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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.
Hardy har har.
What part of "Greenland has for years been shedding ice faster than the rate at which accumulating snow adds to the overall bulk of its ice sheet" do you morons fail to understand?
Whackaloons on both sides start flinging poo at each other.
No, this is a sign of AGW.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
How big is this thing?
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)
Hardy har har.
What part of "Greenland has for years been shedding ice faster than the rate at which accumulating snow adds to the overall bulk of its ice sheet" do you morons fail to understand?
The part where it's been demonstrably proven beyond any reasonable doubt, by people who have no agenda and no connections to anyone with an agenda such as implementing new and unusual taxes, that never before in the history of Earth has Greenland shed ice faster than it could accumulate. Because otherwise there's the idea that this happens in cycles, that the Earth has seen warm periods and ice ages long before humans were around, and that during entry into a warm period the loss of ice faster than it is deposited is precisely what you would expect to see.
Just that little part that us morons fail to understand. Y'know, the part that you morons refuse to acknowledge or perceive as a serious issue pertaining to your view of this subject.
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...
to lure settlers there. not because at anytime it was green and/or warm.
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?
Oh, I just love this argument. It's based on the fact that arctic sea ice is declining to unprecedented levels according to studies using every piece of data and proxy data known, as documented in dozens of peer-reviewed studies, but at the same time, Antarctic ice is increasing, and at times, the combined average is higher than the previous combined average. Never mind that Antarctic sea ice increase is a *forecast* of AGW due to the increased snowfall and increase in flow rates of its glaciers, while Artic sea ice is declining, as expected.
The argument can basically be summed up as this:
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Well, we had this thing called an Ice Age and it put a ton of ice in places where historically there wasn't a ton of ice.
Over the last 12-14,000 some of that ice has been melting, then growing back, but generally melting.
Wrong!
The areas where the Norwegians settled were warmer than the rest of the area and forested.
"Interpretation of ice core and clam shell data suggests that between 800 and 1300 CE the regions around the fjords of southern Greenland experienced a relatively mild climate several degrees Celsius higher than usual in the North Atlantic, with trees and herbaceous plants growing and livestock being farmed. Barley was grown as a crop up to the 70th degree."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Norse_settlement
Ah, this old yarn! As another poster has already mentioned, it was named "Greenland" to lure settlers. But more importantly, there *were* places in Greenland that were green. Those same places are still there, and are even bigger today. Despite attempts to, the Vikings were unable to grow any crops on Greenland, and the only non-animal sources of food in their diet were wild berries, grasses, and seaweed. Today, Greenland cities can grow beets, rhubarb, and other cold-weather plants that the Vikings were unable to.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Right, because global warming predicts that all weather will cease to exist, right?
Seriously, what sort of idiot thinks that there will be no randomness from year to year? Climate is about *averages*. And the trends are clear.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
It's O.K. to own Haliburton stock sonny, but perhaps you're advertising it in the wrong place.
The average temperature at the peak of the last glaciation was 8-9C colder than the modern era. In one century, the "business as usual" scenario will lead to over 5-7C warming (our current rate of rise is about 2C per century, but not only are emissions rising, but we're currently having to overcome the planet's thermal inertia).
It's not *that* the temperatures are rising that's the problem. It's the *rate* that's the problem.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
But global warming is a lie by the liberals! It's all made up, Fox told me! How can this be happening?!
From TFA:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/vast-ice-island-breaks-free-of-greenland-glacier/
> Petermann is a sleeping giant that is slowly awakening.
> Removing flow resistance leads to flow acceleration.
Basically, this means flow acceleration would speed up erosion of the corners that "landlock" it relatively quickly. Pressure caused by the increasing flow on the parts that do the "landlocking" could also lead to the iceberg breaking into smaller parts thus making it easier to make it to the open water.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
You have an ID that clearly shows you have been around for a long time. Yet you post such an inanely stupid comment. It's like rationalizing that while humans are directly causing thousands of species to go extinct every year (true), everything will be OK because in a few million years they will just evolve again. Do humans have life spans of 1000s of years? We each live on this planet for a finite amount of time. We now find that we are causing changes to accelerate which will cause us great challenges. Where is my arranging deckchairs on the Titanic analogy, I need it again!
It already belongs to Denmark.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I hear BP has some PRIME ocean front real estate down in the Gulf for sale, CHEAP!
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?
As a reference:
The author, of course, conflates finding crops growing in modern Greenland to assuming that they could have grown back then, but notes the strong evidence that little, if anything, was ever successfully grown back then but hay and possibly limited amounts of flax (and the only evidence for that is pollen studies, which failed to turn up traditional food crops). Contemporary writings noted that most Greenlanders lived their whole life without ever seeing wheat, a piece of bread, or a mug of barley beer. The earliest settlers reportedly tried growing barley, but there was virtually no success.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
First off, the frog thing is just a myth. Second, life can adapt, but only with time.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
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
What about this trend?
The extent of the ice cap is not the only way to measure the ice cover in the arctic. Probably more important is the quality and the volume of the ice at the polar cap.
By the way, ice 'extent' is different than the 'area' covered by ice. 'Extent' is what is often quoted, not 'area'. Extent is measured like this: If a grid square being examined has more than 15% ice then it is considered ice covered. So if you had two grids being examined of say 10 sq km each, one being covered 80% by ice and the other being 16% covered by ice, the measurements would say that the ice extent or extent of ice coverage is 20 sq km, when the area would be more like 9.6 sq km. Because this is measured by satellite, grids for study are normally more like 25 or more sq km. Argument can be made to use extent over area since sometimes melt water over ice can be interpreted by the analysis software as being open water. Not always but sometimes; so they use extent to be on the safe side.
What many leave out is analysis of data from satellites that provide measurement of ice thickness. The linked web site addresses this somewhat. I have read about and seen information mentioned more and more on this for at least the last five or six years (and to be sure, the real experts have been looking at this for years). It looks like even if the ice extent is greater this year than in 2007, it is still about 1.6 million sq km less than the 1979 to 2000 average; and more importantly, the current volume of arctic ice is the lowest on record.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
. Today, Greenland cities can grow beets, rhubarb, and other cold-weather plants that the Vikings were unable to.
'Mkay . . . so the Greeland McDonald's offers McBeets, McRhurbarb and Mc"other cold-weather plants."
At the Greenland drive-through: "Yes, that will be one sorry McBabyHarpSeal meal or you . . . do you want some Mc'other cold-weather plants' with that?"
"I suggest that you use a McClub to pummel the bastard before you eat him."
Hey, raw seal meat helps against scurvy. Really. Or have you ever seen Eskimos, Inuits and other such folks out tanning themselves while drinking Gin Gimlets?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
According to the article this is the largest iceberg since 1962, early 60's global warming?
Passionately Indifferent
I might be dipping my toe in very hot water, but... is it really true that the earth has never warmed this much, this fast in its entire recent history (meaning when large animals of some sort or another were around)? It seems pretty statistically unlikely, but that's just a guess.
It's not fair that these guys took the word "skeptical" which is supposed to mean "don't believe in Global Warming, Evolution, Keynesean economics or Obama's birth certificate and made a site that takes global warming seriously.
That's bait and switch right thar.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It would only be statistically unlikely if you believe that 'natural' cycles have as large an impact as all of human industry.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Your analogy is erroneous in that there is no such thing as "normal" weather or "normal" climate. Human body temperatures don't fluctuate noticeably unless there is a problem (to which you allude). The same cannot be said for weather or climate. By the way: "proxy data" is laughable. I'll just leave it at that.
My summer was chilly. Record cold temperatures all through the sf bay area of California.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
"What many leave out is analysis of data from satellites that provide measurement of ice thickness."
A video that I shamelesly "stole" from NASA shows animated ice volume data from military satelites for the period 1981-2009.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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 believe you meant 'GW' (Global Warming). The 'A' in AGW just stands for Anthropogenic - as in caused or largely influenced by humans; clearly, no such phenomenon could be a forecast of AGW in particular as any type of GW would be a candidate for that role.
I agree with your post, but scientists are already the target of extreme nitpicking from those who disagree.. and while being critical is commendable, I think you know as well as I do that they're just looking for any excuse to deny 'X', wherever 'X' is something that would (lead to things that would) affect them immediately, and do so vocally with many a broadcaster eager to give them a disproportionate voice, so that they can continue to live in relative ignorant bliss... let's not give them ammunition to do so by mixing GW with AGW, Climate Change, etc.
During the Younger Dryas periods we may have seen 10-15C shifts, warmer and colder, in 20-30 years
Sure, 2007 may have been unusual with arctic ice cover well below the trend line (which can be seen halfway down this page). This is hardly evidence of a reversal of the trend. GP is correct in describing the continuing decline in arctic ice cover as "unprecedented".
I didn't say a damned thing about humans having 1000 year life expectancies or rationalizing anything about future species proliferation.
All I commented on was the the glaciers of Greenland, and other places, are ice age remnants from the Last glacial period.
Explain to me how glaciers in low latitudes are not ice age remnants.
If it's about averages, then you have to set the bar for the average. You can say a 30 year average is significant, or a 60 year average, or a 600 year average, or a 6,000 year average. Which are you going to choose? The problem here is we don't have reliable data for the average that may be significant, so no conclusions can be drawn. And how are you going to compare and contrast the Medieval Warming Period (for example), with today's warming? What about the Little Ice Age? Why is your "average" today so much more significant than the averages of the past, which were if anything more extreme than they are now?
On point of the original post: ice shelves calve. There are momentous dynamic forces at play here. The surface air temperature really has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It would still calve in the absence of any atmosphere at all.
thank you.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
AWESOME, but it's not true, it's recovered much more since 2007 - the big scary alleged melt year - on the order of about 1 million sq. km. (that's kilometers, a unit of distance for you Americans, for you scifi fans that's klicks). We'll know more in a couple of months as the low point of the summer ends.
Don't believe me?
Here is the data. Note that it's really cold up there this year so it's bound to be another low melt year.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/sea-ice-page
Oh, and the ice that broke off of Greenland fractured off, it didn't melt off. It's called calving and it's been going on as long as there have been glaciers. It's a normal process. For some it's spooky. For others it's just what is so.
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.
During the Younger Dryas, there were large amounts of extinctions throughout N. America, and forests in Scandinavia were replaced with glaciers.
Yes, there have been periods of abrupt climate change in Earth's history that have happened without human involvement. Regardless of cause, they are invariably followed by a large list of bad things happening, with very few good things.
Not a typewriter
...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.
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
Actually, human body temperature is constantly fluctuating throughout the day. It's not a whole lot, but it is noticeable.
Following the Younger Dryas humans were able to develop civilization, cities and everything else up to and including internet p0rn, so I reckon alot of "good things" happened.
It is statistically unlikely when you only base your statistics on temperature records since 1950 ...
Here's a better graph of sea ice. It's actually greater now than it has been than in the past 30 years.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
Um Greenland is hardly "low latitude". Here's a reference point.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=greenland&sll=1.406109,-49.921875&sspn=177.148757,193.359375&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Greenland&t=h&z=3
While a good deal of the ice is remnants of time gone by, when the time is long and the ice starts leaving it means something is changing.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
I really like your straw man attacks on someone's straw man attacks.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Here's a better graph of sea ice. It's actually greater now than it has been than in the past 30 years.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
+1 informative for the posting the link, -1 interpretation for implying the opposite of what the graph shows.
It's probably true, however unlikely it seems to you, but one of the best proofs doesn't come from animals. Plants don't wander around - Once a tree grows in a spot, it's committed. Some plants in particular drop heavy nuts or seeds that will only get transported as far as animals will move them at the very most, and some spread by runners or similar methods that mean the offspring will always be close to the parent and moving across large distances takes many generations. For one example that's been particularly useful to biologists, evergreens that live on tops of mountains above the deciduous tree line usually stay there unless the climate gets so warm that tree-line moves higher than the mountaintop. Climate change at one rate may let some of these species relocate, but at a faster rate will simply wipe them out locally. In the same way, some plant diseases may spread widely only if the tree-line becomes so low, the mountain peaks are all connected. That's a distinctive, temperature related effect. We can look at plant fossils and make some pretty good estimates of how long it took for prehistoric changes, in particular, there are formulas based on longevity and reproductive frequency that hold if species X stays viable in some area for Y time, the rate of change had to be slower than Z. I't's a pretty good argument if species are now going locally extinct at 10xZ or 50xZ rate, that nothing like that has happened in pre human times, or we wouldn't have living examples of those species. Because some of the currently observed rates can be tens or more times faster than the prehistoric rates, rather than just, say 50% faster, it's considered an unambiguous type of evidence.
To be fair, even this line of reasoning takes a lot of crosschecking. Plenty of legitimate scientific disputes exist over just how big a locale is meaningful, or how many different species should be checked before the results deserve a certain level of confidence, or whether the scars left by a particular plant disease are uniformly distinctive. For some cases, scientists do have to consider other events that may have happened that fast in prehistoric times (Dinos weren't the only thing clobbered by that asteroid 60 million years ago). So, it may be only fair to say, "unless the Cretacious extinctions were really caused by some sort of warming cycle and not a massive shield volcano super-eruption, asteroid impacts, or alien trophy hunters, nothing like this, this fast, has ever happened before." But, within limits such as that, the evidence is mounting.
Who is John Cabal?
It's not true. The Earth warmed this much, and this fast, from 1900 to 1945. Is that recent enough? There also have been several more significant warmings in the past 15,000 years. It's not hard to find them.
The surface air temperature really has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It would still calve in the absence of any atmosphere at all.
Without any atmosphere at all the global temperature would be 40 kelvins colder due to no green house affect and the oceans would be frozen. I don't see how ice shelves would calve then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Inventions of necessity, and then only for certain civilizations. Human civs that weren't able to develop it went into decline like so many other species at the time.
Picking out the few things that went right in the Younger Dryas is like saying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was successful in being a bridge for about 120 days.
Not a typewriter
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
Ooh, Watts -- everybody's favorite college-dropout electrical engineer who likes to play climatologist and who pretends to be a certified meteorologist!
What a great link -- is it Lets Cherry Pick Data And Then Pretend That It Overrides Peer-Reviewed Analysis time again already?
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
I know exactly what latitude Greenland is. Before the recent ice ages, from modeling and geological samples, there isn't much proof of wide spread glaciers beyond about 10-25 degrees of the poles.
I'm in Anchorage, 29 degrees south of the pole and we have glaciers close by. Heck I can drive to 5-6 within an hour of my house.
Theres alot of press about the glaciers at Glacier National Park fading, well they are also ice age remnants, they've been there as remnants for about 12-14,000 years.
The "changes" have been going on for 12-14,000 years, after over a million years of wide spread ice ages.
The geological record of the Older and Younger Dryas show that rapid change isn't unusual and doesn't mean man caused it.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge has been a successful bridge since 1950 and I drove over it 10 days ago.
Or do you mean the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that failed in November 1940?
Well, I'm perfectly willing to accept that there have been wide temperature variations in the past. I'm no geologist nor climatologist, but I would have assumed that. However, those variations have do nothing with AWG as far as confirming or denying it.
What I do know is the graphs climatologists present about global warming(like the so-called "hockey stick graph") and the correlation between between such graphs and industrialization is quite troubling.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
It's like rationalizing that while humans are directly causing thousands of species to go extinct every year (true),
Stuff like this is why we have global warming deniers. Wild exaggerations (or outright lying) doesn't help the cause.
If it's about averages, then you have to set the bar for the average. You can say a 30 year average is significant, or a 60 year average, or a 600 year average, or a 6,000 year average.
No, that would be called "making things up". Statistical significance requires statistical evidence. And we have ample evidence that the planet's temperature is dominated on the inter-annual scale by ENSO, and to a lesser extent, by other factors, but is dominated by AGW on the multi-decadal scale.
We have tons of data on ice extent. Most people know that, back to 1979, we have a beautiful record of satellite readings with only small holes. But there's a lot more.
Before that, we have sailing logs and logs from Arctic cities for the arrival and departure of ice. A particularly good source of data is the records from the US and Soviet navies' submarine fleets, which has been made available to researchers. There's direct written records from sailors all the way back to the dark ages, although these progressively become much patchier and are usually only good for localized ice extent.
From coastal records, the data dates back as far. Starting in the late 1800s, it becomes very good, and is near complete starting in the 1950s. Iceland has a good 1,200 year record.
Probably the best long-term record we have is that of sediment cores, and just recently we've started getting an increasingly number of papers on the subject (due to the hostility of the region, only readily have many cores become available). Here's a good review. There are several types of sediment proxies.
The first includes the deposition of ice-rafted debris. Large grains of minerals don't just appear in the middle of the ocean. They're too big to blow and too heavy to float. We observe the process of ice rafted debris being deposited in present day. The debris comes in two types: smaller grains from coastal margins, and larger grains from icebergs. The size, shapes, chemical signatures, and surface characteristics of the grains bear hallmarks of their origins and of the type of ice conditions at the time.
A second source of data in sediment cores is that of microfossils. Different types of plankton have different habitats in which they can live (i.e., some can live under ice, others can't) and known sedimentation and preservation rates. A third, and similar, technique involves the fossils of bottom-dwelling organisms. This may seem odd, as they're not directly affected by the ice -- but they're *hugely* indirectly affected. Very little organic matter, which such organisms eat, is deposited beneath the ice sheet; however, vast quantities are deposited around the edges of the ice, and a normal amount beyond it. Their populations are shown to well correlate with ice cover.
A fourth technique, like the above, involves the amount of organic matter itself deposited. Beyond just quantity, you can look at chemistry -- for example, there are chemical biomarkers for diatoms that live in sea ice.
At the coasts, you have a lot more data, as sea ice has significant affects on the land when it touches. This affects everything from whalebone to large mollusks to driftwood to plant matter and so forth. Even arctic tree records provide significant data, as arctic trees do not survive along coasts perennially lined with ice.
Concerning driftwood: wood cannot pass through ice. Driftwood floats, becomes waterlogged, and sinks in open water. Driftwood entrained in sea ice collects in quantity at the ice margin, and corresondingly sinks in quantity at such locations. Massive quantities of driftwood fossils are available.
Various types of sea mammals closely correspond with the ice margins -- polar bears, various species of seals, walrus, narwhal, beluga, and bowhead. T
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
The last time that what we are recreating right now occurred was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55.8 mya.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Back east has been warmer this summer. But, the west has been cooler and wetter this spring and summer. So I'll trade your local weather anomaly for mine.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
The "Younger Dryas" is only well defined and was only severe within a rather small region -- namely, the tail end of the Gulf Stream. The abrupt termination is likely due to a sudden drop in flow from the Gulf Stream due to a massive, catastrophic disruption of the planet's climate system caused by the draining of a lake holding more water than all of today's lakes combined, after a glacial dam burst. Current data suggests that there was no Younger Dryas event in much of the southern hemisphere, and most northern hemisphere signatures are weak and offset. But indeed, it was extremely severe for the areas it affected.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Which would be a valid argument if that's what scientists were actually doing. The early 20th century warming is a combination of several factors -- first, a strong shift in the PDO, and then followed by not only a decline in PDO, but a rapid increase in global industrialization. The latter might seem like it would have just the opposite effect, but you have to remember that until the 1960s/1970s, there was very little regulations on power plant emissions. While CO2 causes warming, it has to accumulate for this to happen. Far more rapid is the cooling effects of chemicals like sulfur dioxide, which were emitted en masse until the first world started mandating scrubbers on its power plants. While SOx has a relatively short (compared to CO2) residency, so it's really just a masking of the real climate, its affects are quite powerful.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Not at all. The *reasons* for the warming involve a breakdown of the strength of dozens of different forcings factors, and then looking at them and figuring out why they're changing. I can go into more detail if you'd like.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
The Younger Dryas was severe in Central and Western Europe and the Eastern, Central and Western parts of North America.
So as someone who lives in the Western parts of North America, I'm surprised to hear it's on the tail end of the Gulf Stream.
Oh, don't forget the Huelmo/Mascardi Cold Reversal in the Southern Hemisphere started slightly before the Younger Dryas and ended at the same time.
Ack -- most of that post was supposed to go in a reply to someone else. :P Oh well.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
No, today's warming is faster.
The early 20th century warming is a combination of several factors -- first, a strong shift in the PDO, and then followed by not only a decline in PDO, but a rapid increase in global industrialization. The latter might seem like it would have just the opposite effect, but you have to remember that until the 1960s/1970s, there was very little regulations on power plant emissions. While CO2 causes warming, it has to accumulate for this to happen. Far more rapid is the cooling effects of chemicals like sulfur dioxide, which were emitted en masse until the first world started mandating scrubbers on its power plants. While SOx has a relatively short (compared to CO2) residency, so it's really just a masking of the real climate, its affects are quite powerful.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
"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.
Humans, unfortunately, are not very good at evolving - esp. in modern societies.
Biologically we are not very good at evolving...
We breed rather late in life and we spend a lot of energy on each offspring - probably necessary as humans have so few multiple births. This means there are not that many "experiments" so the opportunity for mutations, both favorable and unfavorable to current or future conditions, are limited. Effective evolution relies on many experiments.
Human's have relatively long gestation periods - this limits the number of "experiments" even further.
Then we go and make human evolution even harder with social and "moral" constraints...
The more advanced the society, generally the fewer offspring each female has (i.e., less experiments per breeding cycle - with opportunity for both "good" and "bad" outcomes) and the later in life they breed (i.e., fewer breeding cycles per unit time). These factors conspire to further reduce the number of experiments and stymie evolution yet more.
Even worse, we interfere with "natural selection" and actually actively try to eliminate it. The more "advanced" the human society, the more likely we are to keep premature babies alive, mask over various genetic weaknesses with medications and treatments. This results in increasing weakness in each generation as these who avoided the brutal effectiveness of natural selection live to generate yet another even weaker generation.
In advanced societies, we also favor technological solutions over natural selection - if the climate gets colder and colder, we would build buildings and communities with thicker and thicker walls and more and more powerful fusion reactors to keep us warm rather than strongly favoring, via survival, those in each generation those who are most adapted to the cooling environment (by tending to grow fur for example). Societies whose survival is based on heavy infrastructure will eventually be unable to build enough new infrastructure to keep ahead of the environmental changes but they will probably die off due to political mismanagement before then (the Bureau of Fusion will fail to maintain the reactors because the Secretary of Fusion, reporting to some dictator in some 30 year period, will spend all the money on babes, booze, and partying instead on reactor maintenance and the reactors will eventually all fail leaving everyone in the community dead -- albeit, the dictator's favs will be the last to go as they huddle around the last working reactor - killing anyone who tries to shoehorn in on them).
The brutal truth... The cockroaches and ants (or their direct descendants) will be happily infesting the Earth long after all human lineages have become extinct on Earth and will be almost completely unaffected by natural and human induced environmental changes that wiped out all humans millions of years earlier.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The strongest effects were in Greenland and Iceland. Lesser but still major effects were in western Europe and northeastern North America. There were still lesser ripple affects all across the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. However, the global average temperature decline during the YD is estimated at only 0.6C. It was a change in heat transport event.
I don't know about you, but I'd call having a veritable freshwater sea the size of California suddenly drain into the ocean to be a pretty radical event.
And was much slower and milder. IMHO, it's pretty hard to call it the same event.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
I really don't have time to contact the author and ask them about the correlation between their approach and the more complicated approach and what data exists on it. Which would be the logical next step. Feel free to do so yourself and post the results of the discussion.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Analogies are not straw men. GP didn't say that anyone had the beliefs he came up with. He said "if you believe what you believe, then, using the same logic, the following clearly absurd things could also be said, hence the logic of your beliefs must contain flaws."
The "data quoted at the end"? What end? It's a looping image (really annoying, by the way). And it's still cherry-picking. Individual ice cores for a single location do not a planetwide temperature average represent; that's what peer-reviewed papers on reconstructions using *all* available data are for.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
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.
Before that, we have sailing logs and logs from Arctic cities for the arrival and departure of ice
Yes, we have, and those do not support claims that arctic ice is in some sort of rapid unprecedented decline. On the contrary, we have photos of an "ice free north pole" from the last century.
we have ample evidence that the planet's temperature is dominated on the inter-annual scale by ENSO, and to a lesser extent, by other factors, but is dominated by AGW on the multi-decadal scale.
You seem to forget about the PDO, the AMO, the AO etc. Those seem to (e.g. correlate well) with multi-decadal variations.
it's in my head
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".
A recent article in Discover magazine pointed out that the rate of human evolution is actually increasing, and provided several examples. The main reason for his is that there are so many humans around. One example (from memory) was that all humans were lactose intolerant 5,000 years ago, but now only 20% are. And there was another pointing out how sperm had significantly mutated in the past 2,000 years. I know this seems to go against logic, but the author has the credentials and the proof. This was about four issues ago.
Synchronizing stop lights across the US = one less nuclear power plant
This is quite a bit of bullshit. Evolution is slow, wasteful and undirected. Technology is rapid, efficient and directed. It's stupid to let people die from the cold for generations when you can simply put on a damn coat.
Even worse, we interfere with "natural selection" and actually actively try to eliminate it. The more "advanced" the human society, the more likely we are to keep premature babies alive, mask over various genetic weaknesses with medications and treatments. This results in increasing weakness in each generation as these who avoided the brutal effectiveness of natural selection live to generate yet another even weaker generation.
You make it sound like evolution has a goal, that generations get "weaker" (whatever the hell that means) because of lack of natural selection. Generally, diversity is good (especially if you want evolution as you claim). It should also be pointed out that evolution is not dead; people don't generally choose to procreate with weak/sickly people/people with horrible deformities, giving them less chance to pass on their genes
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.
Whenever someone says, "peer review", I imagine a group of Climate Scientists sitting around a table, throwing out papers they don't agree with and accepting ones they do. The fact that you think the calving of a giant ice island many times larger than Manhattan doesn't happen in the absence of 0.5 degree of surface air warming shows what a crock of shit this whole subject is and also shows your unbelievable credulity in the face of Green Propaganda. It's just not credible to say that that this is anything other than a completely normal occurrence.
Moreover, as current temperature changes are well within the bounds of natural variability, all of these other techniques you're expounding here, which may or may not be relevant (I doubt they are relevant given that Climate Scientists can apparently re-construct the entire Northern Hemisphere temperature history from a single tree core in Siberia, using statistical "magic" and a very special tree) are nothing more than the reading of chicken's entrails followed by the promotion of said entrails in the promotion of some political cause.
In my humble opinion most if not all of Climate Science is complete and utter bollocks.
The distribution of mass is the key feature here. It's called Gravity.
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
That was an interesting graph, but from what I could read (it went past really quickly), it showed that the current "hockey stick" is nothing compared to much larger fluctuations *in a single location in central Greenland*.
What is the current viewpoint on the relationship between temperatures at a single location, and the global warming which is the issue we're talking about?
It seems to me, that global changes are much slower and can only be influenced by large events (such as producing 21 billion tonnes of CO2 per year from burning fossil fuels), whereas local changes can be influenced by smaller-scale catastrophic events (think lakes drying up, or Pompeii's local temperature changing from to 23 C to 250 C in August 79)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
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
That would be correct if the assumptions are correct, such as
1. the rate of warming is 2C/100yr from a linear base rather than a 0.12C increase from a double sinusoidal base with periods of 30 and 60 years,
2. the rate of warming will remain constant or increase for centuries rather than running into an increasing negative feedback;
3. that the marginal effect of each increment of CO2 increase is the same rather than diminishing.
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Humans, unfortunately, are not very good at evolving - esp. in modern societies.
Maybe so but Human are much better at thinking of ways to make evolution unnecessary, and getting Humans to think alike is like herding cats; some is going to figure it out, some are not.
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I guess that this must be a sign the AGW is over then?
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"A recent article in Discover magazine pointed out that the rate of human evolution is actually increasing [...] One example (from memory) was that all humans were lactose intolerant 5,000 years ago, but now only 20% are. "
If really *all* humans were lactose intolerant (which I doubt) this would be indeed evolution. If only a majority were, it's not evolution it is "mere" breed selection.
"I know this seems to go against logic"
In fact it is not. Evolution is "just" mutation accumulation. Since society allows for more mutations to be somehow "neutral" (not bad enough to drastically reduce your chances to produce offspring) it's obvious that variation accumulation (thus, evolution) must increase.
We're getting off light, Snow in Brazil, below zero Celsius in the River Plate and tropical fish frozen, 1 Million Fish Dead in Bolivian Ecological Disaster (3 Aug. 2010 - Update: The number of dead fish and other water-dependent wildlife has increased to about 6 million.) watch the video, the images transcend any language barrier. While it's been cool in North America, a -16F temp anomaly isn't as devastating in the temperate regions as the -10C anomaly in the tropics and equatorial regions.
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Right. Because the American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine is the same as Science and Nature.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
People deserve to know who they're sourcing.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
The peer-reviewed studies profoundly disagree with you.
1) One location != arctic sea ice extent.
2) Weather != climate
3) In the past several million years, the North Pole has not been exposed due to large-scale melting, although it has been exposed periodically due to fractures in the ice. It still has not, although it's getting closer every year.
According to peer-review, they are much smaller than the climate signal. For example, here's PDO vs. temperature. In recent decades, it's totally overwhelmed by the AGW signal.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Okay, do you volunteer to airlift out every last road and skyscraper out of every low lying area on the planet and relocate them up north?
Human society is based on effectively immobile assets. And even when societies without much assets have mass-migrated throughout history, the results have had profound, generally negative ripple effects (for example, the Dark Ages were brought about when pressure from the Mongols in Asia led to a Germanic influx into Europe)
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Whenever someone says, "peer review", I imagine a group of Climate Scientists sitting around a table, throwing out papers they don't agree with and accepting ones they do.
What you don't seem to understand is that it is supposed to work that way. Publication is not a level playing field for people who want to overturn scientific consensus. Nor should it be.
Suppose you are on the committee for a physics journal, and you receive a paper which purports to overturn the laws of thermodynamics. You take that paper and toss it in the trash, even if the argument and research protocol appears flawless. For decades, perpetual motion machine proponents have railed against the closed mindedness of the scientific establishment, but despite attracting non-scientific adherents, they have failed to create a source of boundless energy.
It is possible to overturn the laws of thermodynamics, but you can't do it in a single paper. You've got to nibble around the edges. You start with a paper demonstrating an unusual phenomenon that is hard to explain using the laws of thermodynamics. Then everyone hops on the bandwagon showing that it could. Then you point out the flaws in their refutation, further demonstrating there's something really peculiar going on here. You repeat this process again and again at higher levels of controversy, but at each stage you win over more people, until you are finally ready to put a stake in the heart of thermodynamics by demonstrating that the "laws" we have accepted up to now are merely the result of special cases of deeper laws of thermodynamics. Minimum time to do this: on the order of a decade. If you try to do it in one paper, that paper will be chucked in the trash.
Looked at from a rational point of view, a single paper or report that purports to overturn two centuries of scientific consensus is almost certainly wrong. Even if it is backed by statistically significant data results, those results are more likely to have happened by chance than to be real. I've seen many credible sounding ghost reports. I'd be delighted if a credible sounding report was true, but rationally it isn't even worth my time to look into the report.
I hope someday that there will be scientific proof of perpetual motion machines and ghosts, but it takes more than a single credible sounding report to establish those things.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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Isn't that all the more reason to not get your panties all up in a bunch about it? Why the eff should I care how what I do now affects the state of affairs millions of years down the road? The only constant is change.
Actually, I'm all for trying to not make things worse than they are now. If I can do something during my existence that isn't a complete pain in the ass and doesn't *hurt* the environment then great. But if it's too much inconvenience to myself all to keep the human race more comfortable for 100,000 years instead of 90,000, I just don't care.
But having a bunch of hippies telling me I'm causing doomsday scenarios just makes me want to burn a bunch of tires, waste gas idling my car pointlessly, and find other ways to piss them off.
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
Such a system isn't inherently flawed, as paradigms do take decades to overturn. The problem here however, is that this particular little backwater of Scientific misunderstanding is attempting to drive public policy. Overturning or otherwise the laws of Thermodynamics really doesn't have the same impact, so you cannot apply the same due diligence to it. At the stage you describe, it's a problem for the funding bodies and various nerdy PHd's trying hard to get tenure or to attract a research grant, not HM Government or the President of the USA and their various tax-paying agents ("the people").
Here is a common fallacy: scepticism of AGW is equivalent to being sceptical of [fill in the blank of firmly established science]. Notwithstanding philosophical arguments about whether we can ever actually know anything, Climate Science does not have a firmly established body of knowledge at its foundation. What it does have are activist Scientists, interested political movements, scaremongering media outlets and environmental pressure groups driving its consensus hypothesis, regardless of whether or not that hypothesis is rational, reasonable or even true. That is why Peer Review cannot be the back-stop for the establishment of truth in this area, because peer review, where all of your peers are "on the team", is basically censorship (in a political sense).
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.
Sure -- here's one for starters, sort of a meta-analysis of other papers. That should be a good jumping-off point for you.
False. Here's a nice starter for you.
Actually, that's a very real thing. A never-before observed phenomenon occurred called the "Arctic Dipole", which encourages melt. We've now seen it repeat on and off for the past several years. It led to the major melt earlier this year. Several papers have since shown that under AGW scenarios, that pattern becomes increasingly likely.
Huh? How does a temperature graph that starts at -0.4 and ends up at +0.4 versus a PDO graph that starts at +0.2 and ends up at about the same place support your argument? There has been dramatic warming over the PDO signal. The PDO signal matches the 1910-1945 warming, but has virtually no affect on the most recent warming.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
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
Might be.
Increased temperature cases more evaporation from the seas, leading to increased rain and snow.
As long as the temperature is low enough, an increase in the average temperature can cause more snow, which will cause thicker glaciers and harsher conditions during the winters.
If the temperature is too high for snow to fall, it might lead to heavier rains with floods and landslides as a result.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I am not even sure you are joking :D
Calling it a fallacy doesn't make it so.
I've been following the AGW literature since 1984 (my wife is a physical oceanographer and I reader her journals). I've actually watched the scientific consensus being built. AGW is not a special case, it's just like any other scientific consensus.
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It could even be that before 1962 they had no ways of detecting and measuring icebergs.
Blasphemy!
{sarcasm}
How dare you claim that we do not have exact measurements of arctic ice for the past several million years?!?!? If that were true, then we would lack the information about what constitutes "normal" and what constitutes "extreme" over spans of time not measured by puny human lifespans. If we did not have such detailed satellite imagery from before the industrial revolution and, indeed, from the warming period between the last ice age and the ice age before that one, then we would not know whether this event was unusual for such a warming period or whether it had ever happened before in the absence of significant man-made emissions. You cannot possibly be saying that, can you? You are saying things that those evil deniers have said, and we know that they are all like the Nazis, so your morals are now in question; you are clearly a nasty person; nobody should listen to you, etc.
You could get excommunicated by Pope Gore for such filthy anti-dogma ideas.
You'd better say a few Hail Manns, crawl thrice around the IPCC headquarters building on your knees, and beg Gaia for forgiveness
{/sarcasm}
What's that you say? You claim you were just speaking honestly about a lack of data? You say you prefer an honest and calm discussion over the charge of Nazi-likeness and a demand for silence? Well so do those of us who have problems with AGW claims. I'll know that there might be some serious science involved when the proponents no longer need to accuse others of being Nazis and "deniers", and no longer try to make their case by lying, rigging peer-reviews, and withholding information.
If we lack the historic data to perform an apples-to-apples comparison with modern data, then it should not be a problem to point to that fact and use it as an argument. We should be able to question claims that something is the "hottest ever" or the "coldest ever" or the largest or smallest ever (or over some range of time) when the person using the claim lacks the proof of the claim, or tries to distract from important caveats or contrary evidence. Human beings have been around for a remarkably short period of geologic time, they have been keeping records for only a fraction of that time, and they have lacked the ability to make and record observations of most of the Earth for an even smaller fraction of that small fraction of time. We have no equivalent observations from any previous global cooling or warming period to give this event any context. Is it sad? Sure, if you like the beauty of glaciers (as I do) but it might not be if you like the green meadows of a glacier-free Greenland. Is it reason to panic? No. Not if we lack the data to know whether this particular event is not a repeat of what happened during previous warming periods.
Presumably then, you also watched the AGC (cooling) consensus being built in the previous decade. When Mann decided to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (inconvenient as it is for AGW), he effectively decided to throw away public trust in the Scientific Method. The fact your wife is a physical oceanographer therefore, does not impress me in the slightest.
I don't know about you, but I'd call having a veritable freshwater sea the size of California suddenly drain into the ocean to be a pretty radical event.
Undoing a lot of mods by posting this (a couple of which were even positive to you) but really, your zealotry and myoptia are too much.
On the one hand, you believe fundamentally that anthropogenic CO2 emission is going to create an "unprecedented" (carefully ignoring Dansgaard-Oeschger events) warming, but on the other hand believe that dumping a glacial lake the size of California into the ocean and shutting down one of the world's major thermo-haline circulation systems had fairly minor local effects.
Does this dichotomy not strike you as odd to the point of untenability, believing that the Earth's climate is profoundly robust against an event like the one that spawned the Younger Dryas but incredibly fragile against anthropogenic CO2 emissions?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
>Alanis, you oughta know: she's older than you, more mature than you, and can show some restraint >in a theater ...you might want to tuck it back in.
Dude, your age is showing,
I didn't expect my wife's profession to impress you in the slightest. I thought having followed the original literature (instead of reports of what that contains) might, but apparently it does not.
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Moderators. The fact that Rei gives an impression of knowing what he talks about does not mean his posts are "informative". Just as the laughable claim that he made that the north pole hadn't been exposed in millions of years from one of his earlier posts he seemingly does not understand the questions posed and the links he offer in return discuss something completely different.
I believe he knows this himself, and the answer to the question I asked is thus clear. He's more interested in propaganda than actual science.
So;
1) The HADISST paper is not anything like what I asked for. It does however validate the "we only have one position, in multiples" claim I made - that Rei then offers up a link to himself to contradict ;)
Care must be taken when using HadISST1 for studies of observed climatic variability, particularly in some data- sparse regions, because of the limitations of the interpola- tion techniques
(We only have real ice coverage data from 1979 and onwards. Before that we have models, ship logs from specific locations, observations from specific locations etc)
2) Rei's ignorance shows through in believing that an observed phenomenon ("Arctic Dipole") starts to exist when observed. A scientist knows about his own inability to know about the state before.
3) Rei is still attacking the strawman _he created_ instead of what I actually wrote. It's somewhat funny, actually, when shouting the propaganda becomes more important than the actual subject at hand :)
Rei would post more informed comments if he made sure the contents were about science and not his own agenda.
it's in my head
Moderators: The fact that a person appeals to the moderators does not mean that they know what they are talking about at all.
WOW. That's setting a new low in selective quoting. Allow me to finish your quote for you: "... limitations of the interpolation techniques, although it has been done successfully [Sheppard and Rayner, 2002]". You cut the freaking sentence in half to remove the part you didn't like. You want to talk about an agenda? The surest sign of having an agenda is when you have to start selectively quoting scientific research materials and taking quotes out of context.
There's an entire section of the paper -- section 6 -- which goes into the validation of the dataset. It's the peak of absurdity to say that global international shipping and the navy logs of superpowers which frequently mapped out the edge of the arctic sea ice are irreelevant, and only satellites matter. Likewise, it's simply absurd to dismiss every peer-reviewed and validated proxy measure, of which there are dozens.
What part of "A never-before observed phenomenon" is hard for you to understand? The "observed" part, I assume?
Your #3 is merely an insult, not a point, so no reason to even quote it.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
If you had read the other thread, you would have noticed that the other time I posted this, it was followed by a "whoops" post noting that wrote it in response to the wrong poster. It was supposed to go here.
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
The fact I find most interesting is that you seemingly don't understand the papers you cite - yet I get the distinct impression that you actually work in the field. That, or you would really like to anyway.
The point with the quote still stands no matter where you cut it (I could just include the very next sentence to refute your rant above - "It is recommended that the noninterpolated SST data set HadSST be used alongside HadISST1 for climate monitoring and climate change detection studies") - it's still a multiple of "single locations". You might want to claim we've integrated them enough (or, to use the words from your paper - "assumed enough") to claim it doesn't matter - but then you need to find research that supports your claim. The paper you cited does not - as I pointed out. They even make that very clear.
When it comes to "never-before observed" I repeat my point. It means it hasn't been observed before. It does NOT mean it hasn't happened before. It's a bit like the "ozone hole" - we saw it when we first looked. As to whether it has existed before - we don't know.
There's a wonderful Confucius proverb that fits well here. Do you know which one I'm thinking of?
As to #3 - you really need to learn the difference between someone else's arguments and your own constructed strawmans.
it's in my head
Why are you talking about D-O events, which are generally accepted to be regional or at best hemispheric in nature and driven by changes in thermohaline circulation (like the Younger Dryas)? We're talking about *global* climate change.
For the record, the Earth as a whole was quite robust against the Younger Dryas, but the North Atlantic (briefly) wasn't. I do find it annoying that you keep trying to turn this conversation from discussion of global climate change to historical blips in North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.
Science doesn't work based on what you "feel" should be right. Science works on facts. But if you want help with the "feel" side, CO2 levels are the highest they've been in nearly 15 million years, all of this change since human industrialization.
If you need help understanding how humans could cause *that*, picture this. The Hindenburg was the largest aircraft every built, at over 800 feet long, 135 feet in diameter, and with a volume of 200,000 cubic meters. If numbers don't do the size justice, how about a picture?. Now, carbon dioxide was historically at about 280ppm. So if you filled the hindenburg with pre-industrial air, it would contain 56 cubic meters of CO2. CO2 has a molar mass of 44.010 g/mol. The molar volume of an ideal gas under STP conditions is 22.414 L/mol, or 44.6149728 mol/m^3, so the Hindenburg would contain 110 kilograms of CO2.
A gallon of gasoline, burned, releases about 8.7kg of CO2. Your average sedan has about a 12-gallon gas tank. For a full tank of gas, 12*8.7=104kg of CO2, approximately the same as in *an entire Hindenburg of pre-industrial air*.
The world consumes 30 *billion* *barrels* of oil per year. Each barrel represents about 42 gallons of gasoline (about 3 1/2 Hindenburg's worth of CO2). So every year, the CO2 emitted by our burning of oil could double the CO2 concentration of 100 *trillion* Hindenburgs. *Every year*. Yet oil produces only 45% of our planet's total CO2 emissions, and even less of it's total AGW load. Let's be generous and only call the total 200 trillion Hindenburgs per year.
Earth's surface area is 5.10072e14 m^2. The Hindenburg takes up an area of about 108,000 square meters when stacked side by side, end to end. Hence you could stack about 4.7 trillion Hindenburgs side to side, end to end across the entire surface of the planet. To put our emissions another way, then, a mere five years of emissions could *more than double* the CO2 concentrations in Hindenburg airships stacked side to side, end to end, across the entire surface of the planet.
Does that help with the "feel" side of things? So we can get back to the "facts" side of things?
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
Of course it doesn't. As far as I can see there's no way of telling which papers in the literature contain genuine results and which contain fake results (statistical "tricks"). After all, I'm sure a huge weight of them must be fake, given that the advantage in the scramble for grant funding is given to those papers with the phrase, "because of man-made Global Warming" in them. It's ironic though, that the papers most trustworthy in terms of the integrity of the researchers are probably the early papers, but their conclusions are no more trustworthy than any others purely because of the immaturity of the basis in knowledge from which they're constructed. The problem I have here is personal: I am no longer able to read any Scientific paper without raising an eye-brow. Actually this is a rather healthy intellectual disposition to have. It's just a shame that it isn't a sentiment shared more widely in the Climate Studies community.
you should be able to dispatch with his pathetic claims in a matter seconds
No way. That takes decades of studies.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
Sure. You're saying you've got a conduit to the Truth that's more direct than peer review. You wouldn't be the first. In fact, it's obvious that such conduits exist, for reasons that'll I'll make clear in a moment. You also seem to think your conduit is free from mess of human frailty. That I'm more doubtful of.
What you haven't shown is any understanding of the sociological and epistemological operation of peer review. Peer review is not supposed to be an optimal path to the Truth for an individual. That's the function of reason. Peer review exists because different people arrive at different opinions through what appears to them as purely rational means. Peer review exists to give dissent a role in the formation of scientific consensus. It is neither so potentially perfect as individual reason, nor as automatically unreasonable as putting the issue to a vote.
There are always points about the scientific consensus that can be argued. If they could not be argued, it would not be science. At any given time, any scientist has a number of differences with scientific consensus, and pursuing those differences is his job.
If you think you know better, then you should publish. It's all very well well to feel superior, it's another thing to put your opinions to the test in front of people who are competent to critique them. If you disagree with the scientific consensus, it's going to be hard work, but you will prevail if you know what you are talking about.
Unfortunately the system discriminates against people who want to change scientific consensus but don't have the patience to make their case against a hostile and well informed audience.
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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"
On the contrary, what I'm attempting to refute is the idea that saying we have "x number of peer reviewed papers" is an absolute indication that the fact of the matter has been established. An excellent example to give is that of Helicobacter pylori, the main cause of stomach ulcers. There were x number of peer reviewed papers (probably thousands) about the dietary causes of stomach ulcers, were there not? Ultimately it was all bollocks.
That would be a great idea in theory, but in practice the critique is not a very fair minded one. We promise our chums on the team a friendly review and won't try to reproduce their results with different methods (the implication being that the methods are correct, even when authorities on the techniques [Wegman, for example] show them to be erroneous). We promise to reject those that disagree with us - it's a war out there (of political ideas) and the contrarians can't be allowed to gain any traction with their ideas. The world is about to go up in smoke, so the ends justify the means. The ends being to publish, the means being fakery, fraud, obfuscation, censorship and law breaking (deletion of information under FOI). None of this is the science I grew up with. Perhaps your experience has been different.
True, but you've got it the wrong way around. Those promoting the fraud don't want to share a platform with critics. Indeed they are actively discouraged from doing so by their peers (certain individuals, Judith Curry for example, notwithstanding); they don't want to give contrary views any legitimacy. Frankly I'm touched by your faith in the Scientists, but I do fear you're naivety as to motives in this case is a somewhat unfortunate blot on your intellect.
speaking of "proxy data", why not place a data centre on this island?
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.