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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".
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)
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.
What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers. Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers - especially over such a small sample size. It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.
Of course it's possible -- that's called "the null hypothesis." The rather more interesting question is, "how likely is it?"
If I roll "6" ten times straight, the dice might not be loaded. After all, the odds of doing so (allowing the first time free, since it had to be something) are one in a mere 6^9 -- one in ten million. One in ten million events happen all the time (especially on Star Trek) and if you're a betting man by all means put your money on them and I'll match you on the other side.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You know from ice, fossil and biological records.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
If only that were true. The amount we globally spend on defense is probably much, much more, and may even actually be on the order of magnitude required to feed and clothe Africa. Irrespective of global warming, our prosperity is completely based on cheap energy, so it's obviously prudent to look for alternative sources for it. Coincidentally, this happens to also be the issue at the heart of the global warming problem. A plan to simply extract and burn oil until it runs out isn't a sustainable plan by any stretch, whether or not you care about global warming.
As others have pointed out, rising based on what? How do you know what the co2 and methane levels were 1000 years ago? 2000 years ago? 100,000 years ago?
Ice cores how do they work?
When we can't predict the weather accurately three hours from now, how exactly am I supposed to believe they can tell me precisely what effect we're having on the environment?
When you don't know the difference between weather and climate, how do you know what you're talking about?
carbon gases, humans adding up to it, will make everything worse. its one thing to have to build huge dams and sets in order to save london, netherlands etc from sinking, and its another to have the sea levels rise higher than we can prevent with building dams or sets, due to exacerbating the situation through our pollution.
i assure you, those who are opposing the measures will not be there, to spend money to save anything, when the time comes. its better to ignore them entirely now, rather than having to blame them and not being able to find them anywhere when the clock hits the hour.
Read radical news here
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?
The bigger mistake by GP is to not understand the word "distributed" in statistics. It doesn't mean "how far apart" like in common usage. If you deny climate change, you believe there is equal probability for each year to be picked as an outlier year, a uniform distribution (or as he says it, evenly distributed).
Given the values one can calculate a confidence level that it is NOT evenly distributed. Presumably that's what the researcher did, I've never known journalists to publish confidence levels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I completely agree with you. If we did not have climate models, guessing that an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correlates with rising temperature would be just a guess and would not show causation. It's a good thing we've had a climate model for over 100 years that tells up to expect rising temperatures as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases.
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
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?
Yeah; that sounds about right. We're pretty good at raiding and using resources, but in general we don't give a damn about the waste products of our depredations. Much like most other species, except that we have the intelligence to understand what we're doing. But we don't have the intelligence (or social capabilities) to organize the solutions to the problems that we cause.
History is full of examples of this sort of failures. Thus, historians and archaeologists tell us that the "Fertile Crescent" in the Middle East was a major agricultural land 3000 years ago. The people who built the irrigation systems back then understood how salinification worked. They knew that you have to slightly over-water the land to prevent salt buildups. But in the short term, it was more profitable to maximize the land that was irrigated by using the minimum water required by the crops. The result is the devastated, barren landscape that we see over most of that area now. It was done knowingly, and the humans who did it couldn't organize to stop the process (though they could organize to engage in major wars).
Back in the 1970s and 80s, some researchers did an interesting experiment in that area: They leased a few dozen 2-3 square km plots scattered around the landscape, built goat-proof fences around them, and sat back to watch what happened. A year later, they reported that all these small protected areas were covered with grasses and other herbaceous plants. They suggested that if the grazing animals could be kept penned up for a year, there would be no more deserts in southwest Asia. Did the governments jump on this and eradicate their deserts? You all know the answer to that; you can see it every day in news photos from the area. There's no way humans will ever organize to do that, even when they know the story. (Also, most of the literature is in French, which limits its availability to most of us. ;-)
More recently (and close to home here in the US), back in the 1990s the Corps of Engineers did a series of studies on the levee system in the Mississippi delta. They also did a major simulation (google for "Hurricane Pam") of the effect of a major hurricane on New Orleans. Their reports listed all the points of failure that in fact failed when Katrina hit. Their requests for funding to repair and reinforce the levees were turned down by Congress. Then Katrina hit, and people pretended it was an Act of God. But in fact, they knew in great detail exactly what would happen, and it did happen. They couldn't organize to do what was easily within our abilities to prevent the disaster that they knew was coming.
This is human nature. Oil, coal, and natural gas are resources that we can organize to exploit. The side effects of burning all those hydrocarbons is something that we can't organize to control, even when we understand it. All we an do is debate the issue until the disaster is upon us. And, as in the above examples, it'll be too late then to do what we could have done to prevent what we knew was coming.
Actually, in the salinification/desertification example, it's not too late. It can be done any time, and on any scale from a few square km up. But we can't and won't do it on a large scale. Research proceeds on a small scale. Google for "bocage" plus other agriculture-related terms. The information is there, but it's mostly academic, with no local governments getting involved in solving the problem. And note the two meanings of that word "academic", which explains a lot about our attitude toward big problems that we can't organize to solve.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Most of them have big money invested in non renewable rescources -- some not very liquid (like a stock you can just sell in milliseconds) - they own things you can't sell quick and easy, especially if at that point no one else wants them much either, so they see a direct threat in this whole idea, and to them, it's a real threat and real money at stake. And for them, buying a credible scientist amounts to less than lunch money or a trip on the corprate jet. Sad, but.
So much so, that it costs less to buy off a decent (even Nobel prize level) scientist to say what they want said, right out in public. I have found it very entertaining to "follow the money" and it's actually kind of disgusting how cheap it is to buy a fake "controversy" where none exists among scientists not paid by these guys and/or coal/oil firms.
In fact, virtually 100% of all the deniers can be traced back to payment from one or more such entities. They've not bothered covering their tracks all that well, probably because they think the "greenies" don't include any forensic accountants. Wrong, but....
These guys are running scared, and putting money into people whose mouths say what they want said.... Look for yourselves -- it's not that hard to trace funding on some study. It's only a little harder to trace money given previously to get some one to say something.
If you want some guys easy to find out, and to see the very hotbed of this kind of scam, look at Investors Business Daily -- you'll want to puke of course, but they are more "out there" than any other source of this, and the least clever about who they quote and covering their tracks. Note, it's an expensive (and otherwise good info source) paper for investors -- many hundreds of bucks a year. I stopped my sub to them because the editorials on this and other issues made me want to barf too often.
Another way to get at the truth is things like NASA data as mentioned, and just looking at what was thought before this all became so politicized and conflictinated. There really wasn't much controversy then -- when it was "safe" to ignore by the big boys in carbon generation. And it should be obvious to most we are now, finally, doing things at a large enough scale to matter -- look at pictures of the earth from space at night...
There are nice long data series on ppm of CO2 in the air as measured in HI for example. We've tripled it. If we do so again, warming won't matter -- we'll simply suffocate - we'll be at the level where humans can't get rid of their internally generated CO2 quick enough to not pass out. We could hope for some limited cooling from a volcano, or some sort of nuclear winter as far as warming goes, but that sets a pretty hard limit.
And lets face it -- the last time all this carbon was in the air -- we had the dinosaur climate (and our midwest was under water). There's no particular reason to disbelieve that if we put things back that way, we'd have the same climate as then, is there?
Humans can adapt and move, at some cost and travail. But how about trees? We're already seeing issues there and that's just one other form of life.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Someone like me can reasonably propose that the previous 50 years of warming mean nothing since the next 50 will be cooling.
Since you mentioned that you reasonably propose this prediction, I must ask you to explain your reasoning. What makes you believe the next 50 years will be cooling? What are the mechanisms? Please explain your model - I am genuinely interested in hearing about it.
We'll get access to more viking camps that are buried by ice and snow
The viking camps are near the coast, and they haven't been buried by ice and snow.
Here's a famous settlement. Note how it's still green.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=61.152222,-45.515&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=61.152222,-45.515
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.
All well and good, but what about land? Is there enough of it that's suitable for building new houses? That's presuming that the people who vacate the flooded cities are going to live somewhere, but perhaps you have other plans for them.
Ad hominem.
It's the logistic curve, not logistics.
The fact that it may eventually peter out due to constraints at some future time (like lots of other processes from fork bombs to rabbit populations) has nothing to do with what it's doing now. He never claimed it would be exponential for ever and you know it. What a ridiculous strawman.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."