Greenland Ice Sheet Melts At Record Rate In 2010

RedEaredSlider writes "A study using satellite and ground-based data is showing the Greenland ice sheets are setting a record for the areas exposed to melting and the rate at which they are doing so. NASA says 2010 was a record warm year, and temperatures in the Arctic were a good 3 degrees C over normal."

Comments

Re:The meaning of random

[slim]

You seem to have trouble understanding the word "expect".

Not really. If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once, but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.

The parent is questioning whether 30 years is long enough for climate trends to be perceptible.

(I'm not a AGW denier myself -- I don't know enough about it to think I know better than the vast majority of climate scientists)

Re:The meaning of random

[tragedy]

A very good point. For example, just because a mountain that has been around for millions of years disappears doesn't mean that we caused it. Mountaintop removal mining means, however, that these days it's more likely than not.

It seems to me that anthropogenic climate change deniers always start with "you can't prove climate is changing" then when you do, they fall back on "you can't prove that humans are causing it" and finally on "it'll be a good thing anyway with the better weather up North, etc.". Then they reset back to the first position any time new evidence comes out. It seems to me to be mostly hiding their heads in the sand and denying the possibility that humans could affect the environment in any way, all of human history to the contrary. Frankly, there's no way all of the things we're releasing into the atmosphere the soil and the water can't have an effect. Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans. We are definitely having an effect with all the pollution we're spewing out. The environment may have massive reserves, but it's not operating on a scale that much greater than us and we can overwhelm those reserves. The evidence is overwhelming. The environment, and probably even the human race will survive, of course, but in the same way it always does: with massive die-offs and then recovery afterwards. That is not desirable from point of view of the human race or individual humans.

Re:The meaning of random

[vadim_t]

There are places in Europe below sea level. Dams and dikes are a practical solution. Building them around our coasts would create jobs. I never understood this whole "OMG we'll flood the coasts" screaming. If this is an issue then start lobbying Washington for funds to build dams.

That worked really awesomely in New Orleans.

And of course it's an entirely free proposition, that's dirt cheap, doesn't require reengineering ports, closing beaches with the resulting loss of tourism or anything like that. The US fortunately has a smoothly running system as shown by the exemplary mantenance records of the New Orleans levees.

And BTW, we did not have a problem resettling all the people from New Orleans on very short notice. Resettling the coasts would take years and is entirely doable on that time scale.
The main questions are whether we expect sea levels to continue rising, the time scale and the cheapest way to deal with it.

Yes, indeed. Things went very smoothly.

It's very funny that you use the very thing I'd use to explain why it'd be a monumental mess to try to argue everything would be fine.

Re:The meaning of random

[A beautiful mind]

There is no empirical data showing that Co2 caused an increase in 20th century temperature. There is a weak correlation between Co2 and temperature in the 20th century. There is a stronger correlation between the PDO and solar activity. But you will ignore the latter, because the former suits your political opinions better.

We measured the CO2 increase over the past century and we can calculate based on simple physics that adding a given amount of CO2 into the atmosphere increases global temperatures by a given amount. There is no conceivable way that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere wouldn't have a warming effect on global temperature, that's a physical impossibility.

Solar activity varied something like 0.1% in the past 50 years. Here is a graph where CO2, solar activity and temperature are all on a same graph. The CO2 correlation is a lot stronger.