO2?"
That is exactly what originally got me reading Slashdot. Eventually someone would always end up running the numbers. It's a shame that it has fallen out of fashion around here.
From the data he posted, it doesn't look like the 2000s, or even any multiyear period between 1980-2010 was exceptionally warm in the majority of the measurement sites with a reasonable amount of historical data.
Really? Just eye-balling the data the period 1980-2010 looks decidedly warmer than the period 1880-1910. True, there were a number of exceptionally warm years in the 30s and 40s, but the turn of the century still looks warmer, most notably with regard to the colder years in those periods. None of this is to say anything about the statistical significance of any trend, or lack thereof or course. Be that as it may ...
it would seem to suggest that a big iceberg calving in Greenland might not be global warming related.
Now that is a strange claim. "Global warming" is about the imbalance between heat entering the atmosphere and heat leaving. Actually that imbalance (the "greenhouse effect") is a necessary pre-condition for life on earth, global warming is actually about a shift in that imbalance towards greater heat retention. Retained heat can go various places. It can heat the air, it can heat the water and melt ice. Melting ice therefore, is just as indicative of global warming as rising air temperatures are. It would seem decidedly odd to claim that increasing air temperature "might not be global warming related." So how is this claim made in regard to melting ice?
Of course this calving can occur for reasons other than the mere fact that more heat is being retained in the global atmosphere. Inter alia from the force of greater ice deposition upstream in the glacier. So the significance of this calving needs to be understood in relation to other factors, such as how much ice is being deposited on the glacier as a whole.
Look, I'm sitting on the fence on this one. It may indeed be true that this calving is not global warming related, but a number of years of unusually warm local air temperature the 30s does not seem to me an especially compelling argument. I'd be more convinced if you could show me, for example, greater recent ice deposits.
Now I have to say that polar amplification has always seemed a counter-intuitive result to me, since I would have suspected that the large polar ice masses would act locally to cool the air (ie warming would manifest as melting ice). But my scientific training was in pharmacology, not climatology, so what would I know? (As both the model predictions of polar amplification and now the observed results indicate -- not damned much!)
A bigger one calving in 1962 also supports that.
Two problems here. 1) It's an example of the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. (Ie. calving can result from various causes) 2) The atmospheric concentration of GH-forcing gases (and thus the theoretical increase in the heat retention balance) had already risen significantly (against the pre-industrial background) by 1962, so absent any other evidence, you cannot really claim that that calving was "not global warming related," (not to say that it was).
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
[I]f pretty graphs are your thing then try a this random article that took me two minutes to find via a google search.
The problem is that your google search has no way of determining the authority or credibility of the "information" sources that come up as hits. [Hint: read the text in between the pretty graphs and look at the disinformation peddled by that site in general before you recommend it]. Better that people read science than reading about it!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Even if there is global warming, it can still be colder one year than the other, even though the trend is upwards.
Right, except no Warmist ever writes in a correction to any popular news site when they post things that say, "2010 has been an exceptoinally warm year, increasing fears and awareness regarding Global Warming."
If Warmists were merely the honest toilers in the halls of science they claim to be, surely they would be as concerned to correct that error as any of the many similar errors of the Denialists, and we would see earnest comments from them explaining that although 2010 has been exceptionally warm that's just "weather", not "climate", and conscendingly explain the difference.
Why is it that we never see that?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
With that much ice, we're gonna need a lot more whiskey...
Right, except no Warmist ever writes in a correction to any popular news site when they post things that say, "2010 has been an exceptoinally warm year, increasing fears and awareness regarding Global Warming."
Is reasonable within a warmists' political agenda, to attempt to dissuade or calm people's fears, or tell them they don't need to worry about this year's increased temperature?
Why would people want to go out of their way to downplay things that make it look to the naive person as if they were right?
It would almost be self-deprecative to the "warmists"
Don't get your knickers in a knot, it was just a turn of phrase. Climate is much easier to forecast than weather. Generally a researcher uses one model and runs it many times using many different senarios. Larger efforts such as the IPCC average the output of many different models running a few standard senarios.
"was proven correct after the fact"
Yes, testable predictions are what distingushes science from all other philosophies. That said, I agree we can only make "big picture" predictions on climate. I belive a more appropriate saying is "perfection is the enemy of progress".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Agreed, bad random choice.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.