UN Climate Report Fails To Capture Arctic Ice: MIT

An anonymous reader writes "The United Nations' most recent global climate report 'fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends,' says a new research from MIT. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100. However, the Arctic sea ice may be thinning four times faster than predicted, according to Pierre Rampal and his research team of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)."

Comments

Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

And trolls will trot out some generic stereotype strawman, then post as Anonymous Coward. /irony noted

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[mean pun]

Yeah, that's a really accurate translation of the scientific statement. Don't give up your day job.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[NFN_NLN]

hmm, well let's look at this one. It we could be losing it at x rate, or 4x! Translation: we don't have any frapping clue. Yeah, that's what we want to base worldwide economic policy on.

4x factorial, that's insane. On the bright side, Canada will finally gain an ice free northwest passage.

Looks like Sir John Franklin jumped the gun by 200 years. Lead is a helluva drug.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

We do know that it's melting, and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I think it makes sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

To make an analogy, a business may go bankrupt in one year or four years. Do they not have any clue what to do, or is it clear that they need to cut costs or increase revenues to stay in business? In life, we can't wait until we have perfect information before we act, otherwise we'd never act.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Mashiki]

That *is* the accurate translation of the scientific statement into politics, and the political agenda that governments are basing things on. In other words, people with an agenda who want to drive you into the dirt.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[m1ndcrash]

Seems that you have many arguments to counter...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sperbels]

We do know that it's melting, and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I think it makes sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

Why? Because some cities may slowly flood? You're going to have to do a lot better than that if you want to convince the entire world that they can't burn coal and oil.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[TemperedAlchemist]

You may want to educate yourself before posting claims.

1) It's still called global warming. Always has. The media calls it "climate change", even though properly it's global warming.
2) Ozone is O3, which exists as a gas in our atmosphere. A spacecraft can no more "puncture" ozone than you can puncture the air around you with your fists.
3) We first started recording global temperature change in the mid-20th century.
4) No reputable scientific paper or journal has predicted a "doomsday", the media make those claims.
5) CO2 is not the only "greenhouse" gas, or even the most important.
6) There is cause for concern, but no cause for "judgment day" or "doomsday".

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[camperslo]

Even though the waves from the tsunami following the recent 9.0 Japan earthquake were not very large when hitting Antarctica, about 50 square miles of ice broke off.
Some of the many factors are not linear, so a simple loss multiplier or even one based on monotonically increasing loss will have limited accuracy. That's no excuse for denial, as what's happening is quite clear.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=51665&src=eorss-nh

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

Trends and quantitative coefficients are not the same thing. In this case the trend matters for policy makers, the coefficients do too, but not nearly so much.

Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate? Even if we have the quantized result, say on warming or drunk driving or anything else that doesn't really tell us what policy should be unless you want to say it should be 0. What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff. For drunk driving you accept a certain degree of impairment as so minimal as to not really be important, though if we drove cars that went 1000Km/h we'd have a different tolerance level. For global warming we have to accept some amount of warming, because there has already been some, and we're not, in any reasonable time frame going to correct that. So the question is 'how much worse do we let it get, and, on a best guess, how much is it going to cost us'? To with that we wonder 'at what point can we not do any more'? With the ozone layer 160 of the 200 or so countries in the world banned the most serious damaging chemicals about 15 years ago. So there is still damage to the ozone layer happening, and it is likely that it won't be completely repaired until well into the 22nd century. We've certainly taken, in that case, the largest most relevant steps, and we'll be another decade or two before we really know if it was enough, or if we need to do more, but at least we've stopped the, majority of the ongoing damage.

Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more. None of these make for good policy problems, especially when dealing with the americans. The kyoto protocols aim for a CO2 reduction from 1990 levels are basically arbitrary, it's a starting point of a policy, not a quantified analysis of what's required. Because there is no scientific requirement, it's a matter of what cost/benefit we are willing to trade. But it's also a collective, shared responsibility, one that isn't going to be borne equally. Poor countries are poor for a lot of reasons, but the rest of us got rich polluting the planet, and now we're saying they can't become rich unless the do it a different way, that's not fair to them, but it's not fair to the rich world to demand we make all the cuts and poor countries can pollute like crazy negating anything we do.

Either way. Being off on the the exact value of a coefficient is not all that important to the policy problem. We're not doing enough. It's a matter of degree of how much we're not doing. The only thing to do is to try and minimize further warming, and iterate as time goes on.

Since this is a tech board, I'll put it in CS terms. We, in CS, regularly analyze algorithms in 'big O' notation, n^2, n^3 etc. It's a rare, specialized skill to put actual coefficients in front of each term, and most of the time, big O notation gets the job done (and if you really need them it's easier to measure them than calculate them). Policy based around science is mostly worried about the big O notation, because once we start changing policies, whether thats about the ozone layer, sulfur in the air, greenhouse gases or whatever, all the previous detailed assessments get thrown out, and you start looking for the new trend.

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when i

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Doc Ruby]

Evidently you may not.

Some people don't call it "global warming", because idiots like you couldn't stop saying that extreme cold in Winter somehow proved it wrong, even when the overall average of the globe is indeed warming.

You can't spell "holes". And there were, and still are, ozone holes. Only idiots like you said spacecraft "punctured" the atmosphere, though spacecraft exhaust does destroy atmospheric ozone and contributed to the holes. But it was spraycan propellant and coolant CFCs that mainly destroyed the ozone. Until we banned them and let them regenerate. Now they're a lot better. Idiots like you denied they existed, and now deny they ever existed, or that we could affect them by either exhausting CFCs or banning them. Just like idiots like you now say we can't affect the climate by industrial exhaust. But in fact the recent experience with ozone holes shows we do.

Idiots like you are the ones constantly believing religious nuts proclaiming constantly changing doomsday dates.

You might add that BS about volcanoes, but it's just another lie created by polluter think tanks for idiots like you to repeat.

So no, you may not. In future, do not.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Doc Ruby]

"Translated into politics" = LIE

The political agenda that cites science of climate change does not have an agenda of driving you into the dirt. The political agenda is to stop polluters from driving us into the dirt.

The political agenda that attacks climate change science is the one that forces the original science to report only the most optimistic projections, based on only the most undeniable evidence. When new science shows that there's a higher probability of a worse projection, that does indeed undermine the credibility of the earlier, pressured science. The proper conclusion is not to ignore the worse projection, but to expect that the accurate projection is even worse still, since the better science is only getting started rolling back the suppression.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

because those cities also happen to be the main hubs of the global financial system? It's no accident they are also major seaborne shipping ports.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, well let's look at this one. It we could be losing it at x rate, or 4x! Translation: we don't have any frapping clue. Yeah, that's what we want to base worldwide economic policy on.

Or maybe you should RTFS a little closer. Four years ago they concluded we were losing it at x rate, and this more recent MIT research claims we're losing it at 4x rate. If you RTFA the researchers say this is because the IPCC looked primarily at temperature change and underestimated the effect mechanical forces such as drift have on thinning.

Look, you can bury your head in the sand all you want, but don't act surprised when some of us take it more seriously that Arctic ice has shrunk by a third in the past 30 years and that it hit a new low in July.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[m1ndcrash]

I totally deem this as a huge media story non the less, and before you tell somebody to go educate themselves you should broaden your horizons. 1) You're right the media has changed the name ever since the "climate-gate". 2) Ozone-wholes or Ozone depletion occurred or so we thought because spaceship had certain chemicals in the fuel they used. You should read about Ozone layer depletion myths. 3) Precisely my point. This mama (Earth) has been here for so long that 50 years of records isn't enough to even make assumptions. Moreover, aside from temperature logs there are history books and various literature that indicate the weather difference. 4) Yet again media being media. 5) Volcano erupts more than just CO2. 6) It is presented as such.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Baloroth]

In this case, even that much won't happen. It's sea ice, melting won't affect the ocean levels one bit. Floating objects displace water equal to the volume of an equivalent weight of water. Since the ice is water, when it melts the net displacement won't go up. The effects of global warming may be bad, but this will not cause flooding.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[m1ndcrash]

For one, I do not degrade to insults when having arguments. Read my comment above.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[thomasw_lrd]

Don't forget we can't have nuclear power either. Guess we should dam all the rivers in the world for electrical power. Oh wait, that would destroy eco systems too. Well guess we can ride bikes, and use fires to heat our houses. Although, both of those release carbon into the air, also.

Hhhmmm, I'm stumped. How do we power the world, and save it at the same time. I'm all for saving the world, but we need some serious research into alternative fuels.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

We do know that it's melting

And has been doing so for the past 12-14,000 years.

and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Or whatever causes climate shifts when human activity wasn't around to be blamed.

To make an analogy, a business may go bankrupt in one year or four years. Do they not have any clue what to do, or is it clear that they need to cut costs or increase revenues to stay in business?

In that situation, it'd probably be best if they entered bankruptcy court now since they're in the end game.

In life, we can't wait until we have perfect information before we act, otherwise we'd never act.

We can't have perfect information, but we can have better. It's an obvious strategy to wait till we have better information. There is a real choice here.

So let's look at the situation. We have some evidence that there's global warming, some connection with greenhouse gas emissions by humans, and models with quality that varies from pretty good (radiative models) to extremely poor (the economic factors in climate estimates a century from now). We have significant institutional biases (particularly, funding, peer pressure, and the environmentalism ideology). We have huge amount of money and political power in play (environmental government agencies, for example, can expand their power considerably). And we have a remarkable lack of urgency.

That says to me "wait". We'll get better data and if things get worse, it'll be rather slowly. It'll also give us time to weed out alternate explanations for the perceived global warming such as changes in solar activity, orbital configuration, or other non-anthropogenic possibilities.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

And other anonymous cowards will post complaints about the first person who posted anonymously.

Out of Jealousy perhaps.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when it's clearly doing harm, it's a matter of degree.

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more.

So what if some people have to "do more"? Let's keep in mind that the proposed fix, reverting to 1990s levels or less, also forces some people to "do more" than other people. We also need to keep in mind that there's no mechanism in place that can keep those who would suffer under a climate control regime from complying. Currently, the future CO2 producers will be the US and the bigger emerging countries such as China and India. None of them have shown the inclination to damage their economies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. And they all have sufficient power to avoid being forced to accept a climate deal that is detrimental to their interests.

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move, particularly on the time scales that global warming acts. For example, there's enough people moving in the US that effectively the entire population moves every six or so years.

Most buildings have a life of around 20-50 years. So any problem that's on a longer time scale mostly will involve real estate that hasn't yet been built.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[kenh]

To paraphrase Sigmond Freud - "Sometines an exclaimation mark is just an exclamation mark!"

Seriously, factorial? ;^)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[kenh]

Al "Man-Bear-Pig" Gore would disagree with your contention most vehemently, you holocaust-denying, flat-earth Luddite!

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jawnn]

As is typical for climate change deniers, you have left out a key factor in your "the climate is always changing" screed.
The correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and warmer climates is well established. And there is reason to debate which is the cause and which is the effect. What you have so conveniently omitted from your argument however, is that, as near as we can tell the level of CO2 has never risen as quickly as it has for the last few decades. Not even close. Given that empirical evidence and it's temporal proximity to our CO2 producing activities, only a fool or someone with an agenda would ignore the correlation.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

So it's just an amazing coincidence that we'll have ice-free summers in the Arctic 200 years after we started burning fossil fuels en masse?

We have excellent "undeniable" evidence of global warming. We have over 100 years of climatology that tell us that the carbon sensitivity is probably between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, starting with Arrhenius and continuing to the latest estimations. We have agreed that we want to keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius. The only way we can achieve this goal is to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately, given the information we presently have. To me, that says "Act now!"

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[517714]

Arctic ice floats - when it melts, it does not result in a rise in water level. If that's the best argument you have, few will see a reason to take any action you might suggest.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from your gross misunderstanding of the causes of the ozone layer depletion, the regulation of CFC usage is the perfect example of how policy can prevent a global environmental disaster. We did something, and it helped. The occasional moron showing up to argue that there was never a problem in the first place is something we have to live with, due to the action not being too late.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

The political agenda that cites science of climate change does not have an agenda of driving you into the dirt. The political agenda is to stop polluters from driving us into the dirt.

This is quite true. It's very hard to determine intent. They could intend to "you into the dirt" or it might just be a convenient, evolutionary-like outcome of their behaviors. That's why I look at outcome not intent.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not the flooding (which is important, anyway) -- it's the temperature rise which might make life unbearable -- literally i.e. people could die, but animals most certainly will... we may find another specias is vital to our survival, just like bees.

I saw a documentary stating, from observations of the past, that high temperatures may be triggered by a certain threshold, below which things are manageable and above which the heat increases a lot faster than we can adapt to it.

Knowledge to fight these phenomena must be made inexpensive for all; we must make cheap, even lucrative, to fight global warming... and it must be made very expensive to produce thermal pollution.

We can improve this spaceship, let this be our first step into terraforming Earth into a paradise.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

What harm exactly does dumping less shit into the atmosphere do? There are lots of ways to accomplish that, all of which come with their own trade offs of course. Nuclear is well, nuclear, solar and wind have their own complications (mostly about resources and space uses). Burning coal and oil isn't exactly good for the atmosphere. Less CO2 in the atmosphere is good.

The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps. 15% before 1990 levels is both arbitrary and silly. That equates to some actual year (probably 1987 or something), so even the target is phrased in a goofy way. And we can't even do that. Therein lies the problem. The burden on people are going to follow the protocol and make cuts (mostly europeans) is going to be harder, and more to the point if we need to cut X from the atmosphere and only europe is going to cut anything they have to not only cut X, but X+Y, where Y is whetever everyone else is adding to the problem. And yes, no one is obliged to accept anything. International agreements rely on everyone who agrees to actually do it. That's my point of where policy starts to fall apart. Peace treaties require everyone agrees, war requires only one party to agree to it. Such is the way of international agreements. You can try all you want to impose your will on others, and there are non violent ways to accomplish that, but in the end yes, if china doesn't agree to go along with it, either the rest of us cut more to cope, try and impose our will on them (trade sanctions) or we do nothing and cope with the consequences. Of course if no one goes along with it china is unlikely to try and solve this problem on their own, not that they could if they wanted to.

But yes, we must disagree on what to do about it. If you think displacing millions of people, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep more people from having to move, seriously disrupting food production around the world and so on are worthwhile tradeoffs so you can keep using coal fired generators rather than uranium, thorium, solar, or wind, then all that remains is disagreement.

Most buildings have life spans several multiples if not orders of magnitude longer than you have suggested. That that may not be good policy, or good for the buildings and people inhabiting them, but your assertion is factually incorrect. Lots of post WW2 housing was not built to last, that's true, but that is a fraction of the total buildings built in the world.

Land is not that scare is an interesting assertion. I certainly disagree with it on two levels. First, not all land is useful. There's lots of empty land in the middle of the sahara, that doesn't help anyone. That goes to the first problem which is that *usable* land is becoming scarce, and moreso if we want to preserve any remnants of natural habitats for other creatures. Secondly, land, overall, in a lot of places *is* scarce, and, importantly, those are the most populated places, and many of them are poor and those people aren't going to be able to move to places with space (least of all places with usable space). Where are we going to move a few hundred million southeast asians, or chinese or japanese? How about europeans? They aren't exactly welcome in africa for example, and the reason the europeans went rampaging around the world is they didn't have enough space for themselves in europe. And there were a lot less people in europe 150 years ago than there are today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_(based_on_food_growing_capacity) has an illustrative chart. What you are suggesting is sacrificing habitable, food growing areas, to compact people into less space, and hope more of it becomes arable. Not to mention the enormous cost of packing up and moving people and all of the infrastructure t

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

As is typical for climate change deniers, you have left out a key factor in your "the climate is always changing" screed.

The correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and warmer climates is well established. And there is reason to debate which is the cause and which is the effect. What you have so conveniently omitted from your argument however, is that, as near as we can tell the level of CO2 has never risen as quickly as it has for the last few decades. Not even close. Given that empirical evidence and it's temporal proximity to our CO2 producing activities, only a fool or someone with an agenda would ignore the correlation.

Yes there is correlation, CO2 TRAILS not leads temperature increases!

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[BlueParrot]

Actually it is suspected to have increased at similar rates before (as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity messing up the permafrost ), and when it happened last time the majority of species alive on earth went extinct. Not the kinda thing you want to cause to happen if you can avoid it ...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[MightyMartian]

How about "we're going to run out of it, and it's value in materials technology and agriculture will soon far exceed sticking it in your SUV, you shortsighted fucktard."

Does that seem a good reason to you, or do you have some other magic source of complex long-chain hydrocarbons you're not telling anybody about it?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

How many times do you blinkered warmists need to have it spelled out to you. Correlation != causation.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[blind monkey 3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole#The_ozone_hole_and_its_causes

The hole in the ozone layer was attributed to the use of Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons (CFCs) in aerosols. We have stopped using CFCs and the hole has stabilised (which, to me, indicates that there may have been a link) but it is predicted to take till 2050 for it to be repaired. It is an interesting article, please have a read - for you, I especially recommend the misconceptions and consequences parts.

Action is not necessarily a sign of panic.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[BergZ]

"There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity." (Source)

Between TemperedAlchemist, Doc Ruby and I: We've completely demolished every argument you've made.
It is clear to everyone that you are badly misinformed on the topic of the scientific theory of Global Climate Change.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

Citation required....
When the dinosaurs ruled the planet, temperatures were quite significantly higher than they are now, and the ecosphere supported an abundance of highly successful flora and fauna.
How about on your world, we reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 to less than 100ppm?
We have no real idea what the consequences of geoengineering on a planetary scale are, and they could equally well be detrimental to the survival of life on Earth.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[demonlapin]

Cataclysmic volcanic activity causes a totally different problem: massive global cooling due to particulates. This is much more short-lived than any warming that would occur after the dust settled, but really massive eruptions would easily cause massive die-off.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

khallow is also a Level-III Space Nutter. You may *just* have a teensy weensy bit of a hard time pounding reality into his neutronium-dense skull.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[symbolset]

I saw a documentary stating, from observations of the past, that high temperatures may be triggered by a certain threshold, below which things are manageable and above which the heat increases a lot faster than we can adapt to it.

The problem with that idea, besides believing everything you watch on TV, is that both atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures have been far higher than present - and that didn't happen.

Look at it this way: both coal and crude oil were once plants. Plants that grew in a verdant earthly Paradise for hundreds of millions of years until they'd trapped enough CO2 from the atmosphere to ruin their habitat and turn the Earth into a frigid wasteland covered with ice from pole to pole. But for an odd fluke of orbital dynamics we might not have survived to put things back on their former course.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

"ZOMG! It's worse than we thought!"....again...and again.... Global Alarmism. Not global warming.
Let's cripple the economies of all nations on the planet, resulting in increased poverty, hunger and hardship for billions of people just to keep some potential problems with sea-front property in the western world, at bay.

As far as arctic ice goes, maybe you should investigate why Greenland is called "Greenland". Hint" We weren't all driving SUVs when the Vikings went exploring so it wasn't caused by humans.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

We have more than a mere correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature rise. We have a mechanism of causation: carbon dioxide is conclusively known to be a greenhouse gas. So, yes, burning fossil fuels absolutely does increase global temperature. Of that, there's no doubt at all. The only question is how much. A few climatologists argue that it's not enough to worry about, but the vast majority conclude that the climate sensitivity is above 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is enough that it makes economic sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[LibRT]

"Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate?"

Well, we set up illegal police search and seizures via drunk driving road blocks, charge and imprison people for refusing to incriminate themselves (by refusing to provide a breath or blood sample) and generally punish people based upon a (unknown and certainly small) potential they may cause harm, while diverting resources from more pressing issues. All to try to reduce the 13,000 or so people who are presumed to die as a result of "drunk driving" in the US (2008 stat, and about 4/1000ths of a percent of the population).

So no: let's not do the drunk driving approach here (and you're quite right to use that excellent analogy to illustrate what's being suggested)...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

You act as if we have a choice about whether to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. We have no choice at all, because fossil fuels will not last forever. The only choice we have is when we will reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Nations have agreed that they want to prevent warming of more than two degrees Celsius. Maybe you don't see the need to mitigate global warming, but the people running the show sure do see the need. They also don't need your agreement in the matter before they act.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

And AC is a notorious troll who can't be bothered to get their own account or listen to reason.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

So it's just an amazing coincidence that we'll have ice-free summers in the Arctic 200 years after we started burning fossil fuels en masse?

Could be. After all, coincidences still happen even in today's world. And that's part of my point. You don't want to set global policy based on coincidences.

We have over 100 years of climatology that tell us that the carbon sensitivity is probably between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, starting with Arrhenius and continuing to the latest estimations.

And this may well be right.

We have agreed that we want to keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius.

No, "we" haven't. For example, I'm not a signatory to the Treaty of Copenhagen, nor did I vote for Obama who did sign the treaty, and it's worth noting that his signature has no weight since the treaty was not ratified by US Congress. So not only do we have a random slashdot poster who hasn't bought in to the above, we have whole countries! Finally, there's a vast difference politically between a non-binding agreement to do something and actually doing that thing.

The only way we can achieve this goal is to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately

Oops. No evidence for your assertion. Plus, it's not a useful goal for us. We have to sacrifice more important goals such as poverty reduction and building a technological civilization.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[JDeane]

Saving the world is impossible, our sun it putting out more heat every year as it burns its fuel and gets hotter. The best solution is to develop tech as fast as possible so we can spread out.

Of course even this is only a temporary solution as even the sky itself will one day be devoid of stars and the universe will go dark.

In the end everything we do is only temporary.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

What harm exactly does dumping less shit into the atmosphere do?

Rebuttal: carbon dioxide isn't shit. Your entire post is predicated on the idea that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is uniformly bad which it isn't. As in most things, there are winners and losers.

Second, why complain about "overpopulation" when it isn't the problem and has a ready solution in a high tech civilization with gender equality?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jc42]

... both coal and crude oil were once plants. Plants that grew in a verdant earthly Paradise for hundreds of millions of years until they'd trapped enough CO2 from the atmosphere to ruin their habitat and turn the Earth into a frigid wasteland covered with ice from pole to pole. But for an odd fluke of orbital dynamics we might not have survived to put things back on their former course.

Um, the problem with this is that the latest "snowball Earth" period that's been proposed from the fossil record was about 650 million years ago. That was well before there were plants (or animals) on land. Multicellular life was just getting its act together in the oceans around then. There is a conjecture that this extreme climate event was one of the things that drove the rapid evolution of multicellular life forms (though good evidence to support this is still a case of "further research is needed").

There were some rather wild climate swings at various times when those masses of greenery did cover our planet's land masses, but so far those haven't been documented as including planet-wide ice.

Or maybe you have some links to research reports that I haven't read. If so, can you post them?

As an aside, some time ago I ran across a cute geography/climate trivial question: What are the two places where there are glaciers on Earth's equator? Most people can name one spot, but usually get the mountain's name wrong. Few people can name both of them (or even the countries that they're in).

Anyway, we are still in a rather cold period, since we do have tropical glaciers right now. But we may not in another decade or three.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

Maybe the clueless one is you. If you've been following the science you'd realize that ice dynamics regarding sea ice and glacial ice are areas with a lots of uncertainty with much to learn still. The historic record for sea ice is pretty sparse, especially before the 1950's and only since the advent of satellites in the 1980's has there been broad coverage of sea ice. When the IPCC AR4 report came out the cryologists were mostly saying that their estimate was undoubtedly on the low side but they only reported what they could back up with solid science. Now new studies are improving our knowledge of the subject.

So, the IPCC AR4 report was wrong about sea ice but in the opposite direction for the peace of mind of deniers.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[pjbgravely]

How about the correlation between pirates and global temperature. It looks like this chart needs to be updated to show the recent increase in pirates and the contested decrease in temperatures.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

The only choice we have is when we will reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

So this is another vote for "wait" as I see it. No urgent environmental disaster combined with a problem that fixes itself in a few decades.

Maybe you don't see the need to mitigate global warming, but the people running the show sure do see the need.

There's a trust problem here. I don't normally attribute motives or intent to politicians. Maybe the people "running the show" see a need or maybe they see an opportunity to expand their personal power or the extent of their bureacracy. I have some evidence backing my point of view while they have other incentives than just evidence for their actions.

I think it would be naive to discuss the urgency of global warming while ignoring the possible deception involved. A common tactic of con men is to rush the mark into a decision before they think it through. I believe that is going on here. Once again, we're told that global warming is so urgent that we need to change our society right now. When that doesn't work, we're handed dubious treaties that set thresholds that require immediate action in order to respect the treaty.

I think this pretense of urgency is just an indication that we need someone else to run the show for a time.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

Of course you are right that melting sea ice doesn't affect sea level*. But the cryosphere is all tied together and land based ice is melting as well and that definitely will have an effect on sea level. Current estimates are 3-6 feet of SLR by 2100.

*Actually it does very slightly because sea ice is mostly fresh water and when it melts it changes the density of the sea water and causes a bit of rise, but not enough to worry about.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

Yes there is correlation, CO2 TRAILS not leads temperature increases!

Congratulations, you know about the feedback side of CO2. No go learn something about the forcing side. It's not an either/or situation.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps.

And why I should be impressed by treaties which hinder our activities without actually fixing the problem? There's another solution here even if global warming turns out to be a serious problem. Adaption. That is, go on and adapt to whatever adverse or beneficial changes occur. We can move as a natural background activity the entire human race many times over by the time the effects of global warming are supposed to come. We can build irrigation systems to keep drying areas agriculturally productive. And we can run the air conditioning a bit more rather than the heat.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Except (3) isn't based solely on human records, but on evidence collected through other means.

Oh yes, believe it or not, the global temperature DOES leave a record.

You should look up some of their methods.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of hundreds of millions of variables, you have absolute ruled them all out except CO2.

You are all fucking morons.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

The ice that the tsunami broke off of Antarctica was from an ice shelf, not sea ice. Two different things. But you're right, the process of the cryosphere melting is not a strictly linear process.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

We have more than a mere correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature rise.

No actually that is all you have. There's plenty of historical evidence to indicate that temperature rise leads the atmospheric CO2 increase. The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven. Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models,

The consequences on the global economy of attempting to remove carbon from our daily lives will dramatically impact the livelyhood of billions of people who will face hardship, poverty and hunger because of the increased costs of energy. You have the bare faced gall to quote economic impact about removing carbon dioxide just so a few beach-front properties avoid a miniscule risk of higher sea levels.

Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sycodon]

Unbearable my ass. We have had over 50 days of temps over 100 degrees here in TX. Everyone is doing just fine. We broke two records!...but they were set in the 20s...whoops. It's taken us almost 100 years to get back to where we were in the 20s.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Actually it is suspected to have increased at similar rates before (as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity messing up the permafrost ), and when it happened last time the majority of species alive on earth went extinct. Not the kinda thing you want to cause to happen if you can avoid it ...

Read up. The last major extinction event was the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There has been a major global warming event, but it didn't cause a mass extinction except apparently among certain sea floor fauna.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Arancaytar]

Scientists said we could be fucked, and now correct this to say we're really really fucked. Yes, clearly, the most likely interpretation is we're not fucked at all.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jc42]

many times do you blinkered warmists need to have it spelled out to you. Correlation != causation.

Of course not, but as many people have observed, a statistical correlation is often Ma Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something going on that may be important to you." And Nature never does anything as simple as just X causing Y; the reality is always something much more complex.

Unfortunately, human societies are still unable to deal rationally with anything on the order of complexity as the things that Nature throws at us. We can talk about, and deal with, a situation in which a single X is "the" cause of a result Y. But our social (especially political) institutions can't respond sanely to situations in which several thousands or millions of independent actors do things that produce a short-term profit, but their combined actions produce long-term disasters. We may, as individuals, understand what's happening, but we can't marshal the social activity that would ameliorate (or prevent) the disasters that we see coming. We can only analyze them in retrospect, and record who in the previous generations correctly warned us about what was coming.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

I might add to that a natural volcano eruption produces so much CO2, that our silly civilization cannot produce in a half a century.

You got that backwards. Volcanoes produce about as much atmospheric CO2 in a century as human burning of fossil fuel at the current rate does in about 1 year.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

The scientific statement is "we know exactly what the data tells us, but we will only commit to a statement that includes the margin of error because of the unwashed boobs who don't know what a margin of error is and will take the median number as gospel."

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Help us all out then and just go fucking kill yourself.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

So you are stating that smoking doesn't cause cancer because there have only been correlation studies (as a genuine clinical trial would be unethical)? Sometimes, correlation = causation. But apparently only when that's convenient for the deniers.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

You don't want to set global policy based on coincidences.

There's still no scientific proof that smoking causing cancer is nothing other than a coincidence, yet global policy has been set based on that set of coincidences. So you are too late. It's been done, so an argument to not do it again would indicate that the first time was a failure. Was it?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

Of course not, but as many people have observed, a statistical correlation is often Ma Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something going on that may be important to you."

Yeah, and just as often, it isn't. All you have is correlation. Maybe sunspots are driving both variables up and neither one causes the other. Maybe it's pixies dancing. This isn't science and after recent revelations in the wake of Climate-gate, neither is "Climate Science". It's Climate Shamanism or Climate Theology. Take your pick. You can no longer take at face value any proclamations coming from "climate scientists". I've had more reliable predictions from horoscopes so forgive me if I file this latest piece of alarmism in same category..

The ability to trust any reports from the IPCC or CRU is gone, and scientists are going to need years to rebuild that trust.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Your business example is more like: "We think things are going belly up, so we are going to go insane and spend all our reserves on a risky bet that may not even stop us from going bankrupt. Oh and if we were wrong, we would've probably been okay but will instead be bankrupt."

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[yacwroy]

What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old.

Carbon is a zero-sum game. Released minus recaptured.

It is possible (theoretically) for humans to have even a negative effect on global warming (and the ultra-important but media-ignored carbon acidification) while still using many carbon-producing technologies simply by sequestering the carbon (say, in trees).
That might just take replanting half the world's forests, but if we wanted too we sure could. It's not unachievable, it'd just take far more than our predominantly lazy selfish culture is willing to give - even if giving would help us (eg: eating less).

Anyway, we wouldn't have to put up with drastic action for too long. We have the silver bullet solution, fusion, becoming viable most likely some time this century (if we supply enough funds for the research, that is).

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

No, we won't run out of fossil fuels in a few decades. We have enough fossil fuels to increase atmospheric carbon dioxide to ten times what it's been for the past million years, which would in turn cause warming of over ten degrees Celsius, which in turn would cause global catastrophe. Civilization would probably survive, but life would be difficult for hundreds of years. Certainly the Earth wouldn't support ten billion humans at today's standard of living. So, no, it's not going to "fix itself".

It doesn't matter what you think about politicians. They're going to act no matter what you think. We're not all waiting around for khallow's agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which seems to be how you're acting. It's not up to anyone to convince you. You need to convince the people in charge that we shouldn't be reducing emissions if you think that's what we should do. So far, you don't seem to be doing a good job of it. You seem to be preaching to the choir of deniers.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Mashiki]

One only needs to look to the hyper-environmentalist agendas that are running amok in western governments to see that driving civilization into the dirt is just that. Pollution != Climate change no matter how much you try and make it so. And that you used that, shows exactly where your bias sits.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

You, for one, don't deign youself to making logical statements either. That doesn't mean we should all aspire to be you.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sycodon]

If the Alarmists TRULY believe in what they are preaching, they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form. Thorium, molten salt, boiling water, whatever and further, be agitating for more research into smaller, better plants. Because nuclear is the ONLY viable replacement for base load requirements.

Just think of the progress we could have made by now if in the last 15 years there was a full court press on designing a safe and efficient nuclear plant instead of spending millions of dollars trying to gin up enough evidence to convince the majority of people to revert 100 years into the past.

But they don't. Instead, they do advocate strenuously for the transparent radical hippie Green Agenda, that says we should all live in communes and eat bug, twigs, and nuts. Or, if you want to be more ominous, AGW is the perfect vehicle to do what 40 years of cold war could not do , which is to bring Soviet style communism to the States. But only if you want to be ominous.

The bottom line is they only want to solve this "problem" by using THEIR solutions and programs. Or perhaps they invented this "problem" so that they could force their way of living on the majority.

So until I see Hansen, et. al. before Congress advocating for nuclear power, I'll just assume they are a bunch of environmentalist control freaks looking to force others into living they way they deem is correct. Of course the radical environmentalist wackos won't live that way...see Al Gore.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[zymano]

bullshit. There is Solar activity involved and the orbit of the earth is 'Always' changing.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The artic has been ice free on 2 occassions in the last 150 years. Do some reserach.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[thrich81]

Hiding out all day in the air conditioning != "just fine". Ask the farmers and ranchers in TX if they are doing just fine. The municipal water supplies for some Hill Country cities (Llano, etc.) are already dried up or soon will be. Another summer like this one with no winter rains again and Lake Travis dries up and then no one in Central TX will be doing fine.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[dryeo]

Greenland is called "Greenland" for the same reason that Iceland is called "Iceland". Public relations, Iceland was relatively nice, at least by Scandinavian standards and they didn't want to be over run and Greenland was a waste land that they were trying to attract people to.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[wish bot]

No actually that is all you have. There's plenty of historical evidence to indicate that temperature rise leads the atmospheric CO2 increase. The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven. Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models.

I see these statements all the time - unfortunatley they have become urban legend rather than having a basis in fact. Here's some reading:
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m5
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m18

Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.

Here's something for this observation too - http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-global-snowstorms-scientists.html

As a counterpoint for anecdotal evidence, you may want to read the news stories about record heatwaves through the US over the past month...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[blueg3]

That's a gross abuse of qualitative reasoning and dramatically different timescales. It's akin to saying, "I'm going to die eventually, so there's no reason to step off the tracks so this oncoming train doesn't hit me."

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

You need a lesson in logic. This isn't what I said and is a non-sequitur.
There's no point in me wasting my time arguing with an idiot who can't follow a reasoned line of thinking, so I won't bother.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[blueg3]

The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven.

It's actually very well-understood. Arrhenius figured it out ages ago. The details in situ turn out to be moderately more complicated, but no intractable.

Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models,

I suspect talking science at you is like talking to a wall, but it's not heat capacity. Heat capacity is a different thing. Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas, It's also accounted for in most of the models, funny that. The reason it's not as significant a factor is that it's difficult to actually change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (overall).

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

No, we don't have just correlation. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Burning fossil fuels causes the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to increase, which in turn causes warmer temperatures. There's the causation right there. All this was predicted long before it ever occurred. Since then, we've observed the increase in carbon dioxide, and we've observed the predicted warming. I guess it's just an amazing coincidence!

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

We have some evidence we are blundering into a disaster. We have new evidence that we are blundering into it even faster than we thought. Events predicted in the past are happening much sooner than expected. So we wait? We have a lack of urgency?

I find it very difficult to believe the anyone can honestly think the 'institutional biases' cited above are more powerful than the oil companies and others with an interest in doing nothing. To honestly think that every major scientific body in the world has been infiltrated and co-opted by extreme environmental radicals.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bunratty]

It's hard to directly change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, because it just precipitates out. We call it rain. On the other hand, if you pump billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every year, we increase the temperature of the ocean and atmosphere, which causes more evaporation. This leads to higher humidity and more precipitation, and of course, the extra water vapor causes yet more warming. This is why we say water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. So, yes, water vapor is more of a direct cause of warming than carbon dioxide, but it doesn't contradict that it's greenhouse emissions that are causing the warming because it's those emissions that are causing increased humidity which is causing most of the warming.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

Because the solution to overpopulation involves more pollution and much longer timer horizons than CO2 emissions. More power to keep people alive and so on.

More CO2 in the atmosphere at this point *is* uniformly bad. It's a matter of degree of just how bad. If we'd been having this discussion in 1911 it would be a somewhat different calculation, orders of magnitude and all that.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[thrich81]

Forgot to add -- the entire state of Texas was declared a federal natural disaster area by the US Dept of Agriculture at the end of June. It's technically for the drought, but drought and heat go together in the summer around here.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

Here's something for this observation too - http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-global-snowstorms-scientists.html

As a counterpoint for anecdotal evidence, you may want to read the news stories about record heatwaves through the US over the past month...

Yeah this is nice. If the weather is warmer, it's because of global warming. If it gets colder it's also global warming. You guys are hilarious. Any kind of evidence, either warmer or cooler somehow manages to support your hypothesis. You can't really expect me to take you seriously if this is your line of argument.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[ibsteve2u]

Your analogy breaks down because of differing conditions controlling behavior: You go to prison for intentionally driving someone else's business into bankruptcy but you can make an awful lot of money driving everybody's world over the cliff of climate change.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

perhaps you need to accept that the western lifestyle is unsustainable and stop being greedy. Not even nuclear can provide the unsustainable energy needs and lifestyle for everybody on the planet.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[KeensMustard]

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

Not for any reasonable definition of "work" because (a) you haven't demonstrated how the fix (reduction in emissions) will cost more than adapting to climate change and (b) We can safely assume that the fix will always need to be applied - which means that delays in mitigation means more must be spent - because the cost of the fix will not go down, and over time we must add the cost of rectifiying the damage. Therefore the longer the delay in applying the fix, the larger the cost.

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move, particularly on the time scales that global warming acts. For example, there's enough people moving in the US that effectively the entire population moves every six or so years.

I'd like to see some actual numbers on that. For example, you've nominated the richest people on earth as being the most mobile - yet these people are the least affected by climate change, and also have the most (financial) capacity. So a non-exhaustive list of issues for you to cover in your reply include:

• How would the poorest of the poor (who are also the most affected by climate change) demonstrate a comparable level of agility to migration patterns within the U.S, with it's financially solvent/agile citizens
• How does involuntary movement (e.g. being a climate refugee) compare realistically to voluntary migration? (Your example)
• What is the cost of replacing and providing infrastructure for these refugees, settling in a new country (Your example includes movements between well populated areas with existing infrastructure)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

I never suggested you should be impressed by it. Quite honestly you should be uniformly disappointed in it. As a treaty it, as you rightly recognize, has minimal enforcement mechanisms in it. It is, and was too weak.

In terms of all science and all policy as I said, they are iterative, in that regard Kyoto is no better and no worse than any other treaty, law, or agreement signed. You try something, if it wasn't enough you try more, if it was too much, you back off. Whether that is around alcohol consumption, tobacco taxation/policy, global warming, murder penalties or the like. No policy is going to be perfect the first time, and something like kyoto, which gave broad arching ideas without tangible solutions wasn't a step towards solving it. Therein again, likes my point, people who will do more, which are rich countries, are stuck doing even more to cope with the stupidity of a bad treaty.

Trying to prevent a problem it *is* adaptation. We recognize a problem and start adapting our behaviour to the cheapest/least damaging collective path of a solution. Suggesting we can move the entire population around is utter nonsense. I suspect the millions of people starving in somalia would love to pack up and move. No one (including my own country) seems to be running ships over to ferry them out and come here. Our coping with that problem is to leave 80% of the relevant people in need of food aid without help at the moment. And I will point out the famine in 'somalia' is actually only two provinces in somalia, and only effects about 1/3rd of their population - and we are still proving incapable of helping. (Note: I'm not suggesting the famine in somalia is a direct result of global warming, even if the famine is, the problem there is rooted in the political situation, which includes neighbouring countries only taking in a few hundred thousand refugees and the rest of us talking a lot and accomplishing very little). The problem is that a changing climate, even if that means some areas get better and some areas get worse (which at the moment seems to be just more areas getting worse) poses serious problems. Can you count on canada to take in millions of republican refugees from across the border as they cannot feed themselves anymore or provide safe drinking water, or if the cost becomes prohibitive do you want to abandon decades of infrastructure and building development because you're too cheap to make a long term investment in nuclear power? Saying we'll adapt, when the people who are actually experts at figuring out how to adapt give a best guess at a solution and then saying 'naw, we don't like the current plan, lets make our children spend more money on a plan more ridiculous' is idiotic.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[daath93]

*cough*bullshit*cough*

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

bamboo bikes for carbon sequestration and passive solar heating. Then again people are really attached to their out of shape bodies and low humidity disease causing houses.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sir_Sri]

oh and air conditioners don't actually reduce heat. They produce heat, and move heat around.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[cats-paw]

gosh and I thought oil companies also constituted "huge amount of money and political power". But apparently they don't.

Their influence is tiny compared to the power of the EPA.

It would be comedy if it weren't so serious that all you denier bozos completely and utterly ignore that just _maybe_ oil
companies might not be acting in our best interests, but are quite sure that climatologists are part of a lying cabal.

oh yeah - "changes in solar activity" - smacks forhead. Sure wish all those climatologists had thought of that !

Thank the gods of the free market they have you to help them.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

ah, the whole it happens without us so let's disavow any responsability for any contributions we know we are making.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Mashiki]

Perhaps you should realize that there's nothing wrong with the western lifestyle. And there is no shortage of power, and it's 100% sustainable. Nuclear is a cheap, easy, simple method to provide lots of power. And that giant ball of fire, that's a raging nuclear furnace? Or is it something so insignificant that it has no impact on the world at all? If need be that can be tapped. It would require microwave power transmitters, and beaming power back from space but it would work just fine. At least until we move from fission to fusion.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AnfieldSierra]

Please let me know when you start "talking science at me" because so far all I see is pseudo-science dressed up as an (un-falsifyable) hypothesis. Come back when you can show me that any recent trends are anything other than natural variablility caused by any of several hundred factors all unrelated to human activity, eg. Sunspots/solar activity, El Nino, PDO. etc.
Your climate psience champions are unwilling/unable to release their figures, stonewall any attempts to reproduce their work or check their calculations, and are generally obstructive to any kind of scruitiny yet we are expected to dramatically change the economy of the entire world on just their say-so.

It's even highly questionable whether there actually has been any warming that isn't simply down to mis-reading the temperature proxies used to construct a historical climate record. And even if we are faced with a dramatic warming of the climate (which I simply don't believe) the human race as a whole can simply move to higher lattitudes and inland from the coast over the next 50-100 years. It's not like we're not extremely adaptable as a species. It would be way more cost effective than crippling billions of people with increased energy costs today.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

You said "How many times do you blinkered warmists need to have it spelled out to you. Correlation != causation." You stated that "Correlation != causation." But sometimes it is, thus you are wrong. My response was directly related to yours and was not a non-sequitur. An anecdote proving you wrong that's unrelated to the issue at hand isn't non-sequitur. It's just tangential. But you are wrong. Sometimes correlation = causation. And implying otherwise is 100% wrong. Thus you are wrong. That you don't like that I prove you wrong doesn't mean I can't follow a reasoned line of thinking. If anything, that's you. What you said is false. What you implied with it is further false. You didn't add anything to the discussion, other than you confusing correlation and causation even more than those you are complaining about, so if your idle threat of not wasting our time with your inane responses is followed, then nothing of value will be lost.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[ipwndk]

Or maybe because the Greenlandish people have their life disrupted from a deteriorating environment. Of course you Americans probably don't know them. (Albeit you've already caused them great harm with your military bases and forced relocations) People live in places where there's supposed to be ice. The melting disrupts fishing and hunting which is part of their culture and identity.

They could of course just become true westerners and leave their homes. But it's a country that already have enormous rates of unemployment, alcoholism and suicide. That's expected when their way of life is becoming increasingly impossible to live. There's not that much else they can do on that Island. Of course now that they've found oil, that maybe change. Soon they maybe even become as polluting as us! Because that's progress; let's not commune with nature, let's destroy it and drain the land of its resources. I don't blame them however; they did not destroy nature, we did, and they just have to follow suit to survive.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

How many times do you brainwashed unthinking skeptics need it explained to you that causation is always correlated. :) Correlation does not rule out causation because it is an integral part of it.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Scarbo27]

"The only evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide..." Wow! Are you suggesting that there is no evidence that the entirely predictable solar/sunspot cycle might be a factor in this phenomenon? Even if I attempt to control for my confirmation bias, the evidence that CO2 is a factor in global warming is exceedingly slender, and the sunspot cycle is infinitely more likely. I am not a global warming skeptic, since I don't believe that climate is static, but I find the evidence that mankind is a factor to be exceedingly problematic, driven almost exclusively by entities that have something to gain from the connection, or by irredeemably tainted sources like Al (crazed sex-poodle) Gore. Al Gore owns two mansions and travels almost exclusively by private jet. I don't want to hear a thing about AGW until Al Gore acts like he thinks it is reality. Right now Al Gore has as much credibility with me as that other high priest of nutty religions, Warren Jeffs.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[colonel spalding]

You are so right. Recently there was some big effort on the right touting the fact that the glacier at Mt. Shasta, as well as 6 or 7 others are growing. I did a little quick research, which I believe should be left to scientists, not creationists like DR Roy Spencer, the NASA naysayer. Anyway my research taught me that there are approximately 100,000 glaciers on the plants. So lets see 7 over 100,000. Are they kidding? Seven are growing at minute levels while 99,993 are melting, some at hight speed. I actually have no idea if all 99,993 are melting, its just the idea that THEIR science only needs a sample so tiny. ugh

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[dotfile]

Hmm. Maybe that would work where you live. Fiji, right? My out of shape body lives in a part of the world where bamboo (and rubber for tires) would need to be imported by means of fossil fuel burning transport, and passive solar heating is not quite enough to hack a -30F winter week or three around here. Unless you're also proposing that we abandon living in areas such as these -- you know, the ones where we grow millions of tons of carbon-sequestering plants, that get harvested and turned into food to feed people all over the world. Even the poor ones in places where they don't think passive solar heating is such a grand idea, and would do anything for low humidity, electrically cooled houses.

But, hey, I live in the evil West, so ignore anything I say. I'm obviously just a right-wing global climate change denier, probably working for Monsanto and BP.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Arctic cap completely melts there would be a very slight rise in sea level. Fresh water occupies a slightly higher volume than the same mass in salt water. The ocean would get a tiny bit fresher so would occupy more volume. But it isn't like anyone would notice and the rise just from that would take a lot of data to measure. Now melting the Anarctic cap and the Greenland ice sheets is another kettle of fish entirely.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Energy isn't everything. Unless you're completely idiotic you must realize that everything that consumes energy requires resources to construct of which we have a finite amount. Regardless of how much energy is contained in the sun the fact is that we cannot tap into it at this point in time, nor in the foreseeable future. We can't even reliably tap into the over abundant energy from the sun that falls on the earth.

The western way of living requires taking resources from other countries. Grow up, you are not the only country on earth, you are not the only society entitled to the bounty that the world has to offer.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[NeutronCowboy]

Ozone-wholes or Ozone depletion occurred or so we thought because spaceship had certain chemicals in the fuel they used. You should read about Ozone layer depletion myths.

You're a fucking moron. You're quoting ozone layer depletion myths as a reason to believe that the science behind ozone holes is not to be believed? Man, that's a new one.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[dotfile]

Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.

Oh, stop. See, that's why they had to stop calling it "global warming" and are now alarmed about "global climate change". That way they can blame the same thing no matter what the weather does. Try to keep up. :)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Learn to think will you. Energy isn't everything. Our energy needs are high because of the way we live. Everything that consumes energy requires resources to manufacture. There just isn't enough resources on the planet to sustain that type of living for the whole world.

Autism is a growing problem in western society because of the myopic focus that is encouraged. Most people can't even see the bigger picture anymore. The devil is in the details.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Bamboo grows pretty much every where, including Canada where we have passive solar houses as well. Augmenting passive solar with the occasional energy input isn't evil, sometimes it's down right necessary.

I also don't believe in giving up luxury to live like tree hugging hippies. What i do believe in is proper design.

As for poor countries with high humidity, i'm currently on an island in the carribean where the humidity is absolutely ridiculous...if you're walking in the concrete city. Take a stroll in the jungle and suddenly you're in another world that's perfect. It's all about how we choose to live and how we've designed, or failed todesign, our environment.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[buybuydandavis]

This bears repeating.

The confidence interval for an estimation process is the sum of the variance of the estimator itself plus the prediction error against real data. A 4x confidence interval in a rate estimator really does say that we don't know squat on this particular issue.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Arlet]

And has been doing so for the past 12-14,000 years.

No it hasn't. You're probably referring to the last glacial cycle, but for all purposes that basically ended 8,000 years ago. After that, global temperatures have stabilized, or maybe even slightly decreased (until we started messing with it)

The current downward trend, as shown in the graph, started only a few decades ago:

http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20110803_Figure3.png

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Arctic ice floats

No, Arctic sea ice floats. Most of the ice in the Arctic exists in the form of glaciers which happen to sit on land, not sea.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Xyrus]

Insightful?

And has been doing so for the past 12-14,000 years

The planet HAD been cooling since the early Holocene (climatic optimum). It's only over the past 100 years that this cooling has reversed, and pretty dramatically. So no, the arctic not been beating a retreat whole time, and certainly not at the pace we've seen recently.

Or whatever causes climate shifts when human activity wasn't around to be blamed.

That would be CO2, methane, and other green-house gases. Primarily CO2 though as it has a long atmospheric half-life and has a tendency to saturate the biggest sink for it (the oceans) pretty quickly.

We can't have perfect information, but we can have better. It's an obvious strategy to wait till we have better information. There is a real choice here.

You're right. We've parked our truck top of train tracks. We don't know the exact time the train is coming. We don't know exactly how big it will be. But that doesn't change the fact that the truck is still parked on the tracks. We COULD wait until we hear the rumble to move it. We COULD wait until we hear the horn to move it. We COULD wait until we see the train to move. However, the longer we wait until we know the exact size of the train and the exact time it is coming, the less time we have to move the truck.

Waiting for some arbitrarily defined "better" information is a foolish strategy if by the time you get that "better" information it is too late to act on it.

So let's look at the situation. We have some evidence that there's global warming, some connection with greenhouse gas emissions by humans, and models with quality that varies from pretty good (radiative models) to extremely poor (the economic factors in climate estimates a century from now).

Some evidence? Way to play that down sparky. There are thousands of research papers and exabytes of data backing up climate research that show a very strong link between human activity and climate. And not just warming related either. See acid rain and the ozone hole for other examples.

We have significant institutional biases (particularly, funding, peer pressure, and the environmentalism ideology).

[citation needed]

This is a line of pureed bullshit straight from the manufacturers of FUD. From this line alone, it is very clear you have no idea what you are talking about and are attempting to appeal through emotion. To test out how inane your claim is, make up some bullshit paper about global warming and submit it to any one of those "biased" science journals. You won't get published. You'll be lucky to make it through initial editorial review, let alone peer review.

Of course, the most basic counter argument is that if a climate scientist really was in it for the money, they would go to a fossil fuel company and take the opposing side. They pay a whole lot better. Average salary for a climate scientist (publicly funded) is around $75K per year. So they certainly aren't getting rich.

If you want funding, peer pressure, and bias look into private funding sources. For some examples, take a look at the "science" they used to try to pass off smoking is good for you, or that asbestos was a safe material. The same groups who were pushing that psuedo-scientific crap are the same ones behind the denier scene.

We have huge amount of money and political power in play (environmental government agencies, for example, can expand their power considerably).

Scare tactics. Another useless appeal. And no, we don't have a huge amount of money "in play" in this area. AC in Afghanistan runs more than the science budget for the country. And no, the EPA cannot expand it's power "considerably". It would take acts of congress and approval by the president for the EPA to act outside of it's mandate. And even IF some president expanded the charter without congress, congress

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[bane2571]

Smoking is a net loss regardless of whether it is bad for your health. Burning fossil fuels is a massive net gain, even if you consider it to cause global warming.

Making good policy on a bad assumption is still good policy. Making bad policy on a bad assumption is a bad idea.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Galactic Dominator]

This a moron alert for the previous comment.

Baloroth has apparently forgotten to include any other science other than what he/she/it picked up in 5th grade.

Please see fine scholarly articles such as this one for further details:

http://home.comcast.net/~pdnoerd/NoerdlingerBrower.pdf

If you're unsatisfied, don't stop your research there.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Arlet]

maybe you should investigate why Greenland is called "Greenland"

Because in the places where the Vikings settled, it was green. In fact, those places along the coast are still green:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Qaqortoq2008.JPG

If you go further inland, you'll find 100,000 year old ice. We can be sure it wasn't green when the Vikings lived there.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Arlet]

Only 2% of all the ice on the world actually floats. The rest is supported by land, and will cause sea level rise when it melts. Yes, this article only talks about the Arctic ice, but the rest isn't immune to rising temperatures.

Also, the warming of the oceans will expand the water.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[kanweg]

There is hardly anything risky about saving fuel. And who is talking about a requirement that ALL reserves have to be spent on it? Do you recognize that debating style? It is called a strawman. It should shake/wake you up, but you'll probably just go in denial. Kruger Dunning in real life.

Bert

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move

What you're missing is WHO owns the land that will go away.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Low-lying farmland in India and Bangladesh has been in use for hundreds or thousands of years.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Splab]

The nice thing about "global warming" is we can actually try and better our selves. If it's solar activity, orbital changes, acts of god or just those stupid elves, we can't do jack shit about it.

Around here weather has changed - ALOT - last couple of years has set several records, man made or not, we are in for climate change; by changing our pollution we might not fix the climate, but at least the air will be cleaner and we would have done *something* to try and stop it.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Joel Pett said it best.
http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/properties/pett/art_images/cg4b1dc9d7a42b20.jpg

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

God, it's not even just global warming that dumping shit into the air is doing. Carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean causes increased acidity. That's happening. No one seems to be disputing that, and it's royally screwing the ocean ecosystems (which is bad, considering those ecosystems are pretty big CO2 sinks, and pretty big food supplies). But keep on trucking denialists, I hope you enjoy fucking the planet over good.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Perhaps you should realize that there's nothing wrong with the western lifestyle.

Perhaps YOU should take your head out of your ass.

And there is no shortage of power, and it's 100% sustainable.

Call me in a million years, when all reserves of thorium are depleted. I can guarantee you that by then, the sun will be shining, the wind will be blowing, the waves will be rolling and the rivers will be flowing.

Nuclear is a cheap, easy, simple method to provide lots of power.

None of the above.

• it has astronomical initial cost,
• it has high maintenance cost,
• it leaves millions of tons of structural junk that takes decades to clean up,
• if^W when shit hits the fan, the stench is unbearable,
• it is not easily scalable.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you need to accept that the western lifestyle is unsustainable and stop being greedy.

Ladies and Gentleman, Exhibit A.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about Greenland, which has a huge chunk of arctic ice on top of it that would, if melted, raise sea level by, say, 6 to 7 meters.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

Autism is a growing problem in western society because of the myopic focus that is encouraged. Most people can't even see the bigger picture anymore. The devil is in the details.

Autism is a growing problem in western society because of the larger numbers that are diagnosed with the problem. There may not be any actual increase, just a larger percentage of people labeled with the problem. For example, let's say they could detect 60% of the people to have some form of autism, now they can detect 70%. Does that really mean the condition is more rampant, just because you can detect it at lower levels?

The devil is really in the details, and statistics can lie. Especially when you are using different means of counting your data points.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't understand the person behind your comments. You responded by just hand waving off well built-up arguments (atleast an effort). Why not try to respond with the same amount of effort?

But in this comment you shine through. I understand you.
It is 100% human selfishness.

To simplify almost too much, there are two kinds of people when looking at our nature and the way species are being reduced:
Those who think humans should be the last to leave this planet.
And those who think humans should be the first to leave this planet.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Burning fossil fuels is a massive net gain, even if you consider it to cause global warming.

If burning fossil fuels is causing global warming (as the people who spent years working on this say, but I know you fuckers don't believe in eggheads) and we do nothing about it we're fucked. The price we'd pay for inaction would be huge. So you saying it's a net gain even if it fucks up the Earth makes no sense. Unless... are you some kind of comic book villain?
Besides, fossil fuels are bad even if they did nothing to the climate. It causes a lot more pollution than other energy sources, is not that much cheaper than nuclear (not saying we should have nuclear cars, however cool that sounds), and it's about time we moved on from burning dead dinosaurs.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[ShakaUVM]

>>The only way we can achieve this goal is to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately, given the information we presently have.

The only way? Certainly not. With enough CO2-free energy sources, you can certainly pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[MasaMuneCyrus]

...people are really attached to their out of shape bodies and low humidity disease causing houses.

I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that disease didn't exist before the dehumidifier.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

The Global Warming people will ignore the fact that they've already predicted that the Arctic will be ice free by 2008, or numerous other years. Do a google search for all the articles. They are like the people predicting that California will slide into the ocean, every single year. So, if it ever happens, will all those predictions over the last 100 years be considered true, even though they got the year wrong by a century? The GW fanatics have slapped down hundreds of predictions, which have not come true. When this fact is brought up, all they do is whine that the Anti-GW people ar picking on them, and that is wasn't an official prediction.

Then there ar all of the fun after-the fact predictions. Katrina was caused by global warming and the next year would be worse (it was actually very quiet, which was also caused by GW). The japan earthquake was caused by GW. Colder or hotter than usual, caused by GW. Wetter or dryer, caused by GW. More of fewer thunderstorms or snowstorms, also caused by GW. All sorts of things can be predicted after the fact, but they can't use GW to predict the future.

GW is being handled as a religion, with Al Gore (the cause of many pregnant chads) as God himself. Anyone who dares to challenge any of it's tenets is attacked as heretics by the frothing adherents, who will pull up their religious tracts and proclaim them to be the word of God himself. When any of the holy tracts are challenged with actual scientific evidence, it takes a miracle for the poor researchers involved to survive the holy inquisition. Such actions as challenging the holy tenets are simply not tolerated.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

Also, the warming of the oceans will expand the water.

Water is odd about being heated or cooled compared to most other materials. Water actually expands when it is cooled, which makes it less dense as it cools, which is the reason why ice floats. This is also why freezing pop cans is a bad idea.

It is BAD SCIENCE like this that makes the anti-GW people challenge the GW adherents. Fudge factors in the computer programs are the least of it.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[madsdyd]

Can't disagree much with anything you wrote, perhaps expect:

What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff.

I think you are underestimating the religious. They are nutters, after all... :-)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

A joke perhaps?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

From your links.

From Copenhagen:
"commit to economy-wide emissions targets for 2020"
* economic conditions, ie. a tax on breathing. Nothing to do with climate

From the father of anthropogenic global warming:
"We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days. We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind."
* less ice = less starvation

IPCC fourth assessment report:
"but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values"
* All we know is based on estimations, ie. educated guesswork

Reuters:
"Melting glaciers, more humid air and eight other key indicators show that global warming is undeniable, scientists said on Wednesday"
* Fine, how does this in any way have anything to do with the theory anthropogenic climate change? Same for the rest of TFA

It's the same rhetoric being spouted over and over again. Should we stop burning fossil fuels? Absolutely & immediately. Is it having an affect on climatic conditions? Undoubtedly. Is it the main cause of anthropogenic global warming? Still arguable..

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

You know, in the 70's they were predicting Global Cooling. Back then, shouldn't we have transformed the economies of the entire planet to deal with the possibility of that? You don't want to wait for more accurate data, just in case? We should be generating billions of tons of greenhouse gases right now to fix GC!

That's the problem with GW. You're running around in panic mode, not really sure what's happening, but want to be doing something, no matter how stupid it turns out to be in the end. During the Bubonic Plague, they went around killing off all the cats to prevent the spread of the disease. Turns out it was caused by rats, and killing the cats helped the disease spread faster. How do you know your panicked reactions will not turn out to be as stupid as killing the cats? Doing "something" is just an attempt to make yourself feel that you have control over the problem, but rarely does it accomplish anything useful when you don't understand the problem itself. So go ahead and kill off the cats if it makes you feel better, but understand that your kids will probably be cursing you as "stupid twits" when things are better understood.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[he-sk]

That raging nuclear furnace in the sky is 150 MILLION KM AWAY.

If you build your nuclear power plants that far away from earth I have no problems with them.

Also, there is a cheap and proven solution to harness the energy expended by the sun. It's called a wind farm.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Mashiki]

No. The cost of nuclear would be cheaper, if there was less nimbyism. Less rabid environmentalism, especially from the haydays of the 60's and 70's. The maintence costs are smaller on modern reactors. Decommissioned and rebuilt reactors take a fraction of the time when you're not using 50 year old technology. It does scale, and scales well.

Perhaps you could grow up, and realize that the power generation capabilities are right in front of you. And other parts of the world don't have the fear of the 'nuclear boogyman' that americans, and some europeans do.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[he-sk]

Much of the arctic ice is on land (Greenland). When this melts, it will most certainly have an effect on the sea level. Secondly, the ice sheet reflects light away from earth. If it is gone the oceans below it will heat up more than they do now which leads to further warming.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[indeterminator]

Rebuttal: carbon dioxide isn't shit. Your entire post is predicated on the idea that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is uniformly bad which it isn't. As in most things, there are winners and losers.

I'd like to know how you plan to be on the winning side of this one. Selling air conditioners?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

There's still no scientific proof that smoking causing cancer is nothing other than a coincidence, yet global policy has been set based on that set of coincidences. So you are too late. It's been done, so an argument to not do it again would indicate that the first time was a failure. Was it?

Great. You go ahead and smoke 6 packs of cigs a day to prove it wrong. If you're so sure there are absolutely no health risks involved, why not?

The fact that they asked people with specific types of cancer if they smoked, and the numbers came out that there were a significantly larger number of cancers among the smokers than would be expected if there was no correlation should bother you. Others checked the data, came up with their own, and came to the same conclusions.

Now, global warming is based of measurements we are not allowed to see, using programs we aren't allowed to see, by people who are not trained as climatologists. What numbers we do get, are approximations and guesses based on second hand sources, like tree rings. Tree rings can be affected by things other than temperature, but that is just ignored and the data is assumed to be gospel. Peer review is highly discouraged. GW isn't science, and doesn't follow scientific principles. It does follow religious ones.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[mjwx]

they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form.

We are.

But these complete dingbats who keep trying to label us alarmists and have to liken science to a region because they have no clue as to the science involved are drowning the voice of reason out with pointless, inaccurate and completely idiotic rants.

You dont understand the science behind it, you dont want to understand it or the arguments recommending what we should do, you just want to whine because you don't understand it. The fact you think Al Gore has anything to do with actual science proves how much you want to learn, the only people who listen to him are his detractors.

So leave this discussion to people who have a clue and go back to listening to Fox News, the comforting blanket of ignorance.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move, particularly on the time scales that global warming acts. For example, there's enough people moving in the US that effectively the entire population moves every six or so years.

Land is extremely scarce. Take the whole population of the earth, divide it by its area and you get an area equal to two football fields for each person on earth. That's how much resources you get for your entire life, consume more than that and someone else has to consume less. And that's not even counting that most of the globe is covered by oceans and most of the land isn't arable! We have reached the limits of our ecosystem and it is very scary, but that's no good reason to just put your head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[he-sk]

If by adapt you mean lose much of your land base (e.g. Bangladesh, Maldives), sure they can adapt. I wonder though, which country will take up the inevitable influx of immigrants? Certainly not the US with its anti-immigration hysteria. Europe doesn't want them either, we're all closet-xenophobes, unfortunately. You don't expect them to roll over and die, do you? That would be quite the adaptation. Oh, I forgot, these are Muslim countries. Problem solved.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Stephan Schulz]

Nuclear is a cheap, easy, simple method to provide lots of power.

Nuclear energy has never been produced at market price anywhere in the world. Development has been done nearly exclusively in government labs or based on government subsidies. No nuclear plant can get sufficient insurance to cover accidents on the free marktet. Governments guarantee nuclear waste disposal at subsidised prices.

And I'm sure looking forward to a world where Nigeria, Belize, Tuvalu, and Iran produce their power from nuclear plants...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

Either way. Being off on the the exact value of a coefficient is not all that important to the policy problem.

When they give a huge variance on something important that they claim to understand accurately enough to predict the temperature 500 years in the future, it just shows that all they are doing is blowing smoke out their ass.

Since this is a tech board, I'll put it in CS terms. We, in CS, regularly analyze algorithms in 'big O' notation, n^2, n^3 etc.

It's more like you are a programmer working for a manufacturing company. You assign a O value to a program that you haven't seen, don't know what it does or how it does it, and aren't even sure if it exists. You assign an O to it to somewhere between O(1) and O(n^1000), and be proud of your results. You then use those results to determine how much to spend on manufacturing equipment over the next 200 years.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

So what? As long as it moves it from/to where I want it to, what's the problem?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[xenobyte]

Well, I think the Global Warming cult started this by categorically denying that the Sun had anything to do with the Earths climate whatsoever... I mean it's obvious that it doesn't contribute any heat, not any ionization of the upper atmosphere, so better leave it completely out of the equation...

No, it's not a joke. In one of IPCC's reports they actually conclude that the Sun has no significant influence on Global Warming, which is more than stupid. All warming comes from the Sun, and if you removed it the temperature would plummet to a few degrees above absolute zero within a very short time, greenhouse effect or not. It is thus equally obvious that if the Sun provides less warming, the temperature would drop, also regardless of any greenhouse effect. Similar if the Sun should provide more warming, temperature would go up.

As we have several periods of significant climate fluctuations in history and no known human or geological causes, it is obvious that the reason must be external, i.e. the Sun. So as long as the correlation between the Sun and the climate during these periods isn't explained, it is stupid to explain any variations seen today as caused by humans only. I'm not saying that humans have no influence but I'm saying that the simple and obvious answer is that the same factors that caused the historical fluctuations are at play again. It's Occam's Razor.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

We have no choice at all, because fossil fuels will not last forever. The only choice we have is when we will reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

There is only 20 years of fossil fuels left in the Earth, and it's been that way since, at least, the 70's. In 2100, when this article predicts that the Earth will be destroyed, we'll probably be down to 20 years of fossil fuel left.

These predictions become meaningless when they keep failing. Either predict with a tiny bit of accuracy, or stop repeating your mistakes.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Nuclear fission can be good with reprocessing for thousands of years. I think we will have DD fusion by then, which it good for about 5-100millions years depending on how you slice it.

Folks may not want nuclear. That is fine. But it sure can work as far as the numbers are concerned.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[TheTurtlesMoves]

And what is your energy/resource footprint. It is not always other people that need to change.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Stephan Schulz]

Also, the warming of the oceans will expand the water.

Water is odd about being heated or cooled compared to most other materials. Water actually expands when it is cooled, which makes it less dense as it cools, which is the reason why ice floats. This is also why freezing pop cans is a bad idea.

It is BAD SCIENCE like this that makes the anti-GW people challenge the GW adherents. Fudge factors in the computer programs are the least of it.

Water is densest at about 4 degrees C. It expands either way. Since water is densest at 4 degrees C, cold water sinks to the ground - and in fact, much of deep water is more or less at that temperature, and most surface water is much warmer. Thermal expansion of sea water is indeed a major cause of sea level rise, and if somebody told you otherwise, they either don't know shit, or they are trying to deceive you.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

FACTS:

1:CO2 induces the greenhouse effect, TEST THIS YOURSELF.

    -->here is the wikipedia article on the greenhouse effect:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

    -->and here are the youtube links showing HOW to do an experiment showing CO2 induces the greenhouse effect

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge0jhYDcazY

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeYfl45X1wo

2:Humans emit a LOT of CO2 (oil or coal +O2 + flame = energy + CO2 + soot + ...

1+2 = AGW.

  if you find a hole in my argument, please give it to me.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

Making bad policy on a bad assumption is a bad idea.

What's the bad assumption? You seem to be insulting the idea, rather than refuting it, much like people do when they can't figure out how to disagree, but they feel like they should.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AK Marc]

If you're so sure there are absolutely no health risks involved, why not?

Just because you don't understand science or statistics doesn't mean that I don't either.

Now, global warming is based of measurements we are not allowed to see, using programs we aren't allowed to see, by people who are not trained as climatologists.

Oh, it's a conspiracy against you, to keep you from seeing the numbers that disprove global warming?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Yvanhoe]

The fact that there are crazy deniers is not a good reason to not produce the best scientific results possible.
Also, the IPCC is a yearly review of past publications, it is normal that it has some lag. I used to be convinced by the criticism of their work until I actually read the full report. They do mistakes, they correct them. That's regular science. The horrible part is the redaction of the "summary for policy makers". They sum up 200 pages of reasonable extrapolations and doubts into a big "PANIC !" paragraph.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's evident you never looked into the IPCC 2007 report. The report discusses its limitations, and tells you that it gives only very conservative estimates. Translation: IPCC: "The summer temperatures are very probably above 10 C", MIT: "Summer temperatures might be as high as 40 C!".

Look. You are comparing apples and oranges. One does not simply compare the very-conservative-estimate and the wild-estimate.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Whuffo]

Step right over here with the others, and here's your sign.

There's a whole lot of ice that's on land, not in the ocean. IF global warming is a fact, then ocean levels will rise.

I'm not saying it's not true, but remember these are the same scientists that were talking about global cooling not so very long ago. It'd help a lot if some real scientific information was available instead of the news bites and talking points that pass for truth these days.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[enormouspenis]

And yet YOU won't believe this:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/747.abstract Mainly because you prefer to bash people with different viewpoints. Just another arrogant asshole.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[thomst]

Citation required....

Okay, how about this one?

Yes, Wikipedia is non-authoritative. Nonetheless, the article is an excellent summary of current modeling of the Permian/Triassic extinction event - which resulted from the 100,000-year-long Siberian Traps basalt flow eruption (a very different kind of volcanic eruption than the cinder-cone-building type with which we're all familiar). And the citations in the footnotes are, in many cases, of actual scientific papers, rather than Wikipedia-style user summaries.

When the dinosaurs ruled the planet, temperatures were quite significantly higher than they are now, and the ecosphere supported an abundance of highly successful flora and fauna.

Yes, and those higher temperatures were a result of the runaway greenhouse gas emissions that caused the P/T extinction event - a cataclysm that ended with the extinction of 95% of all species on the planet (98% of ocean species!). Had the P/T event not occurred, the dinosaurs (not to mention their Triassic predecessors) would never have had the chance to evolve.

How about on your world, we reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 to less than 100ppm?

I'd like to hear how you propose we accomplish that. The fact is that removing any significant amount of CO2 from the atmosphere is simply not possible with current technology. Simply reducing (or eliminating) additional increases in human-originated CO2 emissions will be a Herculean enough task.

We have no real idea what the consequences of geoengineering on a planetary scale are, and they could equally well be detrimental to the survival of life on Earth.

You're correct about that. However, what's being proposed by most people who are actively engaged in attempting to find solutions to AGW is not geoengineering, but controlling the increase in CO2 emissions.

It's too late to prevent the coming climate changes altogether. About the best we can do now is to try to limit the peak CO2 levels future generations will experience, and to prepare for the very real and devastating changes in climate and geology that the eventual loss of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps will cause.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Splab]

And record amount of water coming down in northern Europe - or record setting months of heat etc.

Might not be global warming - but the climate around here sure as hell has changed, man made or not, be afraid...

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[budgenator]

So leave this discussion to people who have a clue and go back to listening to Fox News, the comforting blanket of ignorance.
--
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.

It's getting to the point where Fox News deserves its own corollary of Goodwin's law ; OBTW your sig doesn't seem to match your comment.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jandersen]

If the Alarmists TRULY believe in what they are preaching, they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form. Thorium, molten salt, boiling water, whatever and further, be agitating for more research into smaller, better plants. Because nuclear is the ONLY viable replacement for base load requirements.

Hmm, I can't speak for "the Alarmists" - they must be a special American party whose agenda is mostly based on hype and willful misinterpretation; are they the ones that call themselves "the Tea Party"? Only joking, of course.

As for nuclear power - there is much to be said for using nuclear power if we can improve on the reactor design; they are still too wasteful and risky; a kind of steam engine with added radiation. As for whether it is the only viable replacement, I am not convinced; it will take real numbers and solid facts, not just arm-waving and loudness.

Just think of the progress we could have made by now if in the last 15 years there was a full court press on designing a safe and efficient nuclear plant instead of spending millions of dollars trying to gin up enough evidence to convince the majority of people to revert 100 years into the past.

What, you mean nobody has done any research in the last 15 years?

Unfortunately, this is basic research, and unfortunately, in basic research it is very often not a matter of how many people are doing it, or how much money is available, because basic research depends so heavily on getting new ideas. My guess is that we would not have come much further than we already are. Personally, I would have liked to see more resources spent on fusion research, which I still think has the most potential.

But they don't. Instead, they do advocate strenuously for the transparent radical hippie Green Agenda, that says we should all live in communes and eat bug, twigs, and nuts. Or, if you want to be more ominous, AGW is the perfect vehicle to do what 40 years of cold war could not do , which is to bring Soviet style communism to the States. But only if you want to be ominous.

Mate, you've just disqualified yourself in my view. It is one thing referring to climate researchers as "alarmists", which in itself is rather insulting (but, alas, something we have grown used to), but when you start using words like "hippie", "green" and "communism" as if they were expletives, you are simply putting your abysmal ignorance and myopic bias on full, public display.

If what you are after is serious, fact-based policies and credible research, you have to do better than that; you can't calm down other people by screaming hysterical abuse on the top of your voice.

So until I see Hansen, et. al. before Congress advocating for nuclear power, I'll just assume they are a bunch of environmentalist control freaks looking to force others into living they way they deem is correct. Of course the radical environmentalist wackos won't live that way...see Al Gore.

You can of course see whoever as whatever, if that is what you want. But if you want to take part in the debate in a serious way, or even just understand what goes on, you have to realise - and accept - that when scientists put forward their opinions, they are only putting forward opinions: their interpretation of the data they have been working with. They, themselves, generally believe in their own conclusions, but they are also aware that they may have made mistakes - it is a fundamental part of scientific discourse that you present your data and conclusions to your colleagues, thereby inviting everybody to try to pick their logic apart. IOW, if you have solid, scientific arguments, please come forward and let everybody hear.

Otherwise, perhaps it would be more helpful if you kept your voice down? Not that I want to curb your right to express your views, but there are just too many noisemakers trying to drown any meaningful discussion about this uncomfortable subject; why contribute to that?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Land is not that scarce.

You've never been to India have you?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sosume]

When was the last time you actually researched the subject? It looks like you are basing your argument on feelings and misinformation. The modern Thorium / molten salt reactors are extremely safe, efficient and clean; actually the cleanest possible method to produce energy en masse. The remaining waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, and there is enough thorium to power the entire earth for many generations to come.

Would you argue that building wind mills is a more sustainable solution? The initial waste from building one windmill pollutes more than a cole plant would pollute given the same amount of energy produced over the lifetime of the windmill, were it to run in optima forma. And we all know how that turned out ..
The same can be said for all the batteries in 'green' electric cars, which contain extremely polluting materials such as toxic rare-earths. But hey, at least you are not exhausting as much CO2 as a regular petrol engine, right? Keep that head down in the sand allright.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[budgenator]

While he quietly buys a SF condo 3 ft above sea-level

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

You've misunderstood the IPCCs view on the sun.
They understand the Sun to be a major contributor to the climate, but they do understand that the recent warming is NOT due to the Sun for a number of reasons.
(1) The Suns output has not increased, yet temperatures increased.
(2) The Stratosphere is COOLING. This is important. If the Sun were warming things then the Stratosphere would NOT be cooling. This cooling is predicted to occur due to the physics of CO2 and is being observed.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sosume]

Not true. Take two glasses, one with seawater, one with fresh water. Add an ice cube to both, and measure volume afterwards.
The salt which causes the fresh water to obtain a higher volume, has to come from the sea water. Which loses some of its salt in the process, getting a tiny smaller volume, negating the effect you described.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

It's in Kenya (at Mt. Kilimandsharo) and in Equador (in the Andes). What do I win?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

No, they are 1) not the same scientists and 2) the global cooling was predicted for 5000 AC, which in no way contradicts a gobal warming until 2150 AC. It is still possible that it cools down in about 3000 years time. But for the next 100 years, we have other problems.

Please stop repeating prejudices you got somewhere without ever fact checking them.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Attila Dimedici]

We do know that it's melting, and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Yeah, it couldn't have anything to do with the undersea volcanoes that were discovered under the Arctic in 2008. The only possible explanation is global warming as a result of man generated CO2 in the atmosphere. We should pass strict government regulation of all aspects of our lives in order to reduce the CO2 emmissions by enough to delay global warming by a decade in order to offset this problem.
The Arctic volcanoes may not be the main contributor to the melting of the polar ice, but it is false to say that the "only explanation that has any evidence to support it" is that it is due to global warming as a result of CO2 emmissions.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Talderas]

Speak for yourself, but I have a philosopher's stone.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Attila Dimedici]

Yes, the influence of the oil companies is tiny when compared to the EPA, the NOAA, NASA, the Sierra Club, Green Peace, the UN, etc. There are an awful lot of organizations that have an amazing amount to be gained by convincing people to buy into AGW.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

All the climate raw data is published, the last data was published a month ago when some of the recording stations lifted the copyright on said data.
So come back when you have some valid claims other than "I don't know nothing, and I want it that way".

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could be. After all, coincidences still happen even in today's world. And that's part of my point. You don't want to set global policy based on coincidences."

By that logic, it sounds like you wouldn't change direction if a bus was about to hit you, because it could be just a coincidence that you and the bus happened to occupy the same space at the same time.

What evidence *would* convince you that it was time to act? How clear does it have to be?

For my part, if global average temperatures declined and sea ice expanded for the next 10 years without clear explanation, I'd have to admit something was wrong with the current interpretation.

"Plus, it's not a useful goal for us. We have to sacrifice more important goals such as poverty reduction and building a technological civilization."

I've got bad news for you. Climate change has the potential to put off global efforts at poverty reduction far worse than anything short of global war. Furthermore, one of the ironies of the situation is the fact that we're going to have to cut back on current fossil fuel use anyway as oil dwindles. That has potential to compromise our technological civilization in a big way, and we have to decide whether to resort to the biggest remaining fossil fuel source (coal), which will make the CO2 problem much worse, or invest heavily in alternatives to it. Any way you consider it -- even if you ignore climate issues -- big changes are coming for technological civilizations in the next few decades with regards to energy. Keeping food systems going as fuel prices climb ever higher is going to be a big challenge. We may as well get on with it whether you think climate change matters or not, because the end of cheap oil is upon us.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

You know, back in the 70ies, there was the expectation that the global weather may be cooling in the next 3000 years. (I still have my old books from the time ;) ). This in no way contradicts a global warming within the next 100 years.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

It seems you're getting your info on environmentalists from Fox News stereotypes rather than the real world. Most intelligent environmentalists (the type you're likely to run into on Slashdot) DO advocate for nuclear power, and none want to turn the world communist or have us live in caves.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah good thing none of that ice is on land in, say, the form of a glacier, Mr. Genius. Your Nobel prize for debunking the entire theory of sea level increase due to climate change in your landmark Ice Cubes In A Glass experiment is ready to be collected.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sycodon]

"We are."

You aren't. Go ahead and do it right now. Post that Nuclear is the answer and that they should quite bitching and arguing over ice sheets and just build out nuclear. Then YOUR problem goes away and MY problems goes away and we are all happy campers. I expet that will stick in your craw and you won't be able to do it without all kinds of Ifs and Buts.

"The fact you think Al Gore has anything to do with actual science"

The fact that you don't understand that Al Gore is major driver of the political component shows you are clueless as t how our nation works. "Experts" don't get to wave their hand and summon new public policy.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

One kook predicted global cooling in the '70s and, unfortunately, got onto the cover of Time. But whatever, keep spewing the same old fiction.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Having never had a single predicition come true - and several rather public exposures of kindergarten like mistakes, the IPCC lurches once again into the area of fantasy. All it was ever about anyway was the money. And the Arctic, still colder than the 1800's. The ice is still thicker than the 1940's when the R.C.M.P. traversed the North West Passage in the fishing vessel St. Roche - in both directions.

But the quest for your money still goes on.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AmiMoJo]

perhaps you need to accept that the western lifestyle is unsustainable

Fortunately the alternative is a better lifestyle, not going back to the dark ages as many climate change denialists like to claim. We have reached the tipping point where green energy is cheaper than fossil fuel or nuclear power, and new technology cuts down on waste e.g. by reading the news on a screen rather than dead trees.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sycodon]

Bottom line for jandersen is that AGW is NOT important enough to solve it with the technology we have not, that works, and is practical. Sure, it can and will get better. But the longer you keep whining about it, the longer it is until we get it under control.

He'd rather we solve it they way HE wants, through restrictions and taxes. Hey, who's agenda is that? Hippies and wacko environmentalists.

And then there's the Shut up, you don't know what your talking about thing. Yeah, standard fall back position of assholes and jerk wads.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sycodon]

Then you and you buddies have lots of work to do because the majority of Slashdotters like and understand Nuclear about as much as they do Fox News.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[kevinNCSU]

driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

How does one achieve less than zero Jesus in the new stone-age?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jc42]

Almost correct. But you got the wrong Kenyan mountain. Mt Kilamanjaro (which has had several spellings) is about 2 degrees south of the equator. This is a common mistake, because that's the African mountain that most people have heard of, probably because it's the biggest one. But there's another large volcano nearby whose glaciers are exactly on the equator.

Ecuador is correct; now we'll see if anyone here can name the mountain. It's been in the scientific news a bit recently, so there may be some /. readers that know its name. It's one of the mountains where the Incas buried people in the ice, for unknown reasons. The rapid melting of the glaciers has exposed some of these mummified bodies, and archaeologists have had to do a lot of work collecting and preserving them and their associated artifacts, before they decay.

I'm not sure how to score this. Maybe you should get one point for each of the country names, and the mountain names should each be worth a point for whoever gets them right. ;-)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably what flintclappers said when they started smelting copper. Then coppersmiths complained about their evil bretheren who added tin to it to get bronze.
Finally bronzesmiths also complained about the end of civilization when others started the unproven process of smelting iron. Glad all of our ancestors weren't like you, else we'd still be wondering whether it's safe to leave the trees.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[hairyfeet]

Uh huh. you DO realize that there are BILLIONS to be made from the biggest scam since CDOs, which of course i'm referring to carbon credits, aka "indulgences for the 21st century" yes? That Mr "inconvenient truth" as set himself to become a carbon billionaire by leeching off the west with said scam, yes?

Or that rev Al also farts around in a personal Lear jet and has a house with an indoor basketball court that sucks down more AC than 30 single family dwellings while telling you that YOU must pay? That he also has the giant brass balls to say those very same energy pigs are 'carbon neutral" because he pays himself with credits from his own company which would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket and calling it "wealth redistribution" and demanding and GETTING a tax credit for doing so?

Old Rev Al Gore is just ONE example of the leeches set to make a killing from this. If you'd like I can show you the same person who helped to invent CDOs is now helping to create carbon derivatives or let you see that Goldman Sachs, kings of leeches are all ready to blow some carbon bubbles but why bother? you'll just deny it and mod me down, yes?

Anyone that thinks this whole thing doesn't come down to $$$ is frankly a fool. And notice how NEVER, not once, have you EVER seen Al Gore and friends come out in favor of heavy tariffs for China and India, who both have said they won't play the carbon game? Why is that? Because they make money off of them silly! In the end it all comes down to 'More monies for teh RICH nom nom nom" while yet again fucking the poor and if you think these people actually give a flying fuck about saving the planet I have a nice bridge to nowhere you might be interested in.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

Now, global warming is based of measurements we are not allowed to see, using programs we aren't allowed to see,

"We are not allowed to see?" "I can't be assed to look for" is more like it.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

Sounds like you got a plan, if you've saved up for air conditioned spacesuits for your descendants to wear outdoors.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Eivind]

There's a finite amount of resources - but the ones we have stay around. There's no simple way, for example of using up iron. (though you may offcourse end up making the iron more or less accessible)

Nevertheless, you're both sorta right. There's no physical reason that all of humanity can't have the material standard of the west. But there's societal and technological reasons - we can't do that *today* with todays technology and todays education and so on, without laying waste to a huge fraction of the ecosystems.

Energy ? Current human consumption is equal to the power shining freely on 5% of Sahara. (no it's not *currently* possible to harvest that power and sell it at market-prices. But have you looked at price/performance charts over the last couple of decades?)

In the meantime, it's a good time to pick the low-hanging fruit, that is, do those things that significantly decrease our impact, without hurting our living-standard much. Keep in mind, for example, that if USA became Sweden, then CO2-emissions would drop 40%, and the living-standard would stay about the same, for example.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

13,000? That's like 4.3 9/11s per year! Seems like an excellent use of effort and money compared to the wars in the Middle East.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Baloroth]

Notice that the rise of sea levels he calculated, if all sea and floating ice shelf ice melted, is ~4cm. Wow, that's almost two inches! A massive threat to mankind and the future of our way of life!

Sorry if I ignored a 2.6% volume increase due to the rise of salinity. But seriously, cities aren't going to flood because of sea ice. Land ice, maybe, but not sea ice. There is a reason most scientists completely ignored the melting of sea ice. Because it really isn't a problem. Might be a (very) tiny contributing factor.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Baloroth]

Yeah, which is why I said sea ice. Which you notice the article is about. As opposed to land ice. Which, with only reading the summary, doesn't enter into it at all.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[ginbot462]

>> This is also why freezing pop cans is a bad idea.
The opposite is true (for carbonated drinks at least) too - leave a coke zero in a hot car in the summer. That said, the expansion of a gallon of salt water wouldn't be noticeable.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Name a single power source that actually operates in a functional free market scenario.

Coal? They externalize nearly all theirs costs onto the residents of the land they mine; dam failures, heavy metal poisoning, increased cancer rates, and the permanent effects of mountaintop removal are all (incredibly expensive) externalities paid by the communities neighboring the mining sites.

Oil? Would we be in multiple wars costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives if we weren't defending our oil supply? That's a massive subsidy right there, even if you value the lives of foreigners at nearly nothing.

Natural Gas? Maybe that one's not so bad, although with phracking picking up, it's going to get a lot worse. What's the monetary cost of a town's drinking water becoming flamable? Obviously nothing right now, but under a functional free market, it would have to be determined.

Seriously, where's your unsubsidized power source? Or, is it a functional free market, as long as all the externalities are being paid foreigners and poor people?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the pro-Global Warming people are using a failed page from the Evangelical Christian handbook. i.e. using shame, guilt, and browbeating in order to get the rest of the sheeple into compliance with God's (now Gore's) plan.

The climate debate is being treated more as a religion than a serious science, particularly when it comes to how dissenters with valid points are villified.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[rabun_bike]

Your two statements have absolutely nothing in common and you have only succeeded in weakening your otherwise valid energy argument. Autism is a problem that now researchers have determined may start very early in the womb mostly like due to environmental issues. If you have spent any time with an autistic kid perhaps you could assess for yourself that Autism is not an illusion or delusion. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-12/mri-scans-diagnose-autism-near-perfect-accuracy-new-study

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny: this was labelled insightful, despite a complete lack of insight. There are no anti global warming people. There are, however, people who understand that there is a group of people whose agenda is to manipulate any data they can, in order to instill enough concern to keep money being wasted on pointless research. The research is pointless, because it can never be all-inclusive, or even close, and there are too many countries, like China, that refuse to lower or even slow the growth of their pollution emissions.

Rehashing tired rhetoric, with no constructive outcome isn't insightful. It is actually quite the opposite.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[rabun_bike]

First, your use of the word "alarmists" and then a capitalized word next to it screams Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox and Friends, etc. Just do a search on Google using only those two words "environmental+alarmists" and see what comes back. I call assure you it isn't a who's who representing the "fair and balanced" view.

http://www.google.com/search?q=environmental+alarmists

Or you can try the "Green+Agenda" Google search. That comes back with some even more interesting search results for even more fringe web sites.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Green+Agenda

Truly pathetic really.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[CrimsonAvenger]

Most intelligent environmentalists (the type you're likely to run into on Slashdot) DO advocate for nuclear power,

Well, no.

On /., most of the environmentalist types are rabidly anti-nuclear. The only ones who seem to be pro-nuclear are some of the engineers and the few of us who've actually been nuclear plant operators.

Or are you limiting the phrase "intelligent environmentalist" to the point where there are only a handful on /.?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

A lot of anti-nuclear nuts have come out since the Fukushima incident but I'd say the majority are still pro-nuclear.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

The second law of Thermodynamics is the problem.

"There is no such physical process which only effects in transporting caloric energy from a warmer body to a cooler."

So whenever you move excess heat from an already cooler building to an warmer outside, you need at least a second process to make that happen - and this process in all cases involves putting even more heat out.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[XanC]

AC? What is AC? I assume you mean "AD", but have some objection to "Domini". You should have the same objection to "Christ", though.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[sgt scrub]

It is completely irrelevant any way. Everyone with any common sense knows that the antartic, el ninios, la ninias and all of that science mumbo jumbo have no effect on climate what so ever. You just tell Jesus what kind of weather you want. Take for example Rick Perry's group prayer meeting for rain in Texas. Well. That is probably a bad example. If a real Christian, like W, would have done it we would have had rain and stuff all summer long. It is True! Jesus said!

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[JDeane]

In this case I would say its more like telling a cancer patient with 2 weeks to live to stop smoking.

almost inhumane to deprive them of what they enjoy so much with the time they have left.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

You want a climatologist to discretize the climate equations, choose the numerical solvers, choose the best way to reconstruct the initial condition from later measures ? That's the job of mathematicians and of informaticians.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

Sorry, I meant "AD".. in German the abbreviations are "v.Chr." and "n.Chr.", and because the time before the birth of Jesus is called "BC" in english, I was fast with using "AC".

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[XanC]

Fair enough! I couldn't have even started to post in German. :-)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[blueg3]

I elided the sciencey bit because I suspect you don't care what heat capacity is. Though if you're not at least familiar with simple thermodynamics, I can't imagine how you would manage to accurately evaluate the scientific rigor of a large field of research where a good grasp on thermodynamics is necessary.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you support Carbon taxes?

Do you support raising the cost of energy through expensive retrofits of existing plants?

Do you support closing coal fired plants?

Do you think energy should be more expensive as a way to reduce consumption?

Congratulations, you are a wacko environmentalist. Probably haven't bathed in a week either.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's more like people arent willing to accept what a C student in high school science announces as "fact", just because we happen to be aligned with him, politically.

But, yeah, name calling and black and white thinking is all we do in America anymore. You're a shit cock eating nigger lover fuck bag. There. That's, so much easier than critical thinking, no wonder that's how the country works.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Forty Two Tenfold]

When was the last time you actually researched the subject? It looks like you are basing your argument on feelings and misinformation. The modern Thorium / molten salt reactors are extremely safe, efficient and clean; actually the cleanest possible method to produce energy en masse.

Not very long ago. The MSR designs are not modern, the technology is 5 decades old. Where are the "safe" power plants? Oh, wait, there are none. And you will not be able to flag them "safe" until a number of them have worked flawlessly in real life conditions for a few decades. Simply put, "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."

Would you argue that building wind mills is a more sustainable solution? The initial waste from building one windmill pollutes more than a cole plant would pollute given the same amount of energy produced over the lifetime of the windmill, were it to run in optima forma.

[Citation needed] on that windmill pollution. Also, mining the nuclear fuel destroys the environment in a constant manner.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Only if you buy in to the hype that preventing global warming creates a better world. Else Joel Pett is just another idiot.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Learn to think will you. Energy isn't everything. Our energy needs are high because of the way we live. Everything that consumes energy requires resources to manufacture. There just isn't enough resources on the planet to sustain that type of living for the whole world.

Given that energy is raining down on us at the rate of up to a kilowatt per square meter for effectively eight hours a day, energy isn't a long term issue. We can afford a more consumptive lifestyle than we currently enjoy. Further, it's pretty obvious that a lot of stuff isn't energy dependent. My entertainment doesn't require a lot of energy to produce or consume. My food doesn't nor does my shelter. My work doesn't either.

Sounds to me like you're suffering from the very "myopia" you claim is a problem. So maybe it is.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

No, we won't run out of fossil fuels in a few decades. We have enough fossil fuels to increase atmospheric carbon dioxide to ten times what it's been for the past million years, which would in turn cause warming of over ten degrees Celsius, which in turn would cause global catastrophe.

"Global catastrophe" is such an ambitious term for inconvenience. The solution to even a 10C increase is to simply live where it's either habitable or economically valuable. Also, we're not stupid. There are various ways to tie up carbon, if too much of it ends up going into the air.

It doesn't matter what you think about politicians. They're going to act no matter what you think. We're not all waiting around for khallow's agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which seems to be how you're acting. It's not up to anyone to convince you. You need to convince the people in charge that we shouldn't be reducing emissions if you think that's what we should do. So far, you don't seem to be doing a good job of it. You seem to be preaching to the choir of deniers.

But it seems to me rather counterproductive to do something stupid rather than listen to khallow's input. Wise people thinking before they leap and all that.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

But in this comment you shine through. I understand you. It is 100% human selfishness.

It's remarkable how much certain ideologies project onto their opponents. The very simple rebuttal to your above accusation is the observation that global warming mitigation will most likely plunge hundreds of millions of people into poverty.

So who is being selfish here? The person who says "Hey, let's wait a little while to see if this is really going to happen." or the person who would plunge hundreds of millions of people into poverty because their beliefs warrant it.

Needless to say, I don't think you have thought through at all the ethical problems associated with greenhouse gas emission reduction. I believe you are the selfish one, willing to harm the entire world in order to preserve an illusion of what you think the world should be like.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[517714]

Apparently you DO know shit because it appears you have your head up your ass.

Melting of ice that is currently above sea level has a much more significant potential impact on ocean levels than does thermal expansion.

FYI: Seawater is densest at about -3.5 degrees C, and it freezes at about -2 degrees C. The temperature of the ocean is rising at .13 degree C per decade. The average depth of the oceans is 3790 m. The thermal expansion coefficient of seawater is approximately 0.0001 . Therefore the sea level rise due to thermal expansion is the product of those three numbers, approximately 0.05 m (2 inches) per decade. While I recognize that this is not without consequences, I think that directing others to focus on that issue instead of the other issues associated with global warming may lead them to the false conclusion that we can mitigate the impact of global temperature changes.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GooberToo]

Not even nuclear can provide the unsustainable energy needs and lifestyle for everybody on the planet.

Nice troll. By definition, of course what you said is true - after all, its "unsustainable." But hey, if we simply remove that misleading word, suddenly your statement is factually wrong. But hey, we shouldn't let things like facts stop you from willfully misleading people.

The FACT of the matter is, we have available enough resources for THOUSANDS of years of nuclear power, even after accounting for growth and corresponding increases in energy demands. And with enough research, likely we have enough fuel for millions of years. But hey, don't let facts stop you from spewing political bullshit.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

i pay about $10/month in electricity which is currently higher than i would like it to be. I try to buy local. I cook my own food. i try to buy organic (no oil based feerts/pesticides). I walk everywhere. I do carpentry with handmade japanese hand tools. I try to use low-power electronic devices. I have a solar charger for my n900. My energy use would be lower if i could find some affordable land to build a sustainable homestead, have a permaculture garden (i'm lazy[apparently not by anybody elses standards]), house designed for zero energy, man-made pond for rain catchement, bamboo and sand bio-filters for clean water, composting toilets, etc...

Believe me, i'm pretty sure it's not me that has to change. I'm not advocating hippie tree-hugging lifestyles, i love luxury and comfort, and believe technology has immense benefits especially in the dissemination of ideas. I just believe intelligent holistic integrated designs can provide us with a better lifestylethan most of us currently have.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Land is extremely scarce.

Remarkable that you can make such silly statements. So given the vast amount of land you mention, why do you still claim that land is "extremely scarce". As to "limits of our ecosystem", the way you can tell if a limit has been reached is that there will be large continent-scale ecological failures. No such failure has ever been noticed except in prehistoric times, such as during the ice ages or the Lake Toba supervolcano eruption 70,000 years ago.

We have reached the limits of our ecosystem and it is very scary

I chose not to be scared by fantasies.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SnarfQuest]

One kook predicted global cooling in the '70s and, unfortunately, got onto the cover of Time. But whatever, keep spewing the same old fiction.

Are you talking about Al Gore? Oh wait, he's the one global warming kook.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

You're missing the point, theoretical energy capture has nothing to do with current reality. Even if we had infinite energy we don't have infinte resources. I don't know about your food or shelter needs, i myself pick up an instrument and play if i want entertainment. For the vast majority of people a trip to the supermarket involves driving a car (immense resources to build and burns fossil fuels), buying food trucked in or flown in from thousands of miles away that was grown using petroleum based ferts/pest/insecticides, packaged in more petroleum based products, etc...

Who knows, maybe you are different and buy locallygrown organic food, built a rammed earthhome with your own too hands and listen to acoustic musicians for entertainment, but you're being myopic if you think that's the wester lifestyle.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Arlet]

Undersea volcanoes do not have anywhere near the required energy to melt Arctic ice. Please come back after you do the math.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Yay, someone who can think. Theoretical futures really have nothing to do when they arrent connected to the current present. I'm even for anincrease in energy and resource usage IF it where to be used to build a sustainable infrastructure for the future, unfortunately we currently just use it tobe more wasteful.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

Defense rests.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Sigh, infinite energy is useless when you have only finite resources to build the technology that consumes said energy. And we are talking about the present reality where we are destroying and depleting our natural resources to provide a high standard of living for just a small fraction of the human population, not some theretical star trek future where we can just synthesize matter from pure energy.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

By that logic, it sounds like you wouldn't change direction if a bus was about to hit you, because it could be just a coincidence that you and the bus happened to occupy the same space at the same time.

Your perception is at fault here not my logic. A reasonable person would not have reached the above conclusion.

I've got bad news for you. Climate change has the potential to put off global efforts at poverty reduction far worse than anything short of global war.

I've got bad news for you. The chicken little approach has the potential to put off global efforts at poverty far worse than anything else, including global war. Even a full blown global thermonuclear war just kills a lot of people and be over. The survivors (who will be there, contrary to Hollywood movie hype) can pick up the pieces and rebuild their civilizations. Global hysteria which creates the conditions it is hysterical about can create very stable and highly dysfunctional systems. I don't want generations of people lost because we didn't know how to deal with global problems such as global warming.

As I see it, the number one problem is poverty. It leads to a great variety of major human problems of our times such as overpopulation, human suffering, crime, and lack of regard for human rights and environmental issues. The proposed solution of greenhouse gas mitigation will impose a direct economic burden on the entire world and drive many people, I think hundreds of millions, into poverty.

The key problem is that you are monkeying around with the energy and transportation system for the entire world. And only a fool thinks that raising the cost of every action or of moving things won't hurt a lot of people.

Any way you consider it -- even if you ignore climate issues -- big changes are coming for technological civilizations in the next few decades with regards to energy. Keeping food systems going as fuel prices climb ever higher is going to be a big challenge. We may as well get on with it whether you think climate change matters or not, because the end of cheap oil is upon us.

So what's the hurry? It's not going to be any easier or harder to have those big changes a few decades from now rather than now. But if we put it off, we'll be wealthier, more knowledgeable, and in general, more capable of adapting to the change.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

More CO2 in the atmosphere at this point *is* uniformly bad.

"uniformly bad" except for the Northern Hemisphere and plants which don't have the most efficient photosynthesis cycle.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Three words: "knowledge-based economy". I have almost no connection to global warming, its causes or consequences. So I don't have a stake in it.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Attila Dimedici]

Really? How much energy is being released by the volcanoes under the Arctic? The ones that scientists believed could not exist because the water pressure was too great (not that volcanoes could not exist there, but that this type could not exist there)?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Arlet]

How much energy is being released by the volcanoes under the Arctic?

It was your suggestion that it could be significant, so why don't you enlighten us ?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Spent any time with an autistic child? Just my whole childhood. The problem with most autism research is that they ignore the autists. Humans are capable of perception along many continuums, autists are frequently restricted to a few continuums or to certain sections of the continuums. Picture the brain as a multi-core cpu where you can run a large number of cores at the same time or just one or a few cores at greatly accelerated speed. Autists, like all other humans, can be divided into the two major categories of mindcentered or body-centered. We are frequently akward because we don't have full control of either, being restricted to a small subset of each one.

How much greater speed? Take vision for example, a normal person with 3d perception when hit in the eye will see a flash of light before the object seems to hit them, 3d processing is intensive. Take away the 3d perception and you can see the flash as the object perceptually hits you. Added bonus, 2d images are easier to store than constructed 3d models of the world, this is the way to go for photographic memory, certainly made school a lot easier for me. As well, you canrepurpose the whole 3d construction area into vizualization for mathematics. Same with sound, binaural processing is intensive and consumes lots of attention slowing down ones rate of sampling. Up side, it's great for echolalia when you can here minute changes in frequency at high sampling rates, downside is you sample too fast to hear syllables and your speach becomes stilted and mechanical. I could say more, but really nobody seems to be interested, because i 'claim' to be somewhat normal now and everybody just KNOWS autism isn't curable and you can only be taught to deal with it. Someday everyone will realize that the autism-neurotypical continuum is a continuum that we all share and can all learn to traverse up and down, after all what else is 'being in the flow'.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

We already have those things in the US. We call them buildings and cars. And just bringing water solves the problem of walking or working in a slightly warmer outdoors.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

I'm all with you on this. Unfortunately the large corporations and goverments arent. It's easy to design water and air filters that can be 'recharged/purified' at home, but which company is going to back a product you only sell once or that a normal person can construct with off the shelf parts?

I have great hope for the role the internet can play in this and amdesigning a system for the free exchange of sustainable design and ideas, now if i could just get a development system to start coding (i'm currently stuck on an island in the carribean that lacks a choice of inexpensive systems and nobody has yet ported any development systems to android). I'd kill for a common-lisp port to android with access to the android api's.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

You're missing the point, theoretical energy capture has nothing to do with current reality.

And here we have the crux of your delusion. For current reality, you're right. For future reality, you'll be wrong.

Even if we had infinite energy we don't have infinte resources.

Nor do we need infinite resources.

I don't know about your food or shelter needs, i myself pick up an instrument and play if i want entertainment. For the vast majority of people a trip to the supermarket involves driving a car (immense resources to build and burns fossil fuels), buying food trucked in or flown in from thousands of miles away that was grown using petroleum based ferts/pest/insecticides, packaged in more petroleum based products, etc...

And what makes you think that's a lot of energy? I think you don't understand the problem.

Who knows, maybe you are different and buy locallygrown organic food, built a rammed earthhome with your own too hands and listen to acoustic musicians for entertainment, but you're being myopic if you think that's the wester lifestyle.

I don't have to go "Mother Earth" here. As I noted earlier, even the Western lifestyle doesn't use that much energy. It's only your opinion, issued in ignorance of the massive rain of energy that comes to Earth every day, that disagrees.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[SomePgmr]

I spent some time over the course of my life, embarrassingly enough, steeped in pseudo-scientific, religiously motivated nay-saying. So I can say (with only anecdotal authority) that it was common practice to seek out minor aberrations, and prop them up before the masses as serious, mitigating evidence. It bothered me even then, and now it really irritates me.

Something was carbon dated and the results came back silly-short? See! Radiocarbon dating is bullshit... except when it suggests we're right.

Someone found a teapot in rock strata that should date it at 500 million years? Well I'm not surprised or suspicious. The earth is really only 10k years old.

Now I'm not properly schooled in geology, archaeology, climatology, biology, etc. But the glaringly amateurish arguments I've seen make your glacier examples seem almost tame and inquisitive by comparison. When you're willing to throw out the conclusions of all the people who do know more about something than you do, unless it comfortably fits your world view, any wacky conclusion becomes entirely plausible.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't doubt for a second that you can find various predictions that proved false. But let's be clear, the AGW thing has irrational screamers in both directions because it's been adopted as a political battleground. It was bound to happen.

I expect that most any rational professional considers any good data without the kind of unwavering foregone conclusions that people scream about. The problem here is that there's a vast majority of professionals saying one thing, and political ideologues saying the opposite, while desperately searching for anyone with a PhD to add to their rolls. What does that say to us laymen?

But ignoring the politics of the thing for just a second... I think there are a host of reasons that examining the issue is a good thing. Our explosive growth and correlated output of generally nasty things can't be good. The question remains, "How bad?" Finding that out is a reasonable pursuit, I think. The rest is politics.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[tmarsh86]

Almost correct. But you got the wrong Kenyan mountain. Mt Kilamanjaro (which has had several spellings) is about 2 degrees south of the equator.

I'm not sure how to score this. Maybe you should get one point for each of the country names, and the mountain names should each be worth a point for whoever gets them right. ;-)

First, Mt. Kilimanjaro is not in Kenya, it is in Tanzania. The first place is Mt. Kenya in Kenya. The second place is Cayambe in Ecuador.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jbengt]

Water is odd about being heated or cooled compared to most other materials. Water actually expands when it is cooled, which makes it less dense as it cools,

That is just wrong. Water expands as it cools only near its' freezing temperature. Above 4C, it expands with rising temperatures and contracts as it cools. Salt water may behave slightly differently, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, but it still generally contracts as it cools.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GooberToo]

You seem to have completely missed the point. Honestly, how you managed to do that is beyond me. The contention was that nuclear power is "unsustainable", and therefore not an option to pursue. That's factually false. Period.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

More snow is not an indication of temperatures getting colder and may indicate warming temperatures. The colder air gets the less water vapor it can hold which means the less snow it can drop.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[jbengt]

We do know that it's melting, and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

I suggest you RTFA, which is about non-temperature-related issues, such as wind, currents, etc., that have a large effect on the extent of Arctic ice but are not being taken into account in the climate models.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Layzej]

The study you site reaches a similar conclusion by looking at sea ice extent over the last 10000 years. They find that polar ice is much less stable than previously thought. They find that 8000 years ago there was likely much less ice than there is today. This is surprising because although we were at the height of the current interglacial at that time, it was not likely much warmer than it is today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

So the two studies reach the same conclusions using different methods. In fact, we are seeing Arctic ice volume plummet, so this also confirms the conclusions of the papers: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2011/05/piomas-april-2011.html

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Attila Dimedici]

I was replying to someone who said that excess CO2 was the only explanation for the melting of the Arctic ice cap that has any evidence supporting it. There is as much evidence that the undersea volcanoes are driving the melting of the polar ice caps as there is that excess CO2 is doing so, especially in light of the recent revelations that all of the global warming computer models understate the amount of heat that is being radiated off into space.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

If the Alarmists TRULY believe in what they are preaching, they would be advocating wildly for Nuclear power in whatever form.

Even if we ignore all other problems with nuclear power - it needs cool water to work. How many nuke plants had to shut down this year because the water was too warm or too little or too much? (of course neither because of Global Warming)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Curate]

I found your post to be an interesting read. Unfortunately I don't have mod points right now.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

I didn't miss the point, i made it. I said energy needs AND lifestyle. Resources are needed to produce the energy consuming technology which are currently produced in an unsustainable ecology damaging fashion. Unlimited energy does nothing to change that, nor are there currently sustainable methods for disposing of nuclear waste that don't amount to sweeping it under the rug and leaving it as somebody elses problem. We have to live in the present not some theoretical future, though those idealistic futures should be used to guide our present course, which unfortunately they aren't.

Honestly, how you managed to do that is beyond me. :)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

btw, i also didn't mention that nuclear power should not be pursued, that was your assumption.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Thank you. Unfortunately i still have a hard time expressing my thoughts in a linear fashion that is intelligible to most people instead of being seen as random clumps of detail which are seemingly disrelated. Don't get me started on syntax and grammar! That's why i love lisp so much :)

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no Jesus in the stone age...he didn't show up until the Iron age and later.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[gzuckier]

yeah, just like when your house is on fire and the firemen don't know how long before it collapses, that means it's probably pretty safe.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Also, the warming of the oceans will expand the water.

Water is odd about being heated or cooled compared to most other materials. Water actually expands when it is cooled, which makes it less dense as it cools, which is the reason why ice floats. This is also why freezing pop cans is a bad idea.

It is BAD SCIENCE like this that makes the anti-GW people challenge the GW adherents. Fudge factors in the computer programs are the least of it.

And yet the OP is absolutely right, and you did the BAD SCIENCE.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[gzuckier]

never mind nuclear energy. the real point is that not even the US military can provide the unsustainable resource needs and lifestyle for everybody in the US. this is not news; trying to tell the US public this cost Jimmy Carter his job; the public liked that actor fellow who kept running the ads telling people they can have it all. they still do. apparently, we can't even provide basic medical care to everybody in the US and/or food and shelter to folks too old to find a job. still, who cares, as long as we are the best, eh?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

I support doing what is technically necessary for our plants to be as safe and clean as possible. I despise the bean counter mentality you exhibit. We should be a nation of engineers showing the way forward, not a nation of MBAs refusing to improve our energy plants because it would cost money.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Please let me know when you start "talking science at me" because .

... you sure wouldn't know science when it jumped up and down in fromt of you with a huge sign saying "SCIENCE".

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Energy isn't everything.

Human innovation is the single more important factor than energy. Everything else is substitutable. Everything.

Regardless of how much energy is contained in the sun the fact is that we cannot tap into it at this point in time

Why say things that are obviously wrong? We have a variety of ways to directly intercept and use the power emitted by the Sun such as solar cells and solar thermal systems. We also have indirect ways such as wind and plant energy. Hence, your assertion is trivially disproven by existing, well-known counterexamples.

The western way of living requires taking resources from other countries.

It's called "trade" and everyone practices it. We exchange something you value which I provide for something I value which you provide. It's not climate science here.

Grow up, you are not the only country on earth, you are not the only society entitled to the bounty that the world has to offer.

No society or entity is entitled to the bounty that the world has to offer. Someone instead has to struggle to free that bounty. Today that society is the developed world which does most of the thinking and economic activity in the world. Tomorrow, it could be someone else who does the heavy lifting. In any case, none of those parties are responsible for other peoples' or societies's faults.

The empty whining about the West "taking resources" ignores that those resources were freely offered, were paid for, and were used. That means jobs and lives for the people who extract those resources. So is it better when resources just sit around not doing anything for anyone?

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[gzuckier]

Unfortunately, it seems that formal logic is not your strong suit, or you would not use
"It is thus equally obvious that if the Sun provides less warming, the temperature would drop, also regardless of any greenhouse effect. Similar if the Sun should provide more warming, temperature would go up."
to prove that changes in temperature therefore must all be due to changes in the Sun
or use
"we have several periods of significant climate fluctuations in history and no known human or geological causes"
to prove that
"it is stupid to explain any variations seen today as caused by humans only."
But never mind global warming, you had better get after that liar Smokey the Bear, with his "Only you can prevent forest fires." After all, we know there were forest fires before there were humans, so it's obvious that it is stupid to explain any forest fires seen today as caused by humans only.

Perhaps you might want to argue from a more physical basis, explaining just exactly how a change in the Sun can make the Earth warmer while keeping the Moon at the same temperature. It's not really clear from your post. I assume you've thought all this out, and aren't just wasting our time. Or perhaps you could explain how an increase in the Sun's output can heat up the lower layers of the atmosphere while cooling the outside layers of the atmosphere, which are more exposed to solar radiation. I've tried to mimic this effect using my toaster oven and various forms of insulation but it just won't work out for me. Something to do with the laws of thermodynamics, apparently. Or for that matter, how it is that an increase in the Sun's output has its greatest effect on the poles, which are least exposed to the Sun, and least effect on the tropics, which are more exposed to the Sun.

Also, you definitely need to explain to us why all those measurements of solar output we can do these days are just big fantasies.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[riverat1]

Oh, really. Care to be specific because I can't find anything that says the arctic has been totally ice free in the last million years? I assume you're not talking about in the last few years.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Sique]

There are also the Ruwenzori Mountains at the border of Congo and Ruanda, which have glaciers. The mountains lie about 23' north of the equator, while Mt. Kenya at 9' south already lost most of its glaciers. Neither one of the three mountaintops (Kibo at the Kilimanjaro, the Ruwenzori and Mt. Kenya) lies exactly at the equator. In the Andes the exact equator actually touched ice at Cayambe, but since 2006 the glacier has retracted so far to the north that there is no completely white point on the equator anymore.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Wow, you have problems.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

I just wonder how do so many US'ians get brainwashed like Khallow. It's like they live in a seperate reality.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[gzuckier]

I just wonder how do so many US'ians get brainwashed like Khallow. It's like they live in a seperate reality.

I take great exception to that. They don't live in any reality at all, they live in a separate fantasy, where the universe is full of infinite resources, tended by friendly savages whose only wish is to provide them to us as cheaply as possible, because they so admire our civilization, lifestyle, character, morality, and intelligence, and they know that we deserve to live like Roman emperors while the rest of the world lives as serfs. After all, we were smart enough to be born here. Gotta watch for those sneaky ones who try to be born here when they don't deserve it though!

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[toddestan]

Salt water is more dense, so the fresh water ice cube displaces less fluid in the salt water than it does in the fresh water. Yet it will add the same volume of fluid to both glasses when it melts. So for the salt water glass, the fluid level will rise (slightly).

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[mrchaotica]

Colder or hotter than usual, caused by GW. Wetter or dryer, caused by GW. More of fewer thunderstorms or snowstorms, also caused by GW.

And that makes perfect sense. Why? Because adding energy to a system increases volatility.

Think of a glass of water: undisturbed, the surface is flat. But when you shake it (adding energy) the amplitude of the surface increases greatly even though the average height of it remains constant.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

Wow, you have problems.

And you have no argument to offer.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Jmc23]

Really, why would i bother? I'm not crazy and you are set in your beliefs and nothing will change that. You're just another person who disavows responsability and refuses to see reality as it is in the present. I'm trying not to be mean or anything, but i'm here for argument in the literal sense and not in the colloquial sense.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[khallow]

And you're someone who got creamed by destroying their own argument. Let me remind you that you made a statement which never was and never will be true:

Regardless of how much energy is contained in the sun the fact is that we cannot tap into it at this point in time

This is probably one of the worst "own goals" I've ever seen on Slashdot. One merely needs to look at plants and human's use of them to see an obvious, glaring counterexample that dates from before the beginning of civilization or even of humans for that matter. There's no excuse for such error.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Eivind]

It just annoys the hell out of me with the people who are like "anyone who's conserned about the environment wants to send us back to the stone-age". I suppose luddites exist, but they sure as hell aren't the norm.

And with all due respect, turning into Sweden (with respect to GDP/CO2) is a far cry from going stoneage. It *is* possible, or indeed easy, to substantially reduce pollution, while having only a small, or in some cases even no, impact on living-standard.

Renewable energy, except hydropower, isn't currently competitive with burning oil or coal or gas to create electricity -- but that's mostly cos energy is dirt-cheap. You can buy a *lot* of energy for your salary today, it depends on where you live, but for example here in Norway a single hour of work at average salary, earns you about 300 Kwh.

Yeah, if you bought windpower, the same salary would earn you only about half that. But 150Kwh for an hour of work, is *still* very cheap - not anywhere near "stone-age".

Furthermore better efficiency means we get more and more comfort, more and more goods, more and more value out of each Kwh. For example a modern but standard norwegian house, needs only a third of the energy to stay warm and comfy in winter, compared to houses 30-40 year old. And a modern car uses only half the petrol of a 25 year old one -- while having *better* comfort and performance.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually thermal expansion will account for a significant amount of sea level rise. If its warm enough for the ice to melt sea level will rise.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[TheTurtlesMoves]

So in other words you don't know. Feeling good is not being good.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[AmiMoJo]

Germany, Italy and Japan's government are all behind green technology now as they want to be rid of nuclear. At least something positive came out of the Fukushima disaster.

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[LibRT]

Well, in the US in 2008 there were 16,272 murders (or 5.91 9/11s) - is that a compelling reason for police to set up roadblocks, randomly stop people and arrest/incarcerate them because they may be statistically more likely to be about to commit a murder (ie: they own a gun; they are black and/or poor; they refuse to provide evidence they are not about to go kill someone, etc.)? Hell, there were nearly triple the number of suicides (34,598, or 12.43 9/11s) in 2007 - does running that through your "9/11 significance filter" make you in favor of "suicide roadblocks", set up to incarcerate people who seem a little down?

I certainly agree that just about anything is a better use of effort and money than the military mis-adventures in the Middle East (which have equalled at least 38.11 9/11s in Iraq and at least another 3.74 9/11s in Afghanistan civilians).

Re:Doesn't matter what they report

[GameboyRMH]

And you've got an air conditioned game reserve (or maybe one populated with desert animals) to get meat in? And a hydroponic farm for crops? Maybe a fish farm that can sustain itself if ocean acidification hits a tipping point? An air conditioned exercise room (or maybe night vision goggles) since exerting yourself outdoors will be extremely exhausting? Hey even if you're fit your kids will probably want to play.

You're gonna need to be rich to afford all this stuff...

I guess

[phantomfive]

I guess we'll all drown, then.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess we don't know how to use colons.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the arctic ice is floating. When melting the volume will shrink so that the resulting water will occupy the same amount of space in the ocean that the ice previously took.
Melting the ice off Greenland will have a larger impact on the ocean level than what melting the arctic ice will have.

Re:I guess

[McGuirk]

I guess we don't know how to use colons.

Where would a colon be useful in that sentence?

Re:I guess

[phantomfive]

That was my question, too.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess we don't know how to use colons.

I guess we don't know the difference between a colon and a comma then.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

He's referring to the 1942 accident at sea where a vessel went off course and collided with a oil rig because of absence of a single colon in the navigation log.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I guess you don't. Get an irrigation.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere. And since we don't know how to use them, it wasn't useful in the headline either.

Re:I guess

[Samantha Wright]

I believe this is more a comment on the suspicious newspapery usage of a colon in the headline. Maybe we could commission "a new research" on it?

Re:I guess

[bunratty]

Melting Arctic sea ice will not raise sea level. Melting ice sheets on land (mostly Greenland and Antarctica) will make sea level rise.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean "Will take LESS space then the original ice". Water expands when it is frozen, shrinks when it melts.

Makes me wonder - how much will the sea level drop if only the arctic ice melts.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly opposite of the way newspaper headlines use colons.
A newspaper would have had "MIT:" at the start, since that's who's doing the saying.

Re:I guess

[AiwendilH]

Ahm...not at all? I thought the the amount of space water skrinks at melting is the amount of space the ice has above the surface of the water. So if ice melts the space it takes in the oceans will be the same.

Re:I guess

[turkeydance]

oh yeah, that. sorry.

Re:I guess

[colinrichardday]

But the liquid water would absorb rather than reflect sunlight as ice/snow would..

Re:I guess

[Sique]

Not at all.

It's pretty simple and known to man since Archimedes.

The ascending force equals the amount of water displaced. Floating ice thus will displace exactly the volume of water corresponding to its weight. And if it melts, it will have exactly the volume of the water displaced, because it's water itself.

Re:I guess

[zippthorne]

That is correct, for floating ice.

But is only part of the picture. liquid water's density also has a small temperature dependence. Warm water is less dense than cold, although a degree or two isn't going to be a significant percentage, it can still add up to noticeable changes in depth when you're talking about a column of water 4 km deep - it only takes a .04% increase in volume to equate to an extra 2 meters in depth...

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

1. If the arctic melts it's because the ocean is warmer, meaning it has expanded.
2. No climatologist on Earth believes that the Greenland glaciers can survive an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the long term.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It would also absorb more CO2 and other gasses.

Re:I guess

[LynnwoodRooster]

He was referring to the physiological colon, rather than the grammatical colon? Passing what I'm not sure, but if people don't know how to use it - we have a whole LOT of problems coming...

Re:I guess

[riverat1]

That's an important point. Open water has a lower albedo than ice so ice melting and exposing open water or land exacerbates global warming.

Re:I guess

[bane2571]

It will also provide a greater carbon sink, water being able to absorb CO2 and all.

Re:I guess

[Electricity Likes Me]

Which leads to ocean acidification which damages marine ecosystems and in turn exacerbates the depletion of fish stocks.

Re:I guess

[skids]

With the caveat that if it were fresh water, there would be a counter-trend bump when large quantities of water between 0 to 4 degrees C were warmed. This is apparently not the case in salt water, however, and yes, thermal expansion is a significant contributer to rising sea levels. Also viscosity increases tide amplitude IIRC.

Re:I guess

[Qzukk]

This is true for freshwater. Most of the ice is freshwater, however the ocean most certainly is not. The ocean saltwater is far more dense than the ice, therefore the ice displaces less than its volume.

The difference is a few percent at most, as other people have pointed out, greenland losing its ice cover will dwarf whatever tiny rise the floating ice will cause.

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Sea ice melts -> darker water is exposed -> more heat retained by ocean -> warmer water expands -> sea level rise.

Re:I guess

[gzuckier]

3. Strengthening Connections or Adding Examples
1. When one unit of information expands or derives from another, consider putting a colon in between them. This makes the relation between the two units more obvious as it alerts the reader to regard the latter unit as significant to the former. This rather advanced use of the colon enables connecting two sentences together in an elegant and more concise manner, as it saves up on some wording.
The new club president was elected by an extremely narrow margin. The count was 8,756 in favor and 8,250 against.
[The reader has to put in some thinking in order to realize the purpose of the given figures as related to the election results]
The new club president was elected by an extremely narrow margin : 8,756 in favor and 8,250 against.
[The colon makes the connection between election results and figures clearer]

http://www.whitesmoke.com/punctuation-colon.html

Re:I guess

[Samantha Wright]

Dear sir or madam,

I write to you to inform you that I very much do have a firm grasp of the colon's proper usage; indeed, one of my hobbies is historical typography and its proper usage. In this case, regardless of whether or not your post was made with the intent to implicate error on my part or not, I feel the need to place emphasis on the jarring absence of the title's conformance to any of the conventions which you outlined. One possible correct usage of the colon in this situation would have been to place "MIT:" at the start of the statement, deleting ": MIT" from the end: in this way, the colon would naturally indicate the flow of material in compliance with the general course of English prose, which is from left to right. Comparably, the example you have given would be unnatural were the two sentences reversed on either side of the colon.

Yours,

name withheld

Re:I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Warming waters expand. We can't just focus on ice.

Should be interesting

[DanTheStone]

We obviously won't be able to stop this melting by just reducing emissions. It will be really interesting to see what happens with shipping lanes and military strategy if we can go right over the pole (with boats, instead of just with missiles).

Re:Should be interesting

[phantomfive]

More importantly, even if we CAN stop this ice from melting by cutting emissions, we aren't willing to do what it would take to cut the emissions that much. Most people would rather have a car than a polar bear (and me too, to be honest).

Re:Should be interesting

[SnapShot]

It would be different if I could ride a polar bear to work, though.

Re:Should be interesting

[bunratty]

Cutting carbon emissions doesn't mean we can't have cars. It means that cars need to be more energy efficient in the near future and run on energy not derived from fossil fuels in several decades. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions doesn't mean doing without. It seems that most people who don't want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions really just don't want to lower their standard of living. Fortunately, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly and keep our standard of living.

Re:Should be interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself please.I hope you die in a car accident tomorrow.

Re:Should be interesting

[phantomfive]

Wow, I'm being messaged by a polar bear. Sorry about your home bear, not gonna do much about it.

Re:Should be interesting

[phantomfive]

According to Hansen et al., we not only have to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we have to start removing it immediately because there is already too much.

Your solution is talking about 'running on energy not derived from fossil fuels in several decades,' but that isn't soon enough. We need a solution that will work now.

In other words, if Hansen is right, we're screwed. Because we aren't going to implement a solution right now.

Re:Should be interesting

[buchner.johannes]

Cutting carbon emissions doesn't mean we can't have cars. It means that cars need to be more energy efficient in the near future and run on energy not derived from fossil fuels in several decades. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions doesn't mean doing without. It seems that most people who don't want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions really just don't want to lower their standard of living. Fortunately, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly and keep our standard of living.

And save money at the same time as reducing resource usage.

Re:Should be interesting

[bunratty]

According to Hansen et al (from the link you gave) "An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects." We do have decades to act.

Re:Should be interesting

[salesgeek]

Does this mean we should stop mowing our lawns?

Re:Should be interesting

[LynnwoodRooster]

Don't listen to him - he's a fake bear. Bears don't have thumbs and thus cannot use the space bar.

Re:Should be interesting

[riverat1]

No, just get a push mower. The exercise is good for you.

Re:Should be interesting

[Arlet]

Not really. Reducing carbon emissions only delays the point where we've burned all the useful carbon in the ground. Since the CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for over 1000 years, it doesn't really make a difference whether we burn all the carbon in 100 years or in 150 years.

If you want to keep CO2 lower, we need to decide to leave some carbon in the ground, and never use it. At the same time, we should probably find a way to sequester existing CO2.

Re:Should be interesting

[Electricity Likes Me]

Or you know, an electric mower.

Re:Should be interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate change is just a myth created by the liberal media to make Sarah Palin appear wrong about Putin coming to get Alaska first!

Re:Should be interesting

[ginbot462]

I don't know, having a polar bear would be pretty cool (for me, not him ... I live in the south). I could give all the Coke (Cola that is) he wants, but I expect he would be a bit hot.

Re:Should be interesting

[tehcyder]

Does this mean we should stop mowing our lawns?

Yes, just buy a sheep and let it graze. As a bonus you get some free meat in the winter when you slaughter and barbecue your lawnmower.

Re:Should be interesting

[mldi]

We obviously won't be able to stop this melting by just reducing emissions. It will be really interesting to see what happens with shipping lanes and military strategy if we can go right over the pole (with boats, instead of just with missiles).

And that's the problem with all this research. The focus should be 100% on the significance of the Human Impact, and just how much we can realistically do (or should do) to stop anything from happening... which really would probably be happening anyway. It has in the past, it is now, and it will again in the future.

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

No you don't.

The best source restricted

[Anonymous Coward]

The US military has detailed information on ice sheet thickness going back 50 years but it's mostly classified. The Russians have similar information and I think their excitement recently over exploiting the arctic shows where they think the trend is heading. They aren't looking at a 100 years from now but in the next decade or two. Most of the discussion is over coverage of the ice but the more telling is thickness. As the ice thins a huge part of the arctic could be exposed in a single season from a major collapse in sea ice.

Re:The best source restricted

[kenh]

50 years of data sounds like a lot, until you realize it doesn't even go back in time far enough to include the last ice age... It's like extrapolating the stock market's performance for the day by analyzing the previous few minutes of trading.

Re:The best source restricted

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is: Look at *any* satellite images! Compare 5 years apart. 10. 20.
It's blatantly obvious. Half the damn ice is gone!
And at that rate, you will be able to get to the north pole solely using a boat in a few decades/years

Now I don't even give a fuck about where it came from and why anymore. I just don't want that thing to get fucked up, that I have to live in and that I need to survive. You know fuckin EARTH.

I never understood some people. You don't shit in your living rooms, do you? Not even when it would have no effect. Which is quite a silly thought. So why do you shit in the atmosphere you breathe and water you drink?

Am I the only one who, as a software designer, thinks the concept of a process that can run forever because its net effect on the environment is zero, is very appealing and elegant? You know... with all resource transfers being a set of interconnected loops and everything getting re-used.
And the only energy source needed to drive them all, as is the case anyway for nearly everything on earth, is our awesome giant fuckin' fusion reactor in the sky! ^^
Now THAT is seriously cool!

Re:The best source restricted

[iggymanz]

I'm looking, but I'm not alarmed: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

how about 50 years ago? 75? oh, that's right, we have no way of knowing, do we?
br?
The temperature at the north pole has always been about 0 degree C each summer, knife edge of having or not having ice.

Re:The best source restricted

[Xyrus]

No, actually it is nothing like that. You are comparing apples to 747's. Please educate yourself about climate dynamics (or at least chaotic systems) before making absurd equivalencies.

Re:The best source restricted

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actually just like that. You fail to provide any argument why it would not be JUST like that, so it very much is...

Re:The best source restricted

[houghi]

If we only have 50 years data, how can you be sure there WAS an ice age? And if there was, then we must have more than 50 years of data.

Re:The best source restricted

[yurtinus]

Apples are crunchy, whereas 747s are big. Not sure why you think it's so hard to compare the two...

Re:The best source restricted

[Kingleon]

It depends on whether the question of interest involves how sea ice responds in the short term (the next 100 years) or the very long term (the next 10,000 years). There is no reason to include the Pleistocene (the last 'ice age') if ones interest is in the short term, as we would expect for nations. A trend of decreasing sea ice for 50 years is enough to project when sea ice will disappear in the next 100 years. Projecting onto longer time scales would, of course, be erroneous. As humans, our interests are almost always in the short term.

I'm a geologist, so yes, 100 years is the short term.

Re:The best source restricted

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you manage to make yourself believe , that that png image would be a satellite timelapse?
It is a drawing. I can make a drawing showing the sun revolving around earth too. Drawings are worthless. Their purpose is to spread lies.
The only half-trustworthy thing is unaltered observation/measurements that are hard to fake. Because that is the whole point of why I said "satellite images".

But you will see whatever supports your views in whatever you find, and find whatever supports your views, anyway. Because you don't base your model of reality on observation anymore, but force-explain everything you observe based on your delusional inner model. And if that doesn't work, simple ignorance kicks in.
Psychologists call that schizophrenia. Most Americans call it religion.

Re:The best source restricted

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Apples are crunchy, whereas 747s are big. Not sure why you think it's so hard to compare the two...

747s are also crunchy. Think Godzilla.

Re:The best source restricted

[yurtinus]

See? Perfectly comparable. OP needs to expand his imagination.

The usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to see here citizen. Move along now.

We're just going to keep pretending these long term problems are not a big deal.

Because when it IS a big deal.. We'll be dead by then. So.. S.E.P.

Better link

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw ibtimes, worthless ad-walling craps.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110811113956.htm

Re:Better link

[Jeremy Erwin]

Better yet, here's the actual paper

Typical science news...

[Darkness404]

Typical science news "ZOMG our predictions could be wrong, but we need $x million to do more research about if we are right or not". Everything is made into a crisis to get more funding. Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.

Re:Typical science news...

[interkin3tic]

Everything is made into a crisis to get more funding.

Therefore it's absolutely safe to conclude that there can be no possible crises ever.

[/s] SARS, the bird flu, and the swine flu were made into crises by the media, not scientists. If you equate what you hear in the news with science, you've got big problems. As far as MERSA goes, it does seem to be fairly bad. I don't know if some scientist told you that everyone was going to die in 3 years if they didn't get funded or what, but this anti-science thing you've got going on is stupid.

Re:Typical science news...

[Anonymous Coward]

> the swine flu

Scientists made than one a lot worse, because it was labeled a pandemic following the criteria
that were set up in advance. The scientists who made those criteria failed to account for
"technically a pandemic, but without the corpses rotting in the streets".

Re:Typical science news...

[chrb]

Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.

Can you point to a single reputable scientist who claimed that everyone in the world was going to die from a flu pandemic? I'm not a flu expert, but my personal opinion is that the scientists actually understated the threat of a flu pandemic, whilst the media overstated it. The problem with the media is that they deal in the now, and have very little grasp of reporting long-term threats. Scientists tend to be more cautious and won't make predictions that aren't backed up with numbers.

The 1918 flu pandemic infected 32% of the world's population, and killed 3% of the world's population. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason why such a pandemic couldn't be repeated today. And whether it will be more or less deadly is impossible to predict - H5N1 killed 60% of infected humans - a mortality rate far higher than the 1918 flu. If H5N1 was as transmissable as the 1918 flu then over 3 billion people would've been killed. This is a number and a risk far in excess of the danger of terrorism, and yet we will spend literally trillions of dollars "fighting terrorism", whilst we spend only millions seeking flu vaccines.

Given the potential danger from flu, and the fact that the victims would be everyone on the planet, it seems like the per capita risk is several orders of magnitudes higher than terrorism. And yet, all of the funding, and all of the political debate, focuses on terrorism. It's crazy, and people who brush it under the carpet by saying "well, we haven't had another pandemic yet", have entirely missed the point. The fact that the 2009 swine flu outbreak didn't kill millions isn't a reason to believe that the threat does not exist - rather, the fact that the 2009 pandemic turned out to be caused by an entirely unseen new variant of the flu that incorporated genes from 5 different viruses should prove beyond any doubt that flu evolution and mutation does pose a continued threat to humanity.

But instead of heeding this warning, people like you will say "Ahh stupid scientists got it wrong! Everyone didn't die". But in fact 18000 did die, and it is only down to chance that this particular flu variant wasn't more lethal and more widely spread. How many dollars have been spent for each victim of 9/11 fighting the terrorism threat? How many dollars have been spent for each victim of H5N1 fighting the flu threat? For whatever reasons, our society is very bad at assessing risk when it comes to long term threats. We judge everything through the lens of the media, which reports current events news, and anything longer than a decade can be kicked into the long grass in the political world.

Rant over...

Re:Typical science news...

[bunratty]

A pandemic doesn't mean corpses rotting in the streets. You can have a pandemic without a single fatality, if the disease is not fatal. Pandemic just means the disease is spread over a wide area, and does not give any indication of how deadly a disease it. I think the scientifically illiterate public are more to blame for the misunderstanding than scientists or the press. Scientists actually saved thousands of lives by determining that the young were most at risk and quickly developing an effective vaccine which was administered first to those most at risk.

Re:Typical science news...

[StandardAI]

Why not look at the illnesses of the past century? The eradication of smallpox, millions of lives saved from other disease through preventive medicine. You know nothing of what you speak of and choose to speak against the people who are actually trying to make the world a better place.

Re:Typical science news...

[cbeaudry]

There is so much to say about the latest swine flu fiasco I wont get into it in details, because its a much too long converstation.

However, 18000 deaths for a seasonal flu is just par for the course and also much below average.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flu_pandemic

There are many reasons why the flu, though something to keep a close eye on, is not to be as feared as it once was. Nutrition, general population health and hygiene to name a few.

Now, I'm not against vaccines, keeping a close eye on the flu strains and even putting out warnings when necessary, however the 2009 swine flu scare was not a media scare, it was a Pharmaceutical scare. They had ramped up the scaremongering, production and used their influence in the WHO to make huge profits.

With the scaremongering and WHO feeding the frenzy, countries had no choice but to buy in and buy in WAY TOO MUCH. Even if the scare is fake, if all other countries are buying vaccines, not buying them could kill a political career. :) I've gone and started on the subject... like I said, there is much still to be said about this subject.

Re:Typical science news...

[iggymanz]

the deaths from 1918 were from secondary infections. no penicillin, won't happen again.

Re:Typical science news...

[Anonymous Coward]

The hyped up illnesses are actually the result of good old corporate capitalism that enjoys selling overpriced drugs.

Re:Typical science news...

[Muad'Dave]

the deaths from 1918 were from secondary infections. no penicillin, won't happen again.

Not according to the article:
"...the virus kills through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system), which perhaps explains its unusually severe nature and the concentrated age profile of its victims. The strong immune system reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas those of the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths."

This could be managed today by steroids or other immunosuppressive therapy, not by antibiotics.

Re:Typical science news...

[KDR_11k]

I think the politicians are to blame for the Swine Flu panic, they're the ones who were screaming about the end of the world and stockpiling vaccines and stuff. The public didn't care, nobody took those free vaccines. Only the pharma industry is happy about the situation.

Re:Typical science news...

[NetNed]

Organizations like the WHO and CDC do seem to overstate the problems quite a bit to, so it's not just the media. They get the info from the CDC and WHO, then add another level of spin to it. But the WHO and CDC do take the over reactionary route most times. That is why you see people in china and Japan wearing face masks.

It's more of a case of the boy that cried wolf. People hear these threats of a new pandemic over and over, yet they don't materialize. After awhile, people get desensitized to it and tend not to trust the reports anymore. The fault isn't all on the media, as scientists and doctors could stress at what level they think whatever new strain is at. The ones affiliated with the CDC and WHO are the worst at this, as they create a world wide panic without positive proof that these diseases could reach a pandemic level. They'd rather push a vaccination that a lot of times isn't the correct one for the diseases which adds to the level of distrust for these organizations and the media.

Re:Typical science news...

[iggymanz]

propaganda from big pharmy

Re:Typical science news...

[Anonymous Coward]

the deaths from 1918 were from secondary infections. no penicillin, won't happen again.

You made that up. Much of the lethality of the 1918 flu was due to the immune system's damaging the victim's own lung tissue, due to a particular gene carried by the virus.

Typical science hater...

Re:Typical science news...

[gzuckier]

So, if one side is saying "The science is settled!" and the other side is saying "We need more research before doing anything drastic!", it's the first group which is demanding more research?

Re:Typical science news...

[iggymanz]

No, renowned doctors in influenza viral pathology who practice actual medicine say that.

Politics?

[DreadfulGrape]

Interesting that /. has categorized this article as "Politics" instead of "Science."

Not that I'm complaining, necessarily.

Re:Politics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says all you need to know about /. editors, really.

Re:Politics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by a lot of the polarized replys it doesnt quite seem unfitting..

Re:Politics?

[Ol Olsoc]

Because it is politics.

This is attacked in the same manner as creationists attack evolution. The anti-GW folks start with a presupposition that there is no human effect on the planet's temperature, and go from that base to cherry pick data that supports their view. When you start doing that, it isn't scientific, it's political.

Over the years, I have asked the anti-GW people to give me scientific data instead of political talking points. To come up with a mechanism by which the Earth mitigates the effects of heat retaining gases, since the effect can - and is - proven in many elementary school science fair experiments. Can't get anything other than political or the cherry picked "one glacier is increasing in size" junk.

Re:Politics?

[Anonymous Coward]

So so-called "concensus" IS politics, not science.

Terrible Headline

[jmac_the_man]

The way the headline reads, it looks like MIT is accusing the UN of not taking Arctic ice into account in their global warming calculation, i.e. MIT says there should be less global warming because the UN forgot to calculate a cold thing.

That is the OPPOSITE MESSAGE from what the story actually says. Does slashdot even have editors anymore?

Re:Terrible Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone actually RTFA before making nonsensical posts in /. anymore?

Re:Terrible Headline

[phantomfive]

It seems more-or-less to represent the article. If you want a direct quote from the article that kind of conveys the same message, there is this one:

On the other hand, large cracks in winter's ice cover help create new ice, since the extremely cold air in contact with the liquid ocean promotes refreezing. Because "everything is coupled" in these intricate feedback loops, "it's hard to predict the future of Arctic sea ice," Rampal says.

Re:Terrible Headline

[AdamHaun]

Does slashdot even have editors anymore?

Yes, but they seem to think global warming is fiction.

Re:Terrible Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

lol... "Does slashdot even have editors anymore?"... had an account in 2001/2, people would say that all the time. Some things never change.

Re:Terrible Headline

[Jeremy Erwin]

Apparently, I've forgotten to read between the lines of a scientific paper, because it doesn't sound like much of a polemic.

Here's the discussion.

Discussion and summary:
Consistent with AR4, this analysis demonstrates that observed and modeled late 20th century Arctic sea ice loss cannot result from natural variability alone. Indeed, an anthropogenic influence on the most extreme observed 1979-2010 negative trends is now evident for all trend lengths examined (2-54 years). While CCSM4 can reproduce the observed ice loss, it also shows that internal variability exerts a strong influence on sea ice trends, especially on sub-20 year timescales. Comparing a six-member CCSM4 ensemble to observed trends suggests that internal variability has enhanced observed ice loss and facilitated detection of an anthropogenic influence on observed trends during the satellite era (1979-present). In a warming world, multi-decadal negative trends increase in frequency and magnitude, trend variability on 2-10 year timescales increases, and when internal variability counteracts anthropogenic forcing, positive trends frequently occur on 2-20 year timescales in the second half of the 20th century, and on 2-10 year timescales in the first half of the 21st century.

But maybe I've missed something. Read the paper and tell me what you think.

Re:Terrible Headline

[AK Marc]

Ah yes, the deniers add qualifications until they believe they've chosen an option that's true. "CAGW"

Re:Terrible Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

This being a political document, the UN is only going include science which the demonstrated evidence is iron-clad. They don't want to run any risk of some item in the report being shown to be wrong in the future, because they know that any such errors would be pounced upon by global warming denialists and UN haters in general. So if there are still some open questions about the sea ice, their response is going to be to wait a few years until the evidence is stronger.

 

Re:Terrible Headline

[tp1024]

We only have data of 32 years. The paper is trying to derive from that basis the natural variability of ice-cover over decades and assigns all the residual variability to non-natural - that is, anthropogenic - factors. They do that by integrating this data into huge simulation runs of up to 4000 years:

Over 4000 years of CCSM4 integrations were used to calculate trends for this study. Natural trends were derived from a 1300-year long control run with constant 1850 forcing (1850CNT) and from an 850-year long last millennium run with transient forcings applied from 1000 to 1850 (LM) (Landrum et al., submitted).

This isn't science. This isn't even just preposterous. This is ludicrous. It's cargo cult science if anything.

There is not enough data to tell what is natural and what is not - and you very very certainly cannot just go ahead and assign what you don't understand to human action. The problem is not that we don't know - it's that we cannot know.

Re:Terrible Headline

[phantomfive]

Oh, if only that were true. Unfortunately, anyone who has read WG2 can never believe that. WG1 is significantly better, though.

Re:So

[interkin3tic]

I was his colleague. He did refuse to play the political game. Also there was a strict policy against snorting whiteout that he was always running into, but it was probably more the political thing.

Re:Please

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because we've been pretending its not there for long enough, shouldn't it have gone away by now?

Please... warming == more energetic weather system

[Gnu Zealand]

I'll take the opportunity to re-state this: Global Warming is an accurate but misleading appellation. Warming a fluid system, such as a planet's atmosphere or water in a pot, results in more, and more vigourous motion. Weather will become more violent. Some places will get colder or wetter. Larger weather systems will mean, at times, more icy air will be swept from the poles into the temperate zones and similarly sweep warmer air to the poles. It will be disastrous and expensive. People who rarely see frost will get heavy snow, like us, today. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5443420/Major-weather-disruption-around-NZ

Re:Thaks for information

[salesgeek]

If only we had a best answer button.

Oh, great, another CRISIS!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What the previous poster was saying, was that 'just because it's a manufactured crisis doesn't mean that it is a crisis', and on that point he is quite right. Very few crises, whether man-made or natural, and cried out by the media *or* scientist, rarely come to pass. He didn't imply that crisis can't happen, just that the track records of both the media and scientists cast serious doubt on their claims, and it is their fault, no one else.

They have both learned that the squeaky wheel, and the crazy-eyed doom-spouting researcher or scientist, get the oil (money). It makes more sense now, doesn't it? They want to eat at nice restaurants and drive BMW's too, just like everyone that works for the UN.

Rather than wasting money and trying to avert climate changes that we can't stop (regardless if we caused it or not), we should be spending time and effort not on stopping it, but dealing with the change. But, because there apparently is not nearly as much money to be made in such planning, rather than in control of people's lives (which, what a coincidence, is very much what many government and UN bodies want), this will be considered 'Not doing anything!' and will not be pursued.

Independent, truly progressive thinkers, can now see this 'crisis' for what it truly is (a wealth redistribution plan, and a power grab), and be prepared to resist. Power to the people!

All of this reminds me of the eroding coastline where I live, that as the beaches disappear and the ocean comes lapping at the foundations of expensive condos and mansions, our state and local governments spend millions (every few years!) to 'replenish' the sand that waves have washed away. Mind you, this has been happening for all of Earth's history, the changing coastlines (so it's not Global Warming, friends), but what do we do? Stop building within spitting distance of the powerful, ever-constant, ocean's waves? No. Humans keep building on untenable and impermanent coastline, hope for the best, then seem shocked when one storm comes along and threatens all of this hard work. What nerve! Since we can't change mother nature, then we have to change something, right? So some people try to change other people's lives and livelihoods. No thanks. You can take your hysterics elsewhere.

Re:Oh, great, another CRISIS!!

[interkin3tic]

Thank you for summing up the already crystal clear argument there, but it's still confusing the media's sensationalism with science, and it's still fundamentally anti-science crap.

Independent, truly progressive thinkers, can now see this 'crisis' for what it truly is (a wealth redistribution plan, and a power grab)

I'll bite. Who exactly is going to profit here? The uber-powerful renewable energy industry? I've never gotten a straight answer as to who is buying off all these climatologists to get fossil fuels banned and profit from it, it's always "The government" or some crack about Al Gore.

By the way, my problem with those two answers: 1. The government is doing just fine with it's "Terrorist / child porn" power grab, making up a whole other one is complicated even for the government. 2. I have no interest in talking to people who are convinced that a former vice president is the evil genius behind global warming.

So some people try to change other people's lives and livelihoods.

How is that happening? I have just as much freedom if my electricity comes from nuclear or solar power as I do if my electricity comes from coal. It will cost more, but look up external costs

Not exactly news

[surveyork]

It has been known for a while that the 2007 report failed to include the effect of sea ice loss, mainly because there was no reliable data at that time, I think. We aren't going to drown in 10, 20 or 30 years, but sea ice is shrinking and thinning faster than previously expected. Most glaciers are shrinking too.

Re:Not exactly news

[bunratty]

I think you're pretty confused. The 2007 report failed to include the effect of ice sheet loss on sea level rise. The 2007 IPCC report did include sea ice loss, which has other effects, such as decreasing the albedo of Earth which speeds up warming. One thing in particular sea ice loss doesn't do is raise sea level, because the ice is floating.

Re:Please... warming == more energetic weather sys

[Marble1972]

Warming a fluid system, such as a planet's atmosphere or water in a pot, results in more, and more vigourous motion. Weather will become more violent.

That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence. And the place on earth with the higest average wind is Antartica.

I guess a heated pot is not a good approximation for a planetary weather system. So - no - I don't really buy the higher temperature = more violence meme. Nor the 'once in a lifetime' crap the media regularly dishes out.

Volcanic contribution

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

> I might add to that a natural volcano eruption produces so much CO2, that our silly civilization cannot produce in a half a century.

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/downloads/start.cfm?id=432

Every volcano on earth put together releases 1% as much CO2 per year as humans do.

I prefer to believe that you were quoting a source you trusted, rather than deliberately trying to cloud the issue. Now you know something important about that source's trustworthiness. Reason from there to an assessment of that source's motives.

And I'll NEVER forget!

[Anonymous Coward]

But in fact 18000 did die,

Every July, I dress up in my Red, White, and Blue and tell people about the ATTACK on this country by H5N1! The flue hates our Freedom!

They ask, "How can Flu hate our Freedom!"

And I respond, "it's because we're Free!"

If that's true, they say and it was about Freedom, then why didn't the Flu attack Sweden?! I say, "IT DID! That's how treacherous it is!

I've protested! And no one pays attention, but we wake up and find our nation ruled by the law of the Flu, they'll wake up! They sure will!

Non-anthropogenic causes

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

> It'll also give us time to weed out alternate explanations for the perceived global warming such as changes in solar activity, orbital configuration, or other non-anthropogenic possibilities.

What's an example of one that's not already been weeded out?

Solar output has been measured by satellite since 1978, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ACRIMIII/Images/solar_irradiance_right.gif. Orbit cycles have been understood for a long time.

Re:Non-anthropogenic causes

[khallow]

What's an example of one that's not already been weeded out?

All the one's I mentioned for example. The climatologists have a real trust problem right now.

Significance of Arctic ice

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Ice melting is a positive feedback mechanism. Less ice means less reflection, which means more heat gain, which means less ice.

Underestimating ice melting would mean underestimating temperature increases.

Re:Significance of Arctic ice

[Coolhand2120]

FTFY

Underestimating ice melting would mean not understanding temperature increases.

Observed data

[symbolset]

According to the Mauna Loa Observatory we passed 350 ppm annual average CO2 in 1990. Next April we're scheduled for our first 400 ppm observation and five years later our last under 400 ppm observation if trends continue. Since there's no way anybody's going to reverse the trend before then, 400 ppm is not an achievable target. 450 ppm isn't even an achievable goal. 500 might be doable - that's a 60 year target.

Re:Observed data

[bunratty]

Carbon dioxide comes out the atmosphere naturally, and even Hansen agrees that we can exceed 350 ppm for a "brief" time. Look at how Hansen himself says we can still reach the 350 ppm target!

Re:Observed data

[symbolset]

It's 2011 now. The maximum observation of CO2 at Mauna Loa observatory (the definitive reference) hasn't been less than 350 ppm since 1987, and the average since 1998. The trend for minima, maxima and mean increase by about 2.5 ppm per year and the trend is fairly constant. How does Hansen define "brief"? I think we're over that already. If Hansen is right we're already well and truly hosed and were when he made his "prediction".

We're hitting 400 ppm CO2 maximum observation next April, and I intend to hold a party on 400 day to raise global awareness of the issue. There's nothing we can do to prevent 400 ppm CO2, even if there were a global tyranny to shut down every POV and coal-fired electricity plant. It's going to happen. There's no way we're bringing global CO2 to 350 ppm in the next century. It cannot happen. So how brief is "brief"? If its less than a hundred years, we're hosed in Hansen's theory - which is not quite the same thing as being hosed in actual practice.

There's a mantra available to help you over this bump:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

Re:Observed data

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that radiative filtering is a cumulative reduced efficiency calculation right?
For each portion increase of CO2, each portion has less to filter or absorb.
also .. plants like CO2.

Re:Observed data

[Arlet]

Carbon dioxide comes out the atmosphere naturally

Yes, it does, but it takes centuries.

Re:Observed data

[Anonymous Coward]

I intend to hold a party on 400 day to raise global awareness of the issue.

Daaaaamn, who are you? A single party by symbolset will get global attention? Dude, I wanna party with you!

Re:Observed data

[gzuckier]

You do know that radiative filtering is a cumulative reduced efficiency calculation right?
For each portion increase of CO2, each portion has less to filter or absorb. .

Yes. You do know that every IPCC report points out that energy retention is a logarithmic function of CO2 content, right?

also... weeds seem to like CO2 more than crop plants. You do know there are two different photosynthetic pathways, right?

Re:Observed data

[gzuckier]

For billions of years, the natural state of the atmosphere was much higher CO2 and warmer and wetter than any living species has seen. Carbon oxidizes exothermally, you see, and it doesn't "come out the atmosphere naturally" unless plants harness solar energy to reverse the reaction. And then the carbon returns to the atmosphere as the plants oxidize (decay or get eaten), unless they get buried underground where they can't oxidize, like they did in the Carboniferous Era. Until people dig up the coal and petroleum and return it to the atmosphere as CO2 again, in an effort to replicate conditions last seen when there were no land animals and only primitive land plants. How do you expect the carbon dioxide to "come out the atmosphere naturally" now? All those massive forests we have these days falling down and getting buried because there are no land creatures to feed on them? That happening in your neighborhood?

Re:Global Hysteria

[riverat1]

I think your numbers are a bit off. According to Wikipedia distribution of the greenhouse effect among the important greenhouse gases is:

Water Vapor:-----36-70%
Carbon Dioxide:---9-26%
Methane:-------------4-9%
Ozone:----------------3-7%

Clouds also have an effect that is thought to be slightly positive overall. Clouds of course are highly correlated with water vapor.

The reason the numbers have such a wide spread is that the level of water vapor is quite variable and as humidity drops the other GHG's become more important.

Re:Please... warming == more energetic weather sys

[Gnu Zealand]

That sounds like typical denialist diversion. We DO know that adding heat to a fluid body does increase motion. Not buying "higher temperature = more vigourous" motion is denying thermodynamics. Care to posit an alternative theory?

Re:Please... warming == more energetic weather sys

[belg4mit]

100 year storm baselines are affected by warming (more energy), but other factors as well.
A 100-year flood often refers to the expected frequency of water accumulation in an area
from some, often-outdated, baseline calculations. As land is developed and natural permeable
surfaces are converted to black and green asphalt (the latter is also known as grass), the rate
of accumulation changes, magnifying the effects of stroms. Similar effects can be seen in heat
waves and wind strength.

Re:Please... warming == more energetic weather sys

[siddesu]

That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence.

Lol wut? The atmospheres of the outer, "colder" planets are quite unlike those of the Earth. A lot of factors can explain the "more violent" weather -- composition, energy, tidal effects from massive satellites, energy output from the planet involved (Jupiter outputs much more energy than it gets from the Sun), effects due to faster rotation, etc -- the outer, "colder" planets' atmospheres are nothing like that of the Earth.

Anyways, yours is a non-argument -- "hotter" and "more violence" in this context are only meaningful when talking about Earth, we're comparing "relative" violence of the same atmosphere, not some absolute "violence" measure valid across all bodies of fluid that wrap a planet.

Re:Global Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Clouds of course are highly correlated with water vapor.

As opposed to what? Peanut Butter? Next you'll tell me rain is highly correlated to liquid water.

Re:Global Hysteria

[belg4mit]

Natural, or backgrounds levels of greenhouse gases are what keep the planet habitable.
Otherwise the Earth would be like the Moon. This does not mean that small perterbations
are welcome or without effect. The climate is a chaotic system with many meta-stablestates.

Displacement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just want to point this out...

Since the arctic sea ice is floating in the ocean, it must already be displacing it's own weight (and volume) of water. (See Archimedes)

So when sea ice melts, it wouldn't cause sea levels to rise. Of course the impact on the arctic environment is another issue. Also, this doesn't apply to Greenland or Antartica, where the ice is on land. If that melted, it would have an impact on sea levels.

Re:Global Hysteria

[riverat1]

Clouds generally won't form when the relative humidity is less than 100%. That's their correlation to water vapor. Clouds and water vapor are two different things when it comes to their greenhouse effects though.

Re:Please... warming == more energetic weather sys

[catchblue22]

That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence. And the place on earth with the higest average wind is Antartica [sic].

Comparing the weather systems between Earth and say Jupiter/Saturn is like comparing apples to oran ^C ^C ^C ^C elephants. Different atmospheric composition. Different gravitation. They are gas giants. Their atmospheres are very deep. The chemicals in their atmospheres have different latent heats of vaporization than those on Earth. The main driver of weather phenomenon on Earth such as hurricanes is the condensation of water vapor, which is by mass a relatively small percentage of the Earth's atmosphere. I would speculate that on Jupiter or Saturn, you have chemicals condensing in storms that compose a very large percentage of the atmosphere (by mass). This alone would result in far more violent weather.

Honestly, who feeds you this stuff? You make me want to change my sig to

"A problem with the self-esteem movement is that it encourages idiots to be proud of their opinions."

But I like my current sig better.

What's really funny about all this bickering

[Jmc23]

is that regardless of what the exact amount of humans contributions to climate change is there is one undisputable fact. Western societies way of living is unsustainable and if the whole world lived like this we would rape our planet into oblivion.

I have the feeling that all these arguments are just distractions from the fact that everything has to change. It doesn't matter how much carbon can't be sequestered by the current rates of logging, if the whole world did the same as western society our forests would be decimated. It doesn't matter how much greenhouse gases are put out by our cars, just the resources required to supply the whole world would eliminate our resources. It doesn't matter how much methane cows give off, if everybody ate meat like the States all of our fresh water supply and arable land would be contaminated and barren.

None of it matters, it's just skating around the issue that the way we live is unsustainable, but we somehow feel ok with it because only we are doing it and not the whole world. How long are we going to let our own greed and fear of change prevent us from tackling the big picture and not having snot fights over the tiny little details?

Re:What's really funny about all this bickering

[e_hu_man]

someone please mod this up.

Re:Please... warming == more energetic weather sys

[yacwroy]

Of course it fails to explain many things. There are numerous other variables in play. "All other things being equal" is generally implied, and is certainly not the case with your examples.

Other planets: Different gasses, vastly different masses of atmosphere, vastly different gravity. Also, don't mistake windspeed for violence / chaos.

Antarctica: There's no foliage or water for friction. It's mostly topographically very flat due to ice build-up. It's at high altitude. Convection is most active at the extremes of a system.

Yes, if you take a simplistic glance at a complex system you're likely to perceive anomalies (the brain's geared toward finding em), but if you mistake your simple glance for something worthy of propping up an opinion (ie, I don't really buy...) that contradicts the vast majority of those (climatologists) that study said system, you're crazy.

are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

the earth is getting warmer because

1. manmade effects
2. natural effects

which is the right answer?

well, i know a better answer: who cares?

the point is, it's getting warmer. who or what is to blame? once you find blame, do you solve the problem? no, the earth is still getting warmer

we are homo sapiens. we don't grow fur. we kill herbivores and wear their fur. we don't find caves, we cut up peat moss and build huts. meaning: we don't adapt to our environment, we adapt our environment to us. in this way, we have conquered the world

now we face the spectre of losing crop land and shoreline due to climate change. we did it? nother nature did it? who cares! we do what we do: we COOL THE EARTH, because we don't want it to get warm

stop with the politician's effort of blame alloting. start with the engineer's effort of just solving the fucking problem

for the left: we are going to mess with the earth, seed the ocean with iron, etc. stop with your hand wringing. we are going to put our hands on the global thermostat and turn it down, and we're going to do it with science, and we are going to mess with the earth in dramatic ways. "oh no! you have to worry about unforeseen-" shut the fuck up. we already are messing with the planet in dramatic ways, so get over it, and get with the program of fixing the problem

for the right: you're going to pay for this in your taxes. don't like that? well, you can pay for it in destroyed coastlines and desert crop land. how do you like that genius? stop being such shortsighted greedy idiots and cough up some fucking dough to save the only home we have. it's YOUR problem, and we solve the problem as a COMMUNITY, individual action has no meaning here. contribute what you owe to maintain your home, assholes

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[yacwroy]

All well and good, but what about the fully foreseen consequences?

Global warming is one part of a two-part catastrophe, the other being ocean acidification. The oceans are taking far, far more hurt than the land. The bottom of the food chain (coral, plankton, etc) that ultimately gives us fish that make up a significant part of our diet (and many jobs) is in severe danger, and seeding the oceans with iron might just cause mass extinction.

We need to fix the CO2, not just the warming, else we devastate ocean life.

If we can do that through advanced science, lets do it. However, AFAICT, the best method we currently have is mass reforestation.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[aztracker1]

Thank you... I so wish I had mod points... it's been globally warming for a few thousand years now.. who cares why.. can we live/adapt to the changes? and can we slow/revert said changes... those are the questions to ask.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

seed the oceans with iron

1. phytoplankton bloom
2. suck up the CO2
3. die and sink to the bottom of the sea

although i heard some chatter this scheme was flawed. so someone think up another scheme

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Anonymous Coward]

we solve the problem as a COMMUNITY

The right doesn't believe in communities - their just for communists.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

the right is part of a community, they derive their sustenance and riches from it, but through either blindness or tactically calculated greed, they deny they have to give anything back to continue the money flow. after a few such assholes, the community is withered, and poorer, and everyone makes less money

the riches in your bank account is a direct reflection of the riches of the community you live in. rich community = rich individuals. no one makes money by themselves. on one is an island. no matter how many idiots think they are. the money in your pocket is a reflection of the exertions of everyone else. so you OWE motherfucker, so cough up, you selfish shortsighted bastards: pay your fucking taxes and support the healthcare and education of all. or they get poor, then YOU get poor, idiots

you pick fruit from an orchard. so help maintain the orchard, give back. or the orchard withers, and there's no more fruit for everyone. this idea you are an independent entity whose money is magically derived from only your exertions is egotistical blind madness that will destroy us all, kill the middle class

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...pay your fucking taxes..."

Who exactly are you talking to: the 50% of Americans who pay no taxes but keep clamoring for more government handouts? Obama's buddy Immelt at GE? Whenever I hear this tired refrain, I automatically dismiss the utterer as an idiot who knows nothing about how the world works. You want to raise taxes - fine! But any discussion about taxes that doesn't include taxes on accumulated wealth or money that US corporations park overseas rather than just on annual income of the productive members of society is completely disingenuous. Let's see how many liberal trust fund babies condescend to say 'I could pay higher taxes" to the real workhorses of the economy - the middle class and small business owners - if Obammy ever started talking about taxing accumulated wealth. Face it - the REAL reason the US tax code is so byzantine is to make it as hard as possible to keep citizens from changing strata in the social hierarchy. Nevertheless, useful idiots like you continue to lick your master's boot and thank him for whatever scraps from your labors he allows you to keep. Fuck you. I hope you die of ball cancer.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can I take you seriously when you don't even know the difference between "they're" and "their?" You must be a product of the left's stranglehold on the US education system. But I'll bet you have high self-esteem and know more about pop culture history than American history. If I received a resume from a semi-literate sack of shit like you, I'd laugh you out of the building.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Hardhead_7]

the earth is getting warmer because

1. manmade effects 2. natural effects

which is the right answer?

well, i know a better answer: who cares?

My computer is overheating because

1. It has poor ventilation
2. There is a ghost in it

Which is the right answer?

Well, I know a better answer: who cares?

I wish the IT guy would stop trying to blame me, and telling me that I should take it out of the cabinet under my desk. I just want him to come up with a way to fix it, but one that doesn't assume that he's right about the poor ventilation while sanctimoniously discounting my ghost theory.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

the us tax code is byzantine because we live in a complex economy where you can make your money in many different ways

idiot

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

poor analogy

try again

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[nharmon]

You need a new IT guy. Placing a computer in a cabinet under your desk is perfectly okay, and sufficient ventilation can be arranged.

Oh, you don't want to pay for it? Now you see where your analogy has come full circle to prove the OP.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Hardhead_7]

Why are you talking about ventilation again? Look, we can argue about whether or not there's a ghost in it all day, but please, I just want it fixed. And no more talk about ventilation. I'm not pushing my ghost theory on you, am I?

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Hardhead_7]

By the way, I love that the title of the OP is "are we engineers or politicians," and then advocates working on a solution without identifying the cause of the problem first.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[nharmon]

Ahh, you're strawmanning the argument. Got it. Carry on.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when people like you prove themselves to be idiots. You bitch about the tax code not being fair, then you immediately jump to its defense. Enjoy licking your master's boot, serf.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

i look forward to the day you are able to react to what someone actually wrote, rather than react to the alternative narrative that only exists in your head

or: i'm a slave arguing for slavery

man, you really got me figured out!

pffffffffft

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Hardhead_7]

How am I strawmanning it? I mean, you're the one that brought ventilation back up as a solution, not me. It's almost like you think the solution to a problem and it's cause are somehow connected.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could make a movie about alternative zombies. That would be great.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[circletimessquare]

we do know the cause of the problem. the earth is getting warmer. WHY is the earth getting warmer is a question about politics and blame, not an engineering issue

it's like you bought in an engineer to fix an overheating computer, and he found out the reason was the ventilation was blocked. your understanding of the situation is like saying the engineer can't get to work unblocking the ventilation until we figure out who blocked the ventilation. that question is not important to the engineering problem

that's what we call a proper analogy

you could use some work in that area of your cognition

that's just an engineering appraisal, of course

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Layzej]

Not quite so. We reached the most recent interglacial maximum about 8000 years ago. We have been on a slow decline since then - until recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could make a film about engineering zombies. That would be great.

Re:are we engineers or politicians?

[e_hu_man]

this is poor problem-solving though. if you force constraints upon yourself that don't exist, you may miss the optimal solution. perhaps the optimal solution in the above analogy is, "this person doesn't actually need a computer. turn it off." if you constrain yourself to "engineering" solutions, you will have missed it entirely.

maybe the right solution is simply, "stop driving and reproducing and flying and eating red (or really any) meat so damn much." such a solution involves no science except that which blames, yet if we could pull it off, we would avert an enormous amount of ecological risk.

i'm not saying stop trying to find the scientific/engineering solutions. just don't stop trying to find political solutions, even if that requires playing some blame games. i know, i know, when have politicians ever solved anything, blah, blah, blah, but we may not have a choice. in the end the scientists and engineers may not be smart enough.

Right. The science is settled.

[tp1024]

There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree. What's the point anyway in their childish insistence that predictions must be accurate. After all, this is a complex system those scientists are dealing with. I mean, hell, we don't even really understand how the ice ages came about or what exactly happened to the Sahara in the last couple of thousand years. We don't even know what the weather will be like next Sunday.

You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[KDR_11k]

Climate and weather are very different things. You can predict the climate far more than the weather, just as you can predict trends in a population better than an individual's daily schedule.

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[tehcyder]

duh, climate's just, like, lots of weather in a row

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[Oligonicella]

Really? Define for me the accepted time frame delineating weather. Now do the same for climate.

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Weather: hours and days
Climate: decades and centuries

Hope this helps.

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[Spoke]

The GP comparing weather to climate pretty much causes him to lose all credibility on the subject...

For those interested in the difference, NASA has a good article on it:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[Anonymous Coward]

>There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree.

right-o! and thats how science works.

right?

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[gzuckier]

If a lion is chasing me and I see a tree, it makes a difference weather I can climate.

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[gzuckier]

Since nobody has mentioned this, a big difference is that climate is much more interested in the basic deep causes of the surface phenomena we know as weather. Like the difference between microbial biochemistry and brewing.

Re:Right. The science is settled.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.

When the proposed solution is "commit economic and political suicide" you have to understand people's trepidations, especially in light of the scientific uncertainty.

Self-solving problems

[symbolset]

Firewood is a renewable resource. It just takes a lot of land to grow enough trees to heat a house, and there are more economical ways to use the fuel.

Geothermal should be good for some of the energy. Accelerating transfer of heat from the planet's core to the atmosphere will help radiate off that heat. If we need to, we can paint the planet white with airdrops of aluminum oxide. Algae fuels trap carbon temporarily. There are some other things we can do. Not that it matters.

There are almost 7 billion of us now (according to this 6,955,578,309 at this writing, 7 billion this year). 43 years ago it was half as many, and 55 years prior it was half of that. Continuing this trend, it was it was 1780 - about 230 years ago, or 120 years for another halving. Do you see where the steps get longer the further you go back? Some of the acceleration in growth rate is medicine, some is energy science, some is transportation. Science is killing us by allowing a yeast-growth law. If we had universal free power with perfect conversion, we'd find a way to get to 14 billion in 35 years and 28 billion in 60. Imagine that... 2071: some of my children are still alive and the world has 28 billion people in it. Yes, I know - the UN expects the accelerating growth trend of the last thousand years to suddenly reverse direction, much like the WP7 team expects their fortunes to turn around - for no discernable reason. I believe the UN estimates wrongly include many bilions of people starving to death, and I think we'll prevent that for the most part with humanitarian efforts, though of course many will die by famine where inserting food by force isn't feasible due to determined armed opposition.

By 2071 we'll be out of oil of course, having even tapped the arctic and antarctic reserves. We'll be digging out the last of the coal having doubled, redoubled and re-redoubled those efforts, and global climate will be at least 3C above present - which means British summers will be pleasant but the winters still intolerable, larger swaths of Africa and southern India will be uninhabitable but Frazier Island will be a destination resort. (Nonseq: that bay looks like a crater to me.) We'll have surrendered to gene mod crops and nuclear power, so vast swaths of the Earth will be unihabitable due to grey goo and nuclear meltdowns. Thermodynamics being what they are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be irreversibly melting, but it will still be a long time before they do melt and raise the level of the sea and vanishing Florida beneath the waves. Ice is not a great thermoconductor, so outer layers of ice delay the eventual flood that will come. Plenty of time for folks to move inland. Of course if you do the math by then the US National Debt is $4 quadrillion at least, and some models escape to infinity which obviously can't happen (can it?)

The world had 1.5 billion people when my great-grandmother was born, and I knew her. My eldest grandson is two years old. If the current trend continues my youngest great-grandson will die amongst a crowd of over 200 billion humans. Assuming: my youngest daughter is 5 now, and will have a child at 35 as her mother did (2041), and that youngest grandchild will have a child at 35 (2076) also that brings us to 65 years hence, or 2076 born and 84 years of life (assumes a lack of medical advances) gives the year 2161 to naturally pass on. It would take several medical miracles to allow me to meet this great-grandchild, but those are expected. On the current trend 200 billion world population is a fairly conservative estimate for 2161. But of course the current trend can't continue unless the future brings something I don't know about.

I used to worry a lot about this stuff - but you know what? In the longer view these problems solve themselves. We're fortunate

Socialists!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare they suggest that sea ice may be thinning four times faster than predicted? That's anti-American!

Apples fall, 747 fly ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, only an uneducated moron could think of linking daily (fluctuating) wind patterns and long-term (alegedly boiling) climate patterns, while an intelligent human being (which can obviously only be yourself) knows that there could be no relation whatsoever between the two, in roughly the same way as only a moron could link drops of water and rivers :-)

So, yes, your analogy is correct, as far as your bias goes : apples fall, exhibiting the same behaviour as last couple of years' (solar cycle #24-linked) temperatures; 747 fly, exhibiting the same behaviour as long-term predictions of the mathematically chaotic system called climate.

But, hey, who am I to argue : scientists are living in a very different world than you and I, and don't need to please their money-givers, and wouldn't care less what's the intended result for their ongoing research (and subsequent research money); ergo, they publish their findings, irrelevant of wether it soothes or bites the hand that feed them, no ?

--
Obligatory quote from Al Gore : "climate sceptics ought to be shot" ... here is the starting point for a reasoned and objective scientific analysis of the facts ...

Re:Apples fall, 747 fly ?

[Xyrus]

Yes, an uneducated moron would think the stock market and climate systems are the same. Because only an uneducated moron would compare forecasting an unbounded chaotic system with a bounded quasi-chaotic physical system dictated by a set of physical equations.

To illustrate, we can predict that temperatures in the winter in the northern hemisphere will be cold. You don't even need historical data to show this as a trivial 2D energy balance model can give an decent good approximation. The more details you add to this model, the more accurate it becomes. Then you can take this model and a set of initial conditions and let run forwards to see how well it predicts the climate.

You can even do this with a pure "zero D" energy balance model, though it will only show you the overall temperature of the globe. Once again, even a zero D model will give a fairly accurate prediction of global average temperature.

You compare this to the stock market, which has no set of governing equations. You can't create some model based on some characteristics and predict with any accuracy what will happen the next day, let alone the next year.

Climate models are not constructed based on hind sight. They are constructed based on physical equations. They are then COMPARED against historical data to determine if the model is accurate.

You guys still believe?

[xmorg]

I cant believe in 2011 there are still people out there that believe global warning and that if we pay money to companies gore is invested in we will be saved, lol.

MAYBE???

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to me when you "The Scientist" have an answer and not a Maybe..
For now it sounds like more scare mongering to justify a multi billion dollar Cap And Trade market.

In large natural systems that have existed for billions of years there exists a mechanism to keep things in balance.
The more you try to push it out of balance the more it takes to keep it there.

The Man Made Global Warming Catastrophe theorists would have you believe we are like a cart at the top of a hill.
EG - if we push to far, all of the sudden we accelerate into oblivion.

Natural laws says we are more like a cart at the bottom of the valley.

George Carlin

[ginbot462]

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentr

last time I checked....

[night_flyer]

at one time there were Glaciers all the way down into Texas, they didn't disappear because the dinosaurs were driving SUVs

Re:last time I checked....

[Arlet]

No, climate changes in the past have been triggered by a combination of solar output, continental drift, and orbital changes. Oh, and greenhouse effects too.

Unless you're claiming that orbits have shifted all of a sudden, or continents drifted in the last few decades, or that solar output increased, it's not really relevant, is it ?

How low can it go?

[Layzej]

There is a bit of a game each year as people speculate how low the arctic sea ice extent will go. The three measures are volume, area, and extent. It looks like we are certainly poised to break the previous record for volume, likely to break it for area, and may possibly break the previous record for extent.

A simple quadratic trend on the available data predicts that we may have an ice free September later this decade: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2011/05/piomas-april-2011.html.

Arctic ice minimum volume averaged 16500 km^3 between the late '70s to early 90's. We are now down to below 4500 km^3 and dropping fast.

The arctic ice acts as a buffer against global warming. The sea ice reflects 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space whereas open ocean will absorb about 90%. As the ice melts we could see accelerated global warming.

The good news is that the retreating ice may expose vast new oil resources.

Ice may be melting 100 TIMES AS FAST as predicted

[Rogerborg]

It's on this spreadsheet that I totally have on my other laptop. There's an official looking logo on it and everything. The logo has an eagle, that's how serious I am.

Now, give me funding or else your children will be raped to death by walruses.

Re:Ice may be melting 100 TIMES AS FAST as predict

[Stuarticus]

Don't worry, some idiot on the internet told me it's all nonsense and everything's fine! Keep the walrus lube though, it's good for all manner of unwanted sexual congress with marine mammals.