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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."
You seem to have trouble understanding the word "expect".
How can you be so sure that there is little we can do to stop it? The fact that we can't prove that we're responsible for global warming doesn't prove that we're not. And if you do a proper risk assessment, like this guy does in his series of videos that are very much worth viewing despite his silly hats, you'll find that the smart thing to do is to try and do something about it.
Your line of thought sounds like "the Earth is going to hell but we might not be responsible so let's just see where this goes". Consider the possibility that we are responsible, and/or (they don't even have to be connected) the possibility that we can do something about it.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
It's all very good to observe this process but since there is little we can do to stop it...
I think I see your problem.
Here's the facts:
CO2 and methane are gasses that prevent thermal energy from escaping into space
The CO2 and methane levels have been rising
Human activity generates CO2 and methane
Thus, there's nothing we can do about it?
Conversely, just because things have been going on for millions of years, doesn't mean we can't screw things up much faster. Our ability to do so became much larger in modern times.
The earth, or life in a general sense continuing to exist is pretty much a given unless we manage to blow it up into space dust, DBZ style. But nobody is worrying about that, AFAIK.
What worries me is that I want myself, my children if I ever have any, familiy, friends, their decendants and so on to be able to live and do so reasonably comfortably. Yeah, humanity in general can adapt and survive events like the flooding of all coastal cities even. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a big deal. No, it'd be a huge horrible mess with world-wide consequences, so I really hope we don't have to see it happen.
Mod parent up - the rest of the paragraph that the GP's quote was lifted from shows a very acceptable understanding of what random means. The GP is just looking for some excuse to discredit scientists who mention anything even peripherally related to global warming.
People don't realize that the Earth is been around for millions of years
Believe it or not, people actually do realize this. They also realize that for many of those millions of years the climate in areas we live in now was not nearly as habitable.
and just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it.
That's really a completely separate question. The first question is: "Is the climate changing?" If the answer to that is -yes-, then obviously we want to know what is it going to be like. If its going to be less habitable than it is now, then we want to know whether there are changes we can make to change the outcome to something we would like more.
Really, the question of what the cause is largely irrelevant except possibly as a subtext to what changes we might want to make if its heading in a direction we don't like.
Bottom line, if the earth enters another ice age, wipes most of us out, and we could have prevented it somehow but didn't because some idiot convinced us "It was a natural cycle"... that is not a "win". In other words, who exactly is going to be any happier getting wiped out by an ice age that occurs naturally vs one that we caused. Not me. Wiped out is wiped out. Arguing who's fault it is really isn't that important.
Because discrediting AGW isn't politically motivated? You know, I always find it funny when people believe that there is more political motivation to push AGW than to discredit it, as if the large number of filthy rich corporations who would lose from green measures had neither the motivation nor the means to buy scientists and politicians to slow down and muddle the debate. Yet, somehow, Al Gore and his following of tree-loving hippies can do it?
Climate change wasn't political until it got recognized and lumped in with other environmental issues by people with vested interests, such as the oil industry, who are harmed by attempts to rein in practices that harm the environment. What do you suppose is the vested interest that would cause someone to fraudulently support the idea that global warming is a problem?
What the fuck is this "Murphy's Law of Research"? I'll tell you what people do to support their assertions, they invent semi-familiar sounding axioms.
The whole point of AGM is that the climactic changes we're seeing are not part of a normal cycle. And what is it that you suggest, that we stop gathering data because the data will point towards a specific theory? That's the whole fucking point. You gather data, and the more data you gather, the clearer the picture becomes, for the theory or against it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Everything depends on the timescale. For the past 2,000 years that we started settling places as a civilization, we're reaching record warmth. It doesn't matter what happened 1-500M years ago, as those conditions existed when the human race didn't. There is a reason why sea to land transition fossil hunters are going to Northern Canada for fossils: about 365M years ago that area was tropical.
The speed of change that's happening is staggering, it's at least a hundred times faster than the speed of natural, geological changes. The difference between our current changes to the composition of the atmosphere and thus the planet's surface temperature and the geological changes is like the difference between bumping into someone and running that person over at over 100MPH.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
This isn't anti-abortion vs pro-choice - this is "babies come from storks" vs "babies come from sex", and the story with the storks keeps on winning because people don't want to face the fact that if you have a lot of unprotected sex, you're going to end up with babies.