Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years

eldavojohn writes "The CBC reports on new research that shows thousand-year-old ice shelves (much different than sea ice) are breaking up and have been reduced by half in a region of Canada over the last six years. 'This summer alone saw the Serson ice shelf almost completely disappear and the Ward Hunt shelf split in half. The ice loss equals about three billion tonnes, or about 500 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.' More detailed pictures can be seen at The Conversation, with a quote from Professor Steven Sherwood, Co-Director of the University of NSW's Climate Change Research Centre: 'The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'"

Comments

"These observations should dispel..."

[AdamJS]

It has never and will never be that easy, Steve. Your optimism is appreciated though.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm not one who tends to dismiss things that experts outside my field say, but this statement is quite a blatant fallacy: just because it's been that way for thousands of years doesn't mean that any change is certainly not natural. It's these types of statements that cause so many to lose credibility. It doesn't give me much faith in someone's ability to interpret complex data when he can't even construct a valid deduction from simple facts...

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[surefooted]

Seriously. It's matter of fact statements like this that are the problem. One feel swoop,eh. Really...

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate change deniers shouldn't go around throwing stones about being unable to construct valid deductions from simple facts... ESPECIALLY not if they're Republicans. I'm just saying, glass-houses and all that.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

"I do not hava a science degree, and I do not really believe that mankind is capable of altering the Earth's climate and God promised there would never be another great flood, and if we were to do anything it would be bad for the economy..."

Yes, sadly presenting evidence is just preaching to the choir. Perhaps adding the cleaving of the shelf released golden plates that you the translated with the help of an angel who told you not to show the plates to anyone would make it more compelling. It's worked before.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Coren22]

Funny, but this gives no evidence of either man made or natural climate change. These ice sheets were created in the last ice age, which is still ending, so they were likely to melt either way.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

ITT:
* fact and hurried conclusion
* someone questions conclusion
* namecalling retaliation
* descent into bedlam

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the good old glass houses argument. Also known as "I can't be wrong because I think you/re wrong". Always a solid argument, unless of course the opponent is particularly cagey and knows the devastating "I'm rubber you're glue" defense which, as we all know, is unstoppable.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Professor (?) Steve needs to study the scientific method more or he's just a "Global Warming" funding whore!

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

Agreed!

what kind of scientist uses their biast opinion instead of facts. F'in prove it's not natural, then open your mouth Mr. Steven, till then your just another wannabe Jesus.

I guess the problem is we're not really sure what's going on, but that still doesn't mean people should be shooting statements wherever they feel like it, then again we're talking about people here...

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

I REALLY hope you are part of the Van Jones crowd and come marching down my street.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[SilentStaid]

Assuming that I'm rubber and your glue is invincible is actually one of the most classic blunders, only slightly behind never going against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

The only unstoppable argument is The Chewbacca defense.

Double reference!

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Layzej]

The height of the current interglacial was about 8000 years ago. Temperatures have been (very) slowly dropping back down since then - until recently that is. The magnitude of the current changes in the arctic are very troubling, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. The following graph shows that arctic summer ice was fairly steady at 16,000,000km^3 up until the 1990's. We are now down to 4,500,000 km^3 : http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f03a1e37970b014e885c65ac970d-pi

This has led some to characterize this as an arctic death spiral.

Data is available here:http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/data/

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

doncha love how people get all huffy when you challenge their new 'religion'?

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm not one who tends to dismiss things that experts outside my field say, but this statement is quite a blatant fallacy: just because it's been that way for thousands of years doesn't mean that any change is certainly not natural. It's these types of statements that cause so many to lose credibility. It doesn't give me much faith in someone's ability to interpret complex data when he can't even construct a valid deduction from simple facts...

Just because it's in nature doesn't make it natural. Even the little ice age took a century or more to set in. We're talking major changes in a couple of decades. Most of the changes were actually in the last decade. Climate changes happen gradually. How could I possibly know that? Let's ignore climate science since most people seem to anyway. There's plenty of evidence of the climate over the last million years, glacieral gases and such, and that's not swayed many people. How about evolution and extinction for evidence of how climates change? Sudden changes cause mass extinctions. The last one happened roughly 12,000 years ago and it wiped out most megafauna. Most extinctions happen during sudden changes and mainly when two changes happen back to back. It's believed species can adapt once suddenly but they need to recover to make further major changes. The last mass extinction happened because two changes occurred within a 100,000 years. There wasn't time to recover. Such extinctions are fairly rare and yet we are facing a second one 12,000 years after the last one. A tiny blimp in geological time. Now I'm not talking great extinctions like the one 65,000,000 years ago. The smaller mass extinctions happen every few million years and some times every few hundred thousand years. There are regular climate shifts that cause evolution to make species adapt. There's strong evidence that we are supposed to be entering into a gradual cooling period leading up to another ice age. That doesn't match with the "it's all natural" theory. How do we know that? Back to that nasty science and facts people hate so much. Ice core sample prove that the cycle has been going on at least as far back as the cores record, a million years give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Soil deposits indicate that it's been going on for millions of years. The over all cycle may go back 25 million years or more with the cycles getting more extreme in the last few million years.

The real truth is there is no amount of evidence that will sway some people. We have CO2 levels that haven't existed since before Neanderthals walked the earth. We are on track to hit CO2 levels that haven't existed in 60 million years before the end of the century. We're talking 60 million years of change in a couple of hundred years. In geological terms that's like flipping a light switch. Historically the only thing that has caused change that quickly were super volcanoes and one hasn't blown in the3 last 200 years so that wasn't the cause.

Say you don't want to give up your SUV but stop claiming it's all natural.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[canuco]

Yeah, but not in 6 years.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Jubedgy]

*Some* scientists have concluded that man is responsible for global warming. There is not a general consensus, the science is not settled.

However, if do you believe that humans are the cause of climate change (global warming, btw, went out of style years ago), feel free to do your part of reducing your "carbon footprint" and saving the planet by killing yourself. Thanks.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[gilleain]

Agreed!

what kind of scientist uses their biast opinion instead of facts.

I agree that it is unwise to pass opinion as fact, especially in climate change science.

F'in prove it's not natural, then open your mouth Mr. Steven, till then your just another wannabe Jesus.

One problem is the question : "what is natural?". The assumption (I think) is that the change is happening too fast to be natural. Or, more exactly, the change is faster than previously observed. Obviously, we haven't watched ice shelves for millions of years, but I suppose that there are ice core records

Personally, I don't want the ice to melt - whether it is faster than normal or not - but you could claim that there is a non-human ('natural') cause. The difficulty as always is to find this other cause...

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Ichijo]

Funny, but this gives no evidence of either man made or natural climate change. These ice sheets were created in the last ice age, which is still ending, so they were likely to melt either way.

No, the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. There was a more recent "little ice age," but that was a local phenomenon, not global.

But you're right that this doesn't prove that the global average temperature is rising. Again, it's only a local phenomenon, and it's possible that the ice shelves are getting colder but seeing less precipitation, resulting in the loss of ice mass.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

Nature zealots are shit, you have your head so far up your ass, is that china in there?

Stop posting on slashdot, it's too high tech for you, go find a tree to have intercourse w.

Or... post source, stats (from reputable people only), and how u have come to your optimistic conclusion of doom.

He doesn't have to prove anything to me, unless he wants me to do something about it, then he has to prove EVERYTHING to me, or he can go f' himself along w that tree.

You wish you knew 1/2 as much about science as me (pick a field).

Oh wait... there aren't any trees on the glaciers. Shit!

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me introduce you to this concept called rate of change. If takes thousands of years to build up, but vanishes in six years, then it got warmer a LOT faster than it got cold in the first place.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[magarity]

just because it's been that way for thousands of years doesn't mean that any change is certainly not natural.p>

Ah, but he must be one of those people who think the earth is ~5000 years old. Therefore, anything out of sync with the last few thousand years is unnatural.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[LordLimecat]

Nothing youve said changes the fact that the summary was a load of garbage. As GP pointed out, his conclusion in no way flowed from his premise

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Nox3173]

Must be all those Volcanic Eruptions and Illegal Immigrants, I'm pretty sure they're at the heart of everything.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

Ice melts naturally as per nature, we are constantly cycling an ice age, I believe we can still trace back to our old one. I'll be honest I think it's both. Part natural, part humans, we can't tell what is natural and what is caused by us because we haven't been watching the ice for very long on the ice's timescale.

Ice shelves melting are nothing to freak out about though, it happens all the time in nature, what is frustrating is the lack of evidence pointing either way and the accusing finger being pointed at humanity without proof. Also, stating that there is a problem isn't helpful, solving it is. If this guy's for real, he's on step 1 of 8 of the scientific method. It's just like the legalize marijuana conventions, a bunch of rabble shows up and expects to be respected simply for being there, marijuana is still illegal 95%, so what does that do for us, besides the scientist being the boy who cried wolf, and when the actual wolf comes, we're too busy w the boy.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[microbox]

The AGW argument doesn't fit into a single factoid. We know the climate change is man-made as follows:

• CO2 has increased since the industrial revolution.
• We know the CO2 is man-made by two independent methods. Firstly, we can account for it by recording the amount of coal/oil that has been burnt. Secondly, coal/oil has a different mixture of carbon isotopes, and these particular isotopes are accumulating in the atmosphere.
• We know CO2 is a green-house gas
• We have detailed models for how much forcing CO2 causes. These models make predictions which have been confirmed. (e.g.: go look at what models in the first IPCC report said about temperatures in 2011.)
• We know that the sun hasn't changed solar output, and that there are no systematic changes in cosmic rays, etc. There is no way to account for modern warming /without/ including CO2

AGW opponents will make any argument of convenience, but the case is straight-forward, and there was a scientific consensus on the basic details in 1979, according to an independent NAS report of that year.

Climate scientists have made *conservative* estimates of CO2 forcing and temperature predictions. The models did not predict the rapid decline of arctic ice, because they were so *conservative*. We could be in for much worse warming than what the IPCC reports say. But real scientists doing the work want to be careful about provided unbiased and factual evidence based science -- and so eschew anything that could be interpreted as hyperbole.

That is the reason why these melting icesheets give no evidence for man-made or natural climate change. The AGW argument isn't written in them. It is, after-all, a global phenomenon.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[gilleain]

Ice melts naturally as per nature

Sorry to say this, but this statement is nonsense. Yes, ice melts - that much is obvious - but the observation is that it is melting faster than records show. We can't conclusively prove it is humans except by removing everyone from the planet and watching what happens. Since (thankfully) we're not going to do that, the next best proof is to check what happened before we arrived. If there is no other cause - like massive new volcanoes in the pacific or penguins inventing explosives - I think it makes sense to at least look in humanities direction, if not point the finger at us.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

Choke on...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Variations_in_Earth.27s_orbit_.28Milankovitch_cycles.29

sourceless bastard!

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[scot4875]

This has truly been a constructive thread to read. I imagine that exchanges like this are commonplace in the upper echelons of science. Thanks for the glimpse into what must be your daily world.

--Jeremy

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[jbengt]

So "happens all the time" is on a time scale with a period longer than modern humans have been around? That's not what us humans consider "all the time". Further up in that article it shows that the ice volume is lower than it has been over the last 100,000 years. So evidence that that volume is decreasing at an accelerating rate does not reassure me that it is natural.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[scot4875]

You'll really take any excuse to rationalize the things you already believe, won't you?

Don't feel too bad, it's a known phenomenon and everybody does it.

--Jeremy

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

How is arguing with the article being a troll?

Shame it's a REQUIREMENT on slashdot to agree with OP, and not be able to spur discussions that bring all the nature freaks and haters out of the wood work. Either way, mod system needs to go to +3 users or something, too many troll mods, then again WORTH IT (see below :P).

I miss the old slashdot :)

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[gilleain]

Choke on...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Variations_in_Earth.27s_orbit_.28Milankovitch_cycles.29

sourceless bastard!

I didn't make any statements that required sources. Also, I wasn't rude to you, but you chose to be rude to me. Perhaps you are trolling, perhaps you are drunk, perhaps you are simply an idiot. Whatever, I'm not interested in anything else you have to say. Continue to piss into the wind if you like, you'll just get wet.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

So let me just ask a simple question...

your opinion... what are you going to do about it?

Say that is the case, human nature dictates we won't do anything till we are just about out of an ozone layer.

Also, what records lol, did we take records 100000 years ago? lol. What if we are completely OFF in our theories and it's because of something completely different that the ice is melting? What if we aren't accurately measuring the ice melt and it's just all underwater? All this and more to be answered... NEVER because the scientists researching this aren't up to snuff on knowledge or funding.

Best bet... there's nothing you can do, so don't worry about it. You'll die in some way, I assure you, why not this one.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Synerg1y]

Ya, not sure why I respond, your post clearly wasn't worthy of a response, perhaps... I'm bored!

Here's when to cite...

http://library.duke.edu/research/citing/

and

but the observation is that it is melting faster than records show

is why I called you out.

Don't point fingers at humanity w/o being 100% certain is all im saying.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[sycodon]

Actually, if they just eliminated the anonymous nature of moderation, they would be much more reasonable I bet.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[sycodon]

I'll believe and support AGW when it's advocates support going full nuclear.

However, if their "solution" is more taxes, cutting back, rationing, etc. then they don't believe in the science any more than "denialists". They believe instead in an opportunity to advance their agenda.

Do you want it fixed or not?

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[riverat1]

No, there really is a consensus among climatologists. 0ver 97% of climatologists who are actively publishing on climate change and over 85% of climatologists in general agree that human influences are responsible for most of the global warming we are seeing (Doran 2009) [PDF].

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[riverat1]

Nice insightful comment there Jeremy.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[amiga3D]

Well, if man is responsible for global warming, I guess it must have been the dinosaurs that were causing it all those millions of years ago. I'm still waiting for them to discover the dinosaur Fords and Chevys. The dinosaur coal fired electric plants and of course the dinosaur air conditioned buildings.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Belial6]

Nothing the poster you are replying to is rationalizing anything. It does not comment on whether AGW is true or false. It only comments on the summary, and how the writer of the summary does a disservice to those who would try to make the case for AGW. The writer of the summary is accidentally arguing against AGW while trying to argue for it.

The fact that you started making unsubstantiated accusation in an attempt to defend a belief that was not being questioned makes you a part of the same problem. You give fodder to those that would argue against the existence of AGW in your poor attempt to bully people into taking your side.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[catchblue22]

I'll believe and support AGW when it's advocates support going full nuclear.

So you then implicitly acknowledge that you have no intellectual basis for your beliefs on global warming, and you instead base your views on the perceived trustworthiness of various authorities? This is what the above statement seems to imply.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Jack9]

> We know that the sun hasn't changed solar output
Er about that....
> and that there are no systematic changes in cosmic rays,
And that...
> etc.
Yeah....might wanna slow down there.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

unless he wants me to do something about it, then he has to prove EVERYTHING to me

While I can understand your position I disagree. Studying something like the climate or how much oil is left or any number of modern areas of scientific study are very complex. Unless you are in the field you left with researching as much as you can. The internet makes this easy but information bias still holds us back.

I take the agnostic view that while I believe humans affect their environment I am unsure what that affect is.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[tompaulco]

Earth to douche bag, scientists have concluded that man is responsible for global warming.
Oh, then it IS natural.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[next_ghost]

Or maybe he needs to realize that he's talking to ignorant morons who won't look at the science even at gunpoint, much less understand it. Newsflash: Professor Steven Sherwood DIDN'T pull that claim out of monkey's ass. Go ahead and see for yourself what's the difference in ice cover between natural and human-caused warming.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[next_ghost]

Yes, the almighty selective blindness. Guaranteed to protect you from 99.9% of all inconvenient scientific facts.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'"

What a nonsensical statement. And false. It has been much warmer many times in the past....WTF is this guy talking about.
Been rubbing Al Gore's head to much and waiting for the Genie to appear.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[khallow]

You moved the goalposts. Before you said scientists, now you say climatologists. There are several problems with this assertion. First, people in fields that overlap with climatology projects have noted problems in the parts of climatology research (more accurately, global warming research since that is a particularly problematic aspect) that reflect their area of expertise such as statistics, economics, or computer/math modeling.

To outline an example in each of the three, statisticians have been concerned for a while about how climatologists measure mean surface temperature from weather station data and temperature proxy data (the notorious tree ring data and ice core data) that has a great deal of irregularity and adjustments to it. Economists have been concerned by the primitive economic models of carbon usage. For example, no study of the effects of "peak oil". And there's weak research on the economic effects of global warming. If one is going to decide whether or not to implement mitigating action, they should have some idea of the costs and benefits of global warming as well as the mitigating action. Computer modelers have noted the bizarre spaghetti code that builds crucial datasets (such as the Climate Research Unit's paleoclimate temperature estimate built on a huge number of datasets. Finally, mathematical modelers have noted the absence of large scale weather phenonema such as hurricanes and equatorial waves.

Second, climatology has a problem common to geology, economics, and astronomy, namely, that it is extremely hard to conduct reproducible experiments. This is a crucial flaw of climate modeling and prediction that routinely gets ignored.

Third, the field has unusual difficulty in communicating its research to the outside world due to the complexity of the field and the difficulty of generating data and models.

Fourth, there's an enduring bias due to who funds climatology research in the field of climate change. Most of the organizations want global warming to be demonstrated. It seems to me that there is a serious danger that research which doesn't support a claim of global warming (particularly, urgent global warming which would require substantial change in society in order to mitigate), is at increased risk of becoming defunded. For example, the Goddard Institution of Space Science (a NASA-run organization) and the before-mentioned Climate Research Institute have both been headed by people who have made extreme claims about the effects of global warming for decades. How would research from someone lower down in the hierarchy that doesn't fit the message coming from the top of the organization fare?

As I see it, an argument from authority (such as "over 97% of climatologists who are actively publishing on climate change and over 85% of climatologists in general agree that human influences are responsible for most of the global warming we are seeing") isn't good enough in the present circumstances.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[blahplusplus]

"It has never and will never be that easy, Steve. Your optimism is appreciated though."

You should all watch the following:

http://bit.ly/dYaWUc

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[mbkennel]

"Second, climatology has a problem common to geology, economics, and astronomy, namely, that it is extremely hard to conduct reproducible experiments. This is a crucial flaw of climate modeling and prediction that routinely gets ignored."

And yet astronomers and geologists and climatologists make good predictions which are upheld and the understanding is very certain in many areas because they are all based on the laws of physics.

Let's come back to the core physical fact. The atmosphere is shining more in infrared than it used to, and this is because the molecules in the atmosphere have a different population and this is because of human activity. These are not subject for debate, they are rock solid experimentally confirmed *fact*.

There is more electromagnetic radiation coming down from the stratosphere than before, and thus it is quite literally physically impossible for the climate NOT to change, and from human activity.

"For example, the Goddard Institution of Space Science (a NASA-run organization) and the before-mentioned Climate Research Institute have both been headed by people who have made extreme claims about the effects of global warming for decades. How would research from someone lower down in the hierarchy that doesn't fit the message coming from the top of the organization fare?"

If there are supporting data and theory and its good then it gets published.

"Computer modelers have noted the bizarre spaghetti code that builds crucial datasets (such as the Climate Research Unit's paleoclimate temperature estimate built on a huge number of datasets."

Yup, and that's because climatology is in fact not well funded at all. No doubt they would love long-term funding for software infrastructure and data processing, but they don't have it. NASA might be better at this, and its data sets show the same thing as everybody else's.

And what about the skeptical Berkeley stats professor who thought the data processing was fishy? He did quite an extensive study, and what did he find? To his surprise, and not to mine, the results were the same as what the mainstream climatologists said.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[riverat1]

I certainly didn't say "scientists" before in this tread because that was my only post (until this one) in the thread. But in general if I say scientists it's in the context of the field being discussed, not every scientist in the world. I guess the GP did use the term "*Some* scientists" but I don't consider those not working the field in question to have much authority to comment on it.

In regards to surface temperature there's a project called Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature lead by the physicist Richard Muller who has expressed some skepticism of global warming that is examining that right now. They still have a long way to go for their final report but the initial findings don't do anything to discredit the current science.

A preliminary analysis of 2% of the Berkeley Earth dataset shows a global temperature trend that goes up and down with global cycles, and does so broadly in sync with the temperature records from other groups such as NOAA, NASA, and Hadley CRU. However, the preliminary analysis includes only a very small subset (2%) of randomly chosen data, and does not include any method for correcting for biases such as the urban heat island effect, the time of observation, or other potentially influential biases.

I left the second sentence in because I acknowledge they have much work to do yet but I will be surprised if their results don't largely validate the current science.

Throw out all of the proxy data and it doesn't matter that much. It's merely corroborating evidence. What matters is the science that's being done today on today's climate.

Economics don't matter until you decide what to do about it which is a political question. It doesn't change the science one bit.

The CRU's paleoclimate temperature estimate code is not a computer model. It is code to process a large dataset. Code for several of the major GCM's such as NASA/GISS Model E are available so feel free to analyze them yourself. Not sure what you're getting at with that last sentence.

The only thing that isn't reproducible in climate science is the data about what happened in the past. It's easy enough to redo the research that determined the effects of different factors on the climate. It's true that it isn't particularly amenable to much lab experimentation but even that occurs (the CERN CLOUD project).

I largely agree with your third point.

I think you see bias because the findings don't say what you want to hear. Someone's going to have to make a much more solid case on that before I'll take the accusation seriously.

An argument from authority isn't necessarily wrong.

The strength of this argument depends upon two factors:

        The authority is a legitimate expert on the subject.
        A consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion.

I would argue that climatologists are indeed legitimate experts on the subject and the study I cited demonstrates there is a consensus in the field. Therefore it is not a fallacious appeal to authority.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

"I do not hava a science degree, and I do not really believe that mankind is capable of altering the Earth's climate and God promised there would never be another great flood, and if we were to do anything it would be bad for the economy..."

Yes, sadly presenting evidence is just preaching to the choir. Perhaps adding the cleaving of the shelf released golden plates that you the translated with the help of an angel who told you not to show the plates to anyone would make it more compelling. It's worked before.

Having a science degree does not make a person right, and not having one doesn't make a person wrong. Not all degrees are equal and not all people are equal. Sometimes the smartest person in the world knows less about a topic than a penniless old grandmother with no formal education who grew up in some place so obscure its practically off the map.

In this case, of course, the economy thing is silly. If we didn't have the clean air act we would have had easily tens of thousands of pollution deaths by now, for example, as opposed to the relatively small number we've had. And it doesn't take a biblical flood to require flood preparations--look at Katrina. Consider how low-lying the coastal cities are.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[khallow]

Let's come back to the core physical fact. The atmosphere is shining more in infrared than it used to, and this is because the molecules in the atmosphere have a different population and this is because of human activity. These are not subject for debate, they are rock solid experimentally confirmed *fact*.

And yet that *fact*, even if it does exist (for example, you can't assert it as fact before the time of satellites), tells us nothing about what to do. Just because part of the problem is "rock solid" doesn't mean much if the rest of the problem isn't so.

Yup, and that's because climatology is in fact not well funded at all. No doubt they would love long-term funding for software infrastructure and data processing, but they don't have it. NASA might be better at this, and its data sets show the same thing as everybody else's.

More money doesn't write good code. And I was talking about the bias of the funding.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Fyzzler]

No, there really is a consensus among climatologists. 0ver 97% of climatologists who are actively publishing on climate change and over 85% of climatologists in general agree that human influences are responsible for most of the global warming we are seeing

And the 3% that don't agree, don't get funding, tenure or publishing. Quite the incentive to toe the Religious line. Also, 97% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Heaven forbid you're expected to walk your fat ass down the street to get your mail. It amuses me how loudly lazy people bitch about this stuff. It's not like they're going to take the McRib away from you, butterball. And if you seriously can believe that humanity is not accelerating climate change I suggest you just give up on reading, and enjoy The X Factor. I hear it's "ohemgee" funny.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[riverat1]

Spencer, Lindzen and Christie are examples of the 3% that do get funding, tenure and published. But I will admit they don't get a lot of respect in the field.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[cavebison]

It doesn't give me much faith in someone's ability to interpret complex data when he can't even construct a valid deduction from simple facts...

Your definition of "natural" is flawed. A stream has been running for many years, when along comes a beaver and builds a dam. The fish downstream cry, "this must stop, it's unnatural!" Nearby, David Attenborough is wrapping up his latest doco on the natural wonder of beaver dams.

Somewhere, a David Attenborough in space is quietly documenting the emergence of a strange form of intelligence on Earth, with distinctive behaviours which result in continual cycles of construction and discovery followed by complete collapse. The conclusion is that, in perhaps another 100,000 years or so, evolution will weed out its self-destructive behaviours.

For now, mostly harmless.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot-friendly car analogy: Records clearly show that my car was inside my garage this morning, so it follows that entering the garage in the afternoon at 100mph is entirely normal/safe/appropriate. Furthermore, gusts of wind move objects around all the time - so there is no conclusive evidence that the motion of the car is man-made.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[V for Vendetta]

Again, it's only a local phenomenon [...]

So, how exactly is glaciers melting around the world a local phenomen?

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar variation is too small to explain climate change (as I learned from wikipedia!)

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

These models make predictions which have been confirmed. (e.g.: go look at what models in the first IPCC report said about temperatures in 2011.)

Thanks for the laugh, well needed.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no decade-trend in cosmic rays. The research being done into cosmic rays and clouds is by someone who eschews typical denier hyperbole, and thus garners quite a lot or respect from the scientific community.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

All simplistic talking points. The models have not been confirmed—show me, with direct evidence, how these models match up with past and present satellite observations.

-Climate modelers have a track record of exaggerating temperatures. Take Hansen's predictions in 1988 with three possible predictions (Hansen et. al., Journal of Geophysical Research, August 1988). Today all three are well above actual observed data and the spread between his predictions and reality will get worse over time.
-Climate models predicted oceans will warm. ARGO buoys show that since 2003 (the time when we started to accurately measure ocean temps) show that temps are basically flat. This news prompted one climate alarmist to declare "“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t." He now says that the missing heat is hiding out at the bottom of the ocean. Next it will likely show up between the cushions of his favourite chair
-Climate models say there should be a hotspot about 10km up in the atmosphere—a point central to the argument of AGW thru' atmospheric amplification. From 1979 to 2001 there was no hotspot. There still isn't.
-Climate models say that the Earth gives off less heat when the surface warms because it traps heat too aggressively (positive feedback). Satellites show the opposite.
Little is known about non-uniform and time-dependent factors on climate, such as clouds, precipitation, atmospheric and oceanic turbulence, geo-, planetary, and solar magnetism (these are barely acknowledged or given arbitrary forcing values in IPCC reports). Plus, that it appears that CO2's heating effect is logarithmic, not linear or exponential, which means that as CO2 concentrations double, it's ability to absorb and radiate heat falls by half.
What's more, there seems to have been a shift in the PDO, from a warmer phase to a cooler phase (it turned warm around 1976). These cycles last for 30 or so years (60 years trough to trough). At the end of the last cooling phase, we all heard about the coming ice age. You will start to hear about it again. Also, the unusual low activity of solar cycle 24, a level that hasn't been seen since around 1800, could well contribute to the cooling. It is assumed that the period of low activity will bottom out around 2050—as we do not know what effect the sun's total activity (e.g. magnetic influences, and the resulting increase in galactic cosmic rays) has on climate, but over the next 40 years we will be able to measure these other possible forcing mechanisms. I'd stock up on firewood in any case.
In a nutshell, we don't know why the climate changes, but it has and will continue to do so like it has always done since the start of geologic time. It is an extremely complex process, almost chaotic, and to pretend that we mere mortals armed with a computer can predict what will happen 100 years from now ( a statistically insignificant, almost zero, amount of time in the history of this planet) when we can't do so seven days from today is beyond hubris. It is arrogance in the extreme. It is also a lucrative way to make money.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Rising global average temperature wasn't even the claim made by the Slashdot post, though. The claim is that these observations should dispel any notion that recent global warming could be natural. The blurb gives even less support for that conclusion than for the one you discuss. Reading the rest of the blurb with that grain of salt, the only thing it actually dispels is the credibility of its author.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

"No, the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago [grist.org]. There was a more recent "little ice age," but that was a local phenomenon, not global."

Even Michael Mann, who claimed as recently as 2005 that the Little Ice Age was not global, has been forced by sheer weight of evidence to conclude that it was indeed a global cooling event.

Denial indeed.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Not sure if I count as an advocate... but I am thoroughly convinced. And all for nuclear, given proper attention to the hazards of fission-based energi. Fission isn't going to be the only source of power any more than wind is, though, it's not flexible enough --- unless of course we develop a way to store energi in large scalas.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Dasher42]

Extracting and releasing hundreds of millions of years' worth of sequestered CO2 in less than two centuries is not natural in the way you and I might think.

This may well have happened in nature before - the prevailing theory about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, the mother of them all which killed over 90% of all species living at that time, is that a comet hit what is now Siberia where huge coal deposits used to be, triggering volcanic activity which burned and released the bulk of that coal. That's natural as in a huge natural disaster.

A disaster is precisely what we're looking at.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

The AGW argument doesn't fit into a single factoid.

Nope, lots and lots of factoids. Here are a few

We know the climate change is man-made as follows:

Who is this "We", Paleface?

CO2 has increased since the industrial revolution.

Actually we know that temperatures started increasing well before CO2 started to increase.

We know the CO2 is man-made by two independent methods. Firstly, we can account for it by recording the amount of coal/oil that has been burnt. Secondly, coal/oil has a different mixture of carbon isotopes, and these particular isotopes are accumulating in the atmosphere.

Problem is that the isotopic composition is fallacious since vegetation sequestrates much more C12 than C13. Bummer that.

We know CO2 is a green-house gas

But we don't live in a greenhouse. Greenhouses warm by suppression of convection. The earth's atmosphere is not a greenhouse.

We have detailed models for how much forcing CO2 causes. These models make predictions which have been confirmed. (e.g.: go look at what models in the first IPCC report said about temperatures in 2011.)

There are so many models that some will be "correct" entirely by chance. Hansen's "business-as-usual" scenario (1988) predicted temperatures much higher than actually happened. In fact, all of the scenarios ended much higher than actually happened.

Funny that.

We know that the sun hasn't changed solar output, and that there are no systematic changes in cosmic rays, etc. There is no way to account for modern warming /without/ including CO2

There is no way that climate modellers will ever admit that they are wrong about the sun.

AGW opponents will make any argument of convenience, but the case is straight-forward, and there was a scientific consensus on the basic details in 1979, according to an independent NAS report of that year.

There was a clear scientific consensus in 1912 about the crisis of the white race being corrupted by intermingling with weaker, browner races. Svante Arrhenius was one such scientist who headed a Norwegian commitee on Racial Hygiene in that year.

Climate scientists have made *conservative* estimates of CO2 forcing and temperature predictions. The models did not predict the rapid decline of arctic ice, because they were so *conservative*. We could be in for much worse warming than what the IPCC reports say. But real scientists doing the work want to be careful about provided unbiased and factual evidence based science -- and so eschew anything that could be interpreted as hyperbole.

There has been no mention of the equally startling increase in Antarctic Ice. Funny that.

That is the reason why these melting icesheets give no evidence for man-made or natural climate change. The AGW argument isn't written in them. It is, after-all, a global phenomenon.

Hyperbole is a truly global phenomenon. As is alarmism, pessimism, and apocalyptic warnings of the end of the world.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm not one who tends to dismiss things that experts outside my field say, but this statement is quite a blatant fallacy: just because it's been that way for thousands of years doesn't mean that any change is certainly not natural. It's these types of statements that cause so many to lose credibility. It doesn't give me much faith in someone's ability to interpret complex data when he can't even construct a valid deduction from simple facts...

well said. we do not know enough about this planet as we pretend to.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Recent findings report water vapor in the upper atmosphere of Mars. Could Earth's loss of ice mass be translated into increased upper atmosphere water vapor and does this explain the lack of catastrophic water level increase that was predicted?

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no, we are still in the middle of an ice age as defined by the classical description of what an ice age is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[LordLimecat]

Where in my post do you see clues as to what I believe? I was attacking a poor rational argument, not commenting on the truth or falsity of his conclusion.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[RobertM1968]

Not quite. The Arctic Circle's precipitation is (1) VERY low to begin with (20" or less a year) and (2) hasn't really changed.

Though the bigger problem is water levels will continue to rise. Anyone can test this by freezing fresh water, putting it in salt water of the same temperature as the Arctic Ocean, and watching what happens when the fresh-water ice cube melts. Or, you can find the real scientists who've studied such.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Wandering Idiot]

You realize this is a remarkably stupid statement, right? The changes scientists are worried about are far more sudden than the naturally-occurring climate cycles we've been able to infer. Do you really think a climatologist is going to read this post, smack their foreheads, and go "Oh, shit! Natural climate variations! Why didn't we think of that and take it into account in all our extensive modeling? This random uninformed internet commenter has certainly schooled us, back to the drawing board guys!" Regardless of your politics, you have no place on a site like /, that ostensibly concerns itself with science, if that's the kind of argument you're going to construct.

Also, joke all you want, but the atmosphere was pretty much created in its current form by biological life, so yes, the plants, animals, and microbes of millions of years ago were deeply involved in climate change. They just didn't have an industrial society to greatly exacerbate the amount of their natural byproducts.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[Coren22]

You should have logged in, this was a very good rebuttal, and is much more intelligent than who he replied to.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[hesaigo999ca]

I do not agree though, if it has been there for the last 5000 years, as before that , no one was really tracking those types of information so we assume it was the same even before that, and that now it is not there, that tends to lend the greater possibility that something has changed recently that is not normal, however,
if we look at the fact that a pattern could exist that extends longer then 5000 years and repeats itself every 6000 years, then we have some sort of pattern
that could now be in its vertex.

Re:"These observations should dispel..."

[buddilla]

clearly no one has read:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2044627/Europe-Canada-Russia-risk-second-hole-ozone-layer-opens-Arctic.html

Which may be a cause of this situation. I certainly don't believe that plant food ( CO2 ) is a pollutant that causes global warming. That's like saying dihydrogen monoxide Is a horrible chemical compound that can kill people. And the people that are stupid enough to die from water intoxication should be dead. These eco freaks will believe any half truths and bald faced lie. "The people will believe a big lie, but not a small lie." - Adolf Hitler

Uh, Greenland redux?

[arpad1]

How about a bit less in the way of hysteria? All the folks who were having kittens over the phony reduction in the Greenland ice sheet are looking like schmucks now so perhaps a few people, like the editors of Slashdot for instance, could forgo schmuckdom by not engaging in heavy breathing ahead of the facts?

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, this is slashdot. This is a site where people honestly think we'll colonize Mars because some fool painted a metal tube and put some kerosene in it. You want hysterics ahead of the facts? Read the comments in any space-related story. Next best are energy stories.

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[CrazyDuke]

I have been a regular on this site for over a decade now. And, I have no clue what you are talking about. As for the shyster alt-e stuff, the group consensus is usually along the lines of fails basic thermodynamics, smoke and mirrors, untested/unrevised claims, cost higher/efficiency lower than existing tech, etc...

Perhaps you have this site confused with another you frequent?

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[Coren22]

eldavojohn writes

Usually everything in the quote box after that is written by the submitter. The editor didn't throw in his own comment on this story, so direct your vitriol at eldavojohn, not Soulskill.

Though, I do agree with you, that comment about dispelling was utterly moronic. These ice sheets are thousands of years old...oh, they are from the last ice age, so they would melt anyways. Antarctic ice that is millions of years old would be more worrying if it was melting.

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[Anonymous Coward]

"unreviewed claims" How nice, Firefox thinks "unreviewed" is not a word and tries to correct it to "unrevised."

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[microbox]

Who is having kittens over phony reduction of Greenland ice-sheet? What on earth are you talking about? Surely not an atlas that used the wrong map by mistake?

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[riverat1]

Greenland is loosing ice at a rate of over 100 Gigatonnes per year as measured by the GRACE gravimetric satellites. This page contains several references to peer reviewed papers on the subject.

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Skeptical Science mentions this paper:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2011/05/02/attempts-to-box-us-out/

Greenland exhibits multi-decadal cyclical patterns. Don't jump to conclusions based on a few years of data.

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[riverat1]

We will see what happens, won't we.

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[Anonymous Coward]

skepticalscience.com ??? - John Cook's Warmist Lobbying Page

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[Ol Olsoc]

Gobal warming can be cured by lowering taxes, and eliminating regulations.

Re:Uh, Greenland redux?

[riverat1]

The page has links to actual peer reviewed papers on the subject. If you want to refute the science you have to refute what's in those papers.

Uh oh.

[MrEricSir]

Now where am I supposed to keep my ice books?

Re:Uh oh.

[jhoegl]

I too thought of book shelves made of ice that last for 6 years...

curse you subject lines of irony!

Re:Uh oh.

[Antisyzygy]

I was think of ice-porn.

Re:Uh oh.

[Antisyzygy]

That's a total Dad-joke.

Re:Uh oh.

[swanzilla]

Not on a Kindle Fire. That much is certain.

There were glaciers all over Montana

[ShavedOrangutan]

... that have been gone since long before the invention of the Sport Utility Vehicle. Or the wheel, for that matter.

I blame the Tea Party.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[asylumx]

Those didn't disappear in six years.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[LastGunslinger]

Can you point me to the research that shows the last Ice Age ended over the span of a century?

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[AngryDeuce]

Oh please, everyone know's climate change is a myth, it still gets cold in winter!

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but we have documented proof that both Europe and North America were experiencing a "mini ice age" as late at the mid-1800's, and that before the early 1700's (when the mini ice-age started) it was warmer than it is now.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Coren22]

These shelves (that are on the water btw) didn't disappear either, take a look at the pictures, they are the ends of the glaciers that hang out in the water, they are going to reduce over time.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Mashiki]

Yeah. I live in Ontario. Where my house is now, was under 1mi of ice less than 7k years ago.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[istartedi]

Maybe those ones didn't, but others may have.

Actually, the link claims there is evidence of catastrophic freshwater increases in a timeframe spanning months; but I'm too lazy to track the citation.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[wsxyz]

If we implement some tough emissions-controls, carbon sequestering, and maybe do a little careful climate engineering, I think we can return Ontario to it's natural state under 1 mile of ice in a century or two. Otherwise we're all doomed.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Taty'sEyes]

Yeah. I live in Ontario. Where my house is now, was under 1mi of ice less than 7k years ago.

I call shenanigans! The world was created just over 6000 years ago!

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[grub]

Ontario wimp... I'm in Winnipeg. We go under 1mi of ice every Winter.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Pope]

Pfft. Go to Labrador for some REAL ice.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[tmosley]

No, but I wouldn't be surprised if they halved in six years at some point.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[tmosley]

No, climate change is real, because it gets warm in summer AND because it gets cold in winter!

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you got it all wrong. According to the AGW, it's up to YOU to prove they didn't.

So you can you show us that they didn't?

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[mpe]

No, but we have documented proof that both Europe and North America were experiencing a "mini ice age" as late at the mid-1800's, and that before the early 1700's (when the mini ice-age started) it was warmer than it is now.

However as none of these records were written by "climate scientists" the AGW lot tend to deny them.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

Let it warm up, I say. See what Boutros Boutros-Ghali Ghali thinks of that. We'll grow oranges in Alaska!

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[nitehawk214]

I blame the Tea Party.

Those didn't disappear in six years.

I hope the Tea Party disappears faster than six years.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[grub]

Oh bah.
That's not ice, in fact we make dildos and butt-plugs from it.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[gilleain]

No, but we have documented proof that both Europe and North America were experiencing a "mini ice age" as late at the mid-1800's, and that before the early 1700's (when the mini ice-age started) it was warmer than it is now. However as none of these records were written by "climate scientists" the AGW lot tend to deny them.

Well, but they might reasonably object that little ice ages are not the same as melting ice shelves? A short term drop in temperature is different to a rapid rise in temperature - assuming that the shelves are breaking up due to increased temperatures

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[gilleain]

I blame the Tea Party.

Those didn't disappear in six years.

I hope the Tea Party disappears faster than six years.

I don't believe in the existence of this 'Tea Party'. It's all an invention of 'Big Tea Party'.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[ArsonSmith]

so obviously man made since man has only been on earth ~6000 years.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Duradin]

I'd be a few miles from having beach front property on Lake Agassiz back then. (The draining of which some think may be the source of various flood myths, ya, it was that big and now (recently in Earth terms) it's gone.)

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to sacrifice a unicorn or two to Algore too.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Mashiki]

The way some greens and environmentalists go on around here, you'd think that this is their stated goal. They're getting pretty anti-human these days.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Baloroth]

A short term drop in temperature is different to a rapid rise in temperature

Oh yeah, totally different. One has a minus sign, the other a plus. If the first is perfectly natural, surely the only explanation for the other is mankind, right? /s

Seriously, though, I'm not a "denier" but I find the claim that this totally dispels any possibility that this is natural completely unscientific. Temperatures over small regions of the Earth change all the time, and often quite rapidly. Especially when the quoted article gives units of "Pyramids of Giza." I don't understand those units. How many Libraries of Congress would that be? (I know it also gives tonnes. It's a joke.) In fact, change that rapid almost doesn't even make sense, the global temperatures are rising slowly, they shouldn't have this dramatic an effect.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[riverat1]

No, but we have documented proof that both Europe and North America were experiencing a "mini ice age" as late at the mid-1800's, and that before the early 1700's (when the mini ice-age started) it was warmer than it is now.

Insightful my ass. It's at least as warm if not warmer now than it was during the Medieval Warm Period.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

For a time scale relevant to this discussion, how many miles of ice was it under 6 years ago?

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Troed]

According to some proxies, yes. According to others, no.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[riverat1]

So we should only believe the proxies that say it was warmer during the MWP? Many proxies are limited in the area they cover (tree rings for instance) so a better estimation is probably made by combining them into a meta-number.

Re:There were glaciers all over Montana

[Anonymous Coward]

Does their racism know no bounds? Even the ice shelves weren't white enough.

Amazing

[avandesande]

These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.

So you are saying that if there was natural global warming these ice shelves wouldn't melt? That's pretty amazing!

Re:Amazing

[Antisyzygy]

I think he's arguing that the ice shelves were there through previously known natural warmings. Its still unjustified to claim its absolutely caused by human related global warming, but whatever.

Re:Amazing

[kernelrahl]

When the next ice age hits we are all screwed anyway. When I say we, I mean some future mob of humans that are doomed of course!

Re:Amazing

[avandesande]

Point taken. So to be correct we would should say that whatever the cause of the current warming it is unprecedented in the last several thousand years.

Funny how if you see a logical fallacy when you skim something you tend to ignore the rest....

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

That sticks out worse than usual for warmist thinking. Ice melting proves the Earth is warming, therefore the warming is unnatural... o.O

About par for the course.

Had the ice shelves grown we would be told greater precipitation, an expected consequence of global warming, caused greater snow pack.

Re:Amazing

[quantaman]

"The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years."

So we see the strongest warming cycle in thousands of years.

What's more likely?

That this unprecedented warming is natural and just happened to correspond with AGW.

Or that the AGW thing that scientists have been talking about for decades is doing exactly the thing they've been predicting.

True there's more nuance than that (not everywhere warms the same, etc) but the evidence has piled up pretty damn high.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

The most likely answer is that they can't explain climate cycles at all and took a 50/50 guess. The climate has to be either getting warmer or colder, in any context where "the climate getting warmer or colder" even means anything. Unless you can explain why *and prove that your explanation describes reality*, you're not doing science.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's either "unprecedented!" natural warming or it is AGW, and couldn't possibly be some combination of both? I know the mere suggestion that it could be 75% natural and 25% AGW (or any reasonable split thereof) will automatically get both sides foaming at their mouths, but it is more likely closer to the truth than pro or deniers would lead you to believe.

The ultimate question is whether or not pushing the environment with a little bit of AGW is good or bad. Good = enough of a push to avoid the next ice age (which arguably will be much more devastating than a little bit of flooding). Bad = enough of a push to hasten the next ice age. In either case I don't believe the alleged scorched earth alarmism is a possibility... short of WW III of course, but even then you'll end up in an ice age in short order.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not as fast, no.

I love the fact that, the entire argument is whether it is 'natural or not'. Fact is, it IS happening. Continue studying whether it's man-made, naturally occuring, or both, but rather than point fingers and claim the sky is falling, we should prepare for the coming years dynamic weather changes (out of season weather), and eventual rising sea-level that, at this rate, WILL happen.

But by all means, keep the rhetoric on the non-issue.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you can explain why *and prove that your explanation describes reality*, you're not doing science.

If you can prove something, you're doing math, not science. We have strong and compelling evidence that AGW is happening, but we'll never have proof.

Re:Amazing

[quantaman]

Scientists have been fairly unanimous in predicting warming since the mid 1970's, and so far they've been right.

And it isn't a coin flip, there are degrees of warming, if you predict that it's going to be warmer than it has in thousands of years you have a far smaller chance than 50/50 of getting lucky.

Re:Amazing

[quantaman]

The only people upset by the split hypothesis is the climate skeptics. All the debate I've seen among the scientists is trying to figure out how much of the current trend is AGW and how much is natural (note it could be 150% if we're in a natural cooling cycle).

There's also been a lot of study over whether AGW is good or bad. A little isn't a huge deal (we already have a little), but a lot means massive drops in food production leading to famines and a lot of war, it hits the poorest equatorial nations a lot worse than the developed world. Maybe it eventually stabilized at a higher productive value, but that's decades or even centuries in the future.

Re:Amazing

[Thing 1]

Funny how if you see a logical fallacy when you skim something you tend to ignore the rest....

Not so funny to me; evidence of lacking logic in one area could imply lacking logic in all areas, and therefore the rest of the communication should be suspect -- if not discarded outright.

Re:Amazing

[magarity]

Scientists have been fairly unanimous in predicting warming since the mid 1970's, and so far they've been right.

No, sorry, I remember the 70's and global cooling was all the rage then. Search 'global cooling 1970s'. Global Warming has been since the 90's.

Re:Amazing

[LordLimecat]

So we see the strongest warming cycle in thousands of years.

What's more likely?
That this unprecedented warming is natural and just happened to correspond with AGW.

Im gonna play devils advocate for a second. Lets say the warming trend started several thousand years ago, and is getting more and more "intense" over time. The moment we start gathering data on it, therefore, we will see it as a cycle "at its most intense". And that will continue to be the case, year after year.

It is in no way sufficient to prove that we were the cause. You would need quite a bit more comprehensive data for THAT, than a simple argument of "what are the chances".

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are saying that if there was natural global warming these ice shelves wouldn't melt? That's pretty amazing!

Wow, you're a retard who doesn't understand there's a big difference between changes that typically take geologic time periods and changes that happen in under a decade. And yet you're still just intelligent enough to type. That's pretty amazing!

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Fallacist's fallacy.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

but the speculation has piled up pretty damn high.

FTFY. Everyone's just guessing and assuming that man is causing all these problems.

Read up on the history of earth. More often than not over the earth's entire lifespan, there has been NO ice on the surface.

Re:Amazing

[quantaman]

Sorry, global cooling was never the rage among scientists.

Re:Amazing

[subl33t]

"but a lot means massive drops in food production "

What studies have you been reading? Higher CO2+warming increases plant growth and extends the growing season, this is elementary, and proven.

Re:Amazing

[bill_mcgonigle]

That this unprecedented warming is natural and just happened to correspond with AGW.

It's a circular argument. The offered set point for when anthropogenic global warming (AGW) kicked in is when the climate started to warm. The actual data from the seabeds is that the CO2 emissions from human fossil fuel use started to be measurable in the 1830's.

Why didn't AGW start in the 1830's? Because there wasn't enough of it to cause warming until the temperature records started to increase significantly.

How much CO2 emission is required to start the climate warming? "I dunno, let's look at the charts."

What do the models tell us? "That this much CO2 will cause AGW." How were those models developed? "Based on the charts."

See? It's honest-to-goodness begging the question. Maybe AGW happens to be correct despite the sloppy method. One side says, "we're all gonna burn in 'Hell on Earth' if we're right." The other side says, "I'm not spending $300T on that bet."

As an attempt to isolate the variables people look to other planets. They see warming there. That's a reasonable indication that there's a common cause, though no proof that AGW isn't happening too.

In the end it's a business decision, but one that affects everybody, one way or the other. We can't predict the future with confidence, but we can control our behavior in the present. Making moral decisions now is the best we can do.

Re:Amazing

[fatboy]

Scientists have been fairly unanimous in predicting warming since the mid 1970's, and so far they've been right.

As I recall, it was global cooling in the 70's, we were are all going to die from UV due to the ozone hole in the 80's, and global warming didn't hit until the 90's.

Re:Amazing

[microbox]

Nah, all the scientists are just wrong. There is no such thing as an environmental problem, and we don't want socialists increasing the size of government under that pretext. So the scientists are obviously wrong. Any warming is obviously natural. Move along. There is nothing to see here.

Re:Amazing

[scot4875]

We were able to fix the ozone hole. If we'd listened to jackasses like you, we may have ignored it and all be forced to wear big floppy hats and SPF 50 every time we step outside for more than 2 minutes. Instead, we bit the bullet, acknowledged the problem, and addressed it head on like grown-ups.

Also, global cooling was a theory in the 70s that was discredited by the scientific community, which even then had the general consensus that we should expect warming. Even now you can probably find people predicting global cooling; does that mean in 20 years you'll be reminding us that back in 2011 they were predicting cooling and somehow use that as evidence that warming can't/won't happen?

--Jeremy

Re:Amazing

[scot4875]

This is a good theory. You should declare a formal hypothesis, build a model to test it, write a paper to be reviewed by your fellow climate scientists, and win a Nobel prize for disproving AGW. You might even be able to get some money from the oil industry or the Heritage Foundation or something to fund it.

--Jeremy

Re:Amazing

[scot4875]

One side says, "we're all gonna burn in 'Hell on Earth' if we're right.

No it doesn't; this is a flat out strawman argument. (i.e. lie). Of course you can find hysterical people on any topic that say crazy things; to characterize the entire group to be the same as the extremists is as bad as assuming that every Tea Party member is a barely literate racist because you saw some dude holding a poorly spelled sign.

--Jeremy

Re:Amazing

[bill_mcgonigle]

No it doesn't; this is a flat out strawman argument. (i.e. lie).

No, it's an allusion to Crichton's argument.

Re:Amazing

[cosmicaug]

Scientists have been fairly unanimous in predicting warming since the mid 1970's, and so far they've been right.

No, sorry, I remember the 70's and global cooling was all the rage then. Search 'global cooling 1970s'. Global Warming has been since the 90's.

Science popularizer, Isaac Asimov, never got the memo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6tSYRY90PA

Re:Amazing

[riverat1]

No one who is alive today has to worry about the next ice age hitting (unless we invent immortality) as it's not scheduled to start for about 20,000 years and it takes 10,000 years or so for the change to happen.

Re:Amazing

[riverat1]

It's not as simple as you'd like it to be. CO2 is only one factor in plant growth. Higher CO2 helps some plants (poison ivy comes to mind) grow but not others. But you still have to have water, ask the farmers in Texas about that, and appropriate soil.

Re:Amazing

[riverat1]

The warming trend started 20,000 years ago and lead to the end of the last glaciation about 10,000 years ago. Temperatures hit a peak during the Holocene optimum about 8,000 years ago and has generally been slowly declining since then, until recently that is.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, why the F does it matter at all whether it's AGW or natural?

Let's say we assume it's AGW, and are wrong. So we get more energy efficient products, and a more diverse energy supply?

The issue of what's causing global warming is a red herring. The only people to lose by assuming AGW are fossil fuel corporations.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the one a thousand years ago was caused by...?

Re:Amazing

[Daniel Dvorkin]

No, sorry, I remember the 70's and global cooling was all the rage then. Search 'global cooling 1970s'. Global Warming has been since the 90's.

You remember what Fox News tells you to remember. Before you tell people to try a search like that, you probably ought to try the search yourself.

Re:Amazing

[Beeftopia]

No, global cooling was the rage in the 70s:

Time Magazine, June 24, 1974
Another Ice Age?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

Re:Amazing

[riverat1]

The Earth's climate temperature is sensitive to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere regardless of the source. Before the 1830's human CO2 emissions were low enough that they pretty much got absorbed by the natural sinks (mostly the ocean) so they didn't raise the level. Before about 1960 the level was still below 320 ppmv (up from ~280 ppmv) which would cause a small enough temperature rise that it's mostly overwhelmed by natural processes. So I would say that AGW started to become significant in the 1960's-1970's. Scientists have said it would be best to keep the level to 350 ppmv or below to limit the temperature increase to tolerable levels. We are currently at 390 ppmv and still rising.

"Burn in Hell on Earth" and $300T are just straw men, exaggerations with no connection to reality.

It's not a business decision at all, the science is the science, what we're going to do about it is a political decision.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a logical fallacy in itself, so I guess we're done listening to you.

Re:Amazing

[rs79]

These guys make a pretty credible and robust case for 600, not 10,000 years. CERN just reproduced some of their results (which the director of CERN put a gag order on).

1 hr. David Suzuki. Well worth watching

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/poles/

Re:Amazing

[rs79]

You can check for yourself, during the 70s and 80s "the next ice age" was mentioned quite a bit. try news.google.com/archivesearch and look for yourself.

"global warming" popped up in 1985.

althoiugh it was first mentioned in the popular press in 1953

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/med_greenhouse_effect.jpg

Re:Amazing

[rs79]

Your "search" is about articles that talk about how global cooling didn't exist in the 70s.

Why doin't you try an actual search of newspapers and magazines in the 70s and 80s. The yields a different result.

"the next ice age" have way to "the ozone hole" which gave way to global warming.

it's always some damn thing or another. many people were convinced in 1900 that halley's comet would cause the death of all mankind.

it's always some damn thing or another.

Re:Amazing

[rs79]

"Higher CO2 helps some plants (poison ivy comes to mind) grow but not others"

No. Just no. You might want to do a little research into the subject before you go making stuff up like that.

*ALL* terrestrial and aquatic plant life on earth is carbon limited. Plants also grow faster when its warmer too.

These are simple experiments you can do for yourself and have been documented, oh, about a million times in the last century going back (from articles I can pull off the top of my head) since the 50s.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe, just maybe, because we can see things now that we have never seen before (thanks to satellites) we can panick and make inane correlations in order to tax everyone a bit more and give a few nerds and failed politicoes a bit of power?

Re:Amazing

[riverat1]

Here is a little research into the subject that backs me up. As I said, it's not as simple as you'd like it to be.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

The earth has been through vastly greater swings in CO2 and temperature than we are experiencing now also. Yet here we all are. The earth was not made uninhabitable. If the earth were so vulnerable to tipping points you'd think it would have fallen out of balance in the last several billion years.

More like the vast quantities of water tend to stabilize temperature.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Natural. A couple thousand years ago no fossil fuels were being used whatsoever.

Re:Amazing

[surd1618]

uhhhh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DEoOdcYKbc

Re:Amazing

[riverat1]

Ok, I was saying 10,000 years for the glaciation to fully develop. It's may be true that the switchover to glaciation conditions occurs relatively quickly. I still stand by the 20,000 years for the start of the next glaciation. That is from calculations of Milankovitch cycles without consideration of what humans may do to change it.

Re:Amazing

[LordLimecat]

Yea, you missed what I was arguing against. Good use of sarcasm, poor reading comprehension.

For the curious, I was arguing against his reasoning and the assumption he ended up with, as it is a remarkably weak argument. Had he framed his argument differently, I might not have posted in the first place.

Re:Amazing

[32771]

Just a minor nitpick, they have been arguing for more than a century.

http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k32227/f808.image.r=memoires+de+l'academie+des+sciences.langEN

But I admit these were cutting edge people, like early adopters or something. The best is that Arrhenius estimates are close to contemporary simulations. You would think that making people understand the paper should be easier than one of these complicated computer models.

Canadian gangsta

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitch, I'm putting your ass on ice. See you in six years, eh?

Not year over year

[Anonymous Coward]

The pictures in the article were take before and after summer, not at the same point in two consecutive years. I would expect that the ice be melted more after summer. Saying this is what happened, and then shouting a warcry of human global warming is misleading at best.

Re:Not year over year

[riverat1]

No, it's not misleading. Ice shelves are the lobes of glaciers floating on the sea, typically tens or hundreds of meters thick, not the sea ice that melts and reforms each year and typically never gets more than maybe 10 meters thick. At no time in the past 5,000 years would you have been able to go to those ice shelves and find them to have broken up as they have in the past 6 years.

New measurement unit?

[c.r.o.c.o]

What is this Great Pyramid of Giza unit?!? I demand all mass measurements to be reported in the accepted Elephant units. African or Indian, it's your choice.

Re:New measurement unit?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...weighing in at an astounding 420 kPd(kilopachyderms)..."

Re:New measurement unit?

[Abstrackt]

Approximately 551,155,655 African bull elephants.

Re:New measurement unit?

[avandesande]

How about filled shrimp boats? They're pretty heavy too :-)

Re:New measurement unit?

[magarity]

What is this Great Pyramid of Giza unit?!? I demand all mass measurements to be reported in the accepted Elephant units. African or Indian, it's your choice.

As a US citizen, and proud public school graduate, I demand volumes be given in terms of football fields.

Re:New measurement unit?

[Duradin]

Metric is all the rage these days, it should have been given in Libraries of Congress.

Re:New measurement unit?

[SnarfQuest]

Shouldn't they use golf balls? Ice storms are always measured in golf balls, so why not ice bergs too?

Re:New measurement unit?

[Baloroth]

Elephants? Pah, I only accept LoC (Libraries of Congress). Works for volume, mass, and information!

Re:New measurement unit?

[tompaulco]

Well, maybe it is just me, but 500 times the size of the great pyramid of giza just doesn't seem like a huge amount to me when we're talking about something huge like an ice shelf. We're talking a chunk of ice that is about 1 cubic kilometer. That's less than 1 billionth of the Earth's water.

Re:New measurement unit?

[FishOuttaWater]

~500 megaphants.

Re:New measurement unit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to school and learn the difference between volume and area.

Re:New measurement unit?

[riverat1]

If that was the only time and place it happened it wouldn't matter much. But it has been happening and will continue to happen as long as the Earth keeps warming until there is no ice left. Check out what's been happening with the Pine Island Glacier and ice shelf in Antarctica.

Natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural"

The Earth has been warming and cooling for billions of years. Water has been melting and freezing for billions of years. An observation that ice melts proves that ice melts, and not much else.

Why would that dispel anything?

[SuperKendall]

Since you have no record of how fast ice shelves may have vanished in the past due to natural warming, it seems suspect to claim that this certainly proves the current rate of dissipation is due to unnatural warming...

Yes there is warming, but it appears our activities are unrelated.

But then what would he know? He's only the chair of a climatology department...

But my main point remains, that you are taking a rather unscientific leap with your fear-mongering statement.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Antisyzygy]

Im pretty sure they have some data considering they can get ice cores, and I am sure they probably have before. This would show approximately how long its been there, and there would be evidence of warming events, etc. in the ice.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Mark of the North]

[...]Yes there is warming, but it appears our activities are unrelated.

But then what would he know? He's only the chair of a climatology department...[...]

Wow! You picked a pretty big and ripe cherry there. Are you sure it is indicative of all the cherries on the tree?

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[cosmicaug]

Since you have no record of how fast ice shelves may have vanished in the past due to natural warming, it seems suspect to claim that this certainly proves the current rate of dissipation is due to unnatural warming...

Says who? At the very least, someone seems to have the idea that these particular ice masses have been around for thousands of years.

Yes there is warming, but it appears our activities are unrelated.

But then what would he know? He's only the chair of a climatology department...

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/08/murray_salby_and_conservation.php

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is warming, but it appears our activities are unrelated [carlineconomics.com].

Yet another case of 1 study showing conflicting results of 100 other studies. Hmm, which has more chance of having made mistakes?

Mostly debunked, anyway: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Murry-Salby-Confused-About-The-Carbon-Cycle.html

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

In 2008 fossil fuel burning adding 8.7 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere, land use changes another 1.2 gigatons. Where did it go? Unless all anthropogenic CO2 is disappearing in a way that natural CO2 isn't, then we're contributing to the increase.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[DeadCatX2]

Since no one else has explicitly debunked this yet...

Yes, it is true that human emission of CO2 is dwarfed by natural emissions, which dominate the variability in CO2 emissions on a short-term annual basis. However, natural CO2 emissions are in equilibrium with natural CO2 sinks, so the long-term trend is more neutral. The human CO2 emissions have no corresponding CO2 sink, and therefore continually add a little bit of CO2 to the atmosphere every year.

Think of it like this. You get a paycheck for $2k every two weeks. Some months you pay a higher gas bill (winter), some months you pay a higher electric bill (summer), some months they're both low (spring, fall). Despite these short-term month-to-month variations, on a long-term basis you make about the same amount of money annually.

Now let's assume that your expenses and your income have reached equilibrium. You make $2k every two weeks, and spend $2k every two weeks. Now let's say that once a week, the bank deducts $1 from your account. $1 is insignificant compared to your bi-weekly income and expenses. And yet, over the long term, these $1 deductions will gradually make you go bankrupt.

So in summary, even though human CO2 emissions are dwarfed by natural CO2 emissions, they will add up in the long term.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[sycodon]

If my recollections of college are accurate, the Department Chair was usually the professor who was so out of date in the topic that the only thing left to them was to be a bureaucrat.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

Yes there is warming, but it appears our activities are unrelated.

The link you gave says this:

Salby analyzed the annual variations in atmospheric CO2 levels as measured at Mauna Loa with temperatures and found a strong correlation. The largest increases year-to-year occurred when the world warmed fastest due to El Nino conditions. The smallest increases correlated with volcanoes which pump dust up into the atmosphere and keep the world cooler for a while.

Let's first address the word 'correlation' in the first sentence. In any discussion of global warming, the anti-global warming crowd jumps all over any use of 'correlation', screaming up to the heavens 'correlation does not equal causation'. So much so that I now immediately discredit anyone who uses that phrase. I'd just like to point out the hypocrisy of relying on correlation when it suits your findings and attacking correlation when it does not.

Secondly, what he found, and I'm not saying I believe the findings, I haven't seen them/analyzed them/heard anyone else mention them, but the strongest conclusion you could come to from that summary is that year-to-year, humans don't push atmospheric CO2 as much as natural causes like El Nino. However these year-to-year natural causes are generally cyclic. El Nino doesn't keep causing CO2 to enter the atmosphere because it comes and goes. Over several years, El Nino is a net-zero contributor of CO2, it's like zooming out on a sine graph, whereas human CO2 additions is a monotonically increasing line.

Thirdly, "The smallest increases correlated with volcanoes which pump dust up into the atmosphere and keep the world cooler for a while." Okay, so even when natural causes are doing their best to keep the world cool, CO2 still increases. I think that goes to show that there is some more fundamental force pushing up CO2 year-over-year-over-year.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Masterofpsi]

Anyone who calls AGW a "religion" should be taken with a grain of salt.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Carlin is not a climatologist, never has been, never published any peer reviewed climatology work. He is a well know oil industry sponsored shill see http://www.desmogblog.com/alan-carlin for details. Beware of any piece of work that is not coming from the real scientific community. The majority of the dissenters are fronts for the petrochemicals industry doing a great job on confusing old joe public, and surprisingly, the ./ crowd, or are you all just more of the same individuals involved in the global warming denial industry.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[microbox]

It only strengthens the case that warming is unnatural, because the rates of ice-decrease in the arctic is way outstripping model projections based on AGW.

This is a clear case of people conveniently misinterpreting the context of what is being said.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[sycodon]

"Dr. Giaever was quoted declaring himself a man-made global warming dissenter. “I am a skeptic...Global warming has become a new religion,”

  This guy knows what he is talking about.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[microbox]

But then what would he know? He's only the chair of a climatology department...

Haha, you would believe anything you read/heard, so long as it means that there is no AGW! Ah yes, I smell a mirror image projection coming from you write now as you read these very words.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Yes, it is true that human emission of CO2 is dwarfed by natural emissions, which dominate the variability in CO2 emissions on a short-term annual basis. However, natural CO2 emissions are in equilibrium with natural CO2 sinks, so the long-term trend is more neutral. The human CO2 emissions have no corresponding CO2 sink, and therefore continually add a little bit of CO2 to the atmosphere every year...

OK, I'll bite. I would love to hear more about this amazing ability of CO2 sinks to distinguish naturally occurring CO2 emissions, from human CO2 emissions.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Atroxodisse]

Except that if you look at the graph on the linked materials you can see that human emissions don't correlate at all with the total measured CO2 levels in the atmosphere, not even close.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[scot4875]

Same way a mother bird will know if its babies have come into contact with humans and then just abandon them. Nature just knows. Human produced CO2 smells different than regular ol' CO2.

--Jeremy

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[DeadCatX2]

What does distinguishing the source of CO2 have to do with anything? This is called a red herring fallacy.

CO2 sinks have some finite amount of sinking ability. CO2 sources have some finite amount of sourcing ability. Over the long term, these finite values are roughly equal, even if over the short term they aren't.

Human CO2 emissions throw this equilibrium out of whack, like the bank which is constantly deducting $1 a month in fees. You don't know for sure that a given dollar that you put in will go to the bank's fees or your bills, but the money is coming out of your account either way.

Certainly, some human CO2 emissions will be sunk by natural means...and a corresponding amount of natural CO2 that would have been sunk now remains in the atmosphere.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[DeadCatX2]

I looked at the link for a graph, but found none.

I did find a 47 page paper with plenty of graphs, but I have no idea which one you're talking about, so that makes it somewhat difficult to refute your assertion.

Despite this, I feel compelled to point out that his paper focuses on short-term variations in atmospheric CO2. This is why there appears to be no correlation - El Nino sources 20-30x as much CO2 as humans do, while La Nina sinks about as much CO2 as El Nino sources; El Nino and La Nina are in equilibrium. Naturally over the short term, because El Nino dwarfs human CO2 emissions, it will look like human CO2 isn't correlated with atmospheric CO2 at all.

Once you go long-term so that El Nino and La Nina cancel each other out, you will see the correlation of human CO2 emissions to atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[arem-aref]

are we to take your word that natural co2 emissions have a natural sink, but man made do not?, how do the trees tell the difference?, you've been indoctrinated.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[riverat1]

CO2 is CO2 regardless of the source (except there can be differences at the isotope level). The way it works is that in the Carbon Cycle there is a natural balance of carbon between the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, the geosphere and the pedosphere. When you increase the total carbon in the cycle it gets distributed among the various 'spheres' increasing the level until a new balance is reached. The yearly cycle continues as it always has, just with more total carbon in it. The most obvious signs of this are the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere and ocean acidification.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[riverat1]

No, the sinks take up CO2 regardless of the source. But there is more total carbon in the carbon cycle so the levels increase everywhere. Only around 45% of the CO2 emitted by humans each year remains in the atmosphere, the rest is absorbed by the sinks.

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[Jubedgy]

Insightful? Bah. Giving big numbers is nothing without something to compare them to. What is the total mass of the atmosphere? about 5 quadrillion tons (look it up). What percent of 5 quadrillion tons is 10 gigatons? I get .0002%. So the number the parent spewed out may look big, but in context it is really, really tiny...some would say insignificant?

Re:Why would that dispel anything?

[toddestan]

You do realize that CO2 is a relatively small portion of the total atmosphere, at about 0.039% by volume?

I know its true!

[Anonymous Coward]

My 32bit signed integer based FORTRAN compiler told me so!

Its the solar cycle!

[Antisyzygy]

God wants it this way.

The sky is falling!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote Sherman T. Potter. "Horse Potatoes!" One fell swoop. Give me a break.

Bad phrasing

[OverlordQ]

'The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'"

How's that saying go, past performance is no guarantee of future results. The Andes used to be under water for thousands of years; the continents used to all be one big land mass. If we lived back then I'm sure we'd be hearing about Anthropogenic Tectonic Drift.

Dont jump from "There used to be ice, now there isn't." to "We did it"

These unique and massive geographical features that we consider to be a part of the map of Canada are disappearing and they won’t come back

Alarmist.

The researchers say their disappearance suggests a possible return to conditions unseen in the Arctic for thousands of years.

So there used to be conditions where they would have melted anyways, climate changed and they appeared, now they're disappearing again and you say we'll never see them again?

Re:Bad phrasing

[Antisyzygy]

If it takes thousands of years, we probably wont see them again.

Re:Bad phrasing

[cosmicaug]

'The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'"

How's that saying go, past performance is no guarantee of future results. The Andes used to be under water for thousands of years; the continents used to all be one big land mass. If we lived back then I'm sure we'd be hearing about Anthropogenic Tectonic Drift.

Assuming this is not some pathetic attempt at humor which I am pathetically entirely missing, do you even have any idea of the timescales involved here or are you one of those 'the earth is 10000 years old' folk?

Re:Bad phrasing

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>If we lived back then I'm sure we'd be hearing about Anthropogenic Tectonic Drift.

The difference is that there's a physical mechanism for human effect on climate and that observations are matching calculations based on that physics.

A quick touchstone for any alternative hypothesis for explaining global temperature rises is to ask, "Does it predict stratospheric cooling?" If CO2 is trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, then we'd predict that it won't reach the stratosphere, which will then cool down. Warming due to orbital changes, solar activity, or whatnot, would warm up the stratosphere.

It's easy to find out which is happening.

Re:Bad phrasing

[subl33t]

"The difference is that there's a physical mechanism for human effect on climate and that observations are matching calculations based on that physics."

Um no, the observations are definitely NOT matching the predictions. Not the IPCC predictions anyway.

Re:Bad phrasing

[microbox]

How's that saying go, past performance is no guarantee of future results. The Andes used to be under water for thousands of years; the continents used to all be one big land mass. If we lived back then I'm sure we'd be hearing about Anthropogenic Tectonic Drift.

AGW is not purely the result of environmental alarmism. There is an actual scientific argument which is ignored in the public discourse, as people like you impugn the motives of others. (Since that is far easier then actually going after the science.)

NOBODY has made a sound scientific argument that the AGW science is wrong. So go ahead, keep calling the scientists alarmists. Afterall, the must know nothing about climate at all.

Re:Bad phrasing

[Anonymous Coward]

You do make a convincing argument.

Re:Bad phrasing

[Baloroth]

Exactly. Whatever is causing these shelves to melt, the fact that they are melting at an unexpected rate means that our current model for climatology is broken in some way. Meaning the model that everyone is using isn't accounting for everything, whether the unknown factor is human or natural.

So what this story is really proving is that scientists really have no idea what is happening, because the Earth is really big and influence by far to many factors to be accounted for in the models. On the other hand, cutting back carbon emissions is a good idea in any case, but alarmism like this article is not going to help convince people of that.

Re:Bad phrasing

[tompaulco]

Dont jump from "There used to be ice, now there isn't." to "We did it"
He didn't. He said it wasn't natural. If it wasn't natural, it must be supernatural. If we did it, it would be natural.

Re:Bad phrasing

[Fned]

You do realize he offered a fairly specific prediction in the sentence immediately following the one you quoted, right?

Re:Bad phrasing

[riverat1]

I think if you compared IPCC predictions to reality you would find that they more often underpredict rather than overpredict.

Re:Bad phrasing

[Jubedgy]

+5, Insightful

To paraphrase from THHGTTG, the Earth is a mind-bogglingly big place. In the modern age of jet travel people may forget that. There is a LOT of mass associated with our little planet, and to assume that we have an effect on it's long-term rhythms really smacks of a modern day 'geocentric-view'. People had models that proved, PROVED that geocentrism was correct, and the science had been settled for over a thousand years. All scientists agreed on that point.

It may turn out that anthropogenic climate change is true, but it may also turn out that we just have faulty models and poor data. Occam's razor would favor the latter over the former due to the sheer complexity of the system.

Re:Bad phrasing

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

erroneous conclusions

[corbettw]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural."

Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

Note the huge uptick in average temperature starting roughly 11.5k years BP. I'm pretty sure the foot-powered cars the Flintstones drove didn't warm the earth, so this must've been a natural event. Saying that it's impossible for current temperature trends to be unnatural flies in the face of something that has already happened once, almost within recorded history; not to mention all the times when it happened outside of recorded history.

This is why some people, like myself, do not take climate alarmists seriously. They make these grandiose pronouncements that have little, if anything, to do with the facts.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Alomex]

This is why some people, like myself, do not take climate alarmists seriously. They make these grandiose pronouncements that have little, if anything, to do with the facts.

Most likely this is just like Y2K, SARS, and yes, even AIDS. All real, actually happening events and yet at the same time exaggerated by people who have much to profit from pushing an agenda (in this case funding for their own research programs).

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

so basically, you just want the world to know you have no sense of scale. Those three pixels to the right of the 0? That's 60 years.

The reason you don't take science seriously is that you've been lied to by activists.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Ichijo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

Note the huge uptick in average temperature starting roughly 11.5k years BP. I'm pretty sure the foot-powered cars the Flintstones drove didn't warm the earth, so this must've been a natural event.

What's that massive spike at the end of the graph, in the "Recent Proxies" section? Do you see it?

Re:erroneous conclusions

[mpe]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural."
Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Note the huge uptick in average temperature starting roughly 11.5k years BP.

I wonder how well the methods used to reconstruct climate would be able to identify a similar event to that observed in Canada. Even though Ellesmere Island is a large island it is still a comparativly small part of the planet.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the scale of that change. It still takes over a thousand years for a 1.5 degree temperature change. We're seeing similar temperature increases in a few decades. That is an enormously higher rate of change.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

To some that might depend on whether you think god saying let there be light is considered a natural event.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural."

Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

Note the huge uptick in average temperature starting roughly 11.5k years BP. I'm pretty sure the foot-powered cars the Flintstones drove didn't warm the earth, so this must've been a natural event. Saying that it's impossible for current temperature trends to be unnatural flies in the face of something that has already happened once, almost within recorded history; not to mention all the times when it happened outside of recorded history.

This is why some people, like myself, do not take climate alarmists seriously. They make these grandiose pronouncements that have little, if anything, to do with the facts.

Halocene Temperature variations? Did you even read the text under the graph you presented?

"During the Holocene itself, there is general scientific agreement that temperatures on the average have been quite stable compared to fluctuations during the preceding glacial period. The above average curve supports this belief. However, there is a slightly warmer period in the middle which might be identified with the proposed Holocene climatic optimum. The magnitude and nature of this warm event is disputed, and it may have been largely limited to high northern latitudes.

Because of the limitations of data sampling, each curve in the main plot was smoothed (see methods below) and consequently, this figure can not resolve temperature fluctuations faster than approximately 300 years. Further, while 2004 appears warmer than any other time in the long-term average, and hence might be a sign of global warming, it should also be noted that the 2004 measurement is from a single year (actually the fourth highest on record, see Image:Short Instrumental Temperature Record.png for comparison). It is impossible to know whether similarly large short-term temperature fluctuations may have occurred at other times, but are unresolved by the available resolution. The next 150 years will determine whether the long-term average centered on the present appears anomalous with respect to this plot."

Talk about cherry picking,taking data out of context and comparing apples to oranges.

EPIC FAIL.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[microbox]

Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?

You are misinterpreting something. The arctic melt is proceeding far faster than anybody predicted, because climate science is very *conservative*. People who only "debate" climate science within the public discourse fail to acknowledge just how conservative the science is. So their predictions, consistent with AGW, say X, and we are seeing 2X. And then some scientist says: "looking, the ice is melting far faster then we predicted, we must have been correct." Note that the science is so *conservative* that any poorly understood positive feedback is no counted. So it becomes likely that warming will be greater than the IPCC reports predict.

That may be a little bit too complex to be understood within the public discourse, which focuses on specious arguments and "factoids", and a chronic failure to listen.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm wrong, and you are right, but what you see as a huge uptick around 11.5k actually spans 300 to 800 years.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[cosmicaug]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural."

Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

Note the huge uptick in average temperature starting roughly 11.5k years BP. I'm pretty sure the foot-powered cars the Flintstones drove didn't warm the earth, so this must've been a natural event. Saying that it's impossible for current temperature trends to be unnatural flies in the face of something that has already happened once, almost within recorded history; not to mention all the times when it happened outside of recorded history.

This is why some people, like myself, do not take climate alarmists seriously. They make these grandiose pronouncements that have little, if anything, to do with the facts.

That's not a very reassuring comparison if you want to calm down the alarmists. You know what else happened at a time when, despite what you are suggesting, temperature change was slower than what we seem to be getting now, at ~11.5k years BP? Yup, that's right, a mass extinction.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

That graph isn't granular enough to compare to the present day - with intervals of 2000 years, it's impossible to tell if that initial spike in temp took a week , a year, a decade or a century. We've seen an increase of about 0.8 deg C in 100 years. Also, while probably not the only factor, that event was likely the result of Milankovitch orbital changes, which are known to not be a factor in current climate change.

And the reason why many people don't take "climate alarmists" seriously is because they prefer simple and understandable, which climate is not. And some of the skeptics and most of the deniers play fast and loose with their "facts".

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Alsee]

Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?

Right. It hasn't. And your link only demonstrates how radically unnatural the current warming is.

Check the slope of the graph you linked to. The "rapid" warming coming out of the last ice age has a rate of approximately 1 degree C per 2200 years.

Over the last hundred-odd years the earth has earth has recently warmed at a rate fourteen times faster than that. And the conservative end of the scale the current rate of warming is 2 degrees C over the next hundred years. That's 44 times faster than the unusually rapid rate of the planet thawing out of an ice age.

-

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

the recent proxies section is a closeup of the last 2k years in the larger graph... so that massive spike, is the non-existent spike in the main graph.

Also, notice the scale.. the last recent proxies section only goes up to +0.5... and there are spikes in the main graph of +1.5

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that massive spike at the end of the graph, in the "Recent Proxies" section? Do you see it?

Oh, you mean the Mann "Hockey Stick" graph reconstruction - the one that "disappears" the Holocene optimum, the Roman warm period, the little ice age, etc... based on a principal component analysis algorithm used by Mann that produces a hockey stick no matter what data you feed into it - the same graph the IPCC removed from AR4 because it could no longer be supported in emergent scientific findings - that graph? Seriously, any publication that uses that graph has lost all credibility. The graph corbettw refers to has been recently added to improve the credibility of Wikipedia. While it is a more realistic reconstruction of paleoclimate, it still doesn't help Wikipedia's credibility given they still use Mann's hockey stick graph to bolster their alarmist claims.

Re:erroneous conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

That directly relates to the removal of 3500 of the coolest thermometers from 1990 onwards. This is also known in skeptical circles as the great dying of thermometers: http://joannenova.com.au/2010/05/the-great-dying-of-thermometers/

Also has a nice animation too.

Logical fallacy

[argStyopa]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural"

Why?

Ice melting fast != humans at fault. Honestly, I've seen a lake go from "safe to walk on" to "no trace of ice" in a few days. I never once thought "Holy crap, some dude must have caused this!"

Certainly, that's the ASSUMPTION, and there are a lot of credible reasons for believing that to be true. But I don't see how A logically follows B unless you're already certain that B is true and just looking for more reasons to say it.

Re:Logical fallacy

[Bucky24]

Ice melting fast != humans at fault. Honestly, I've seen a lake go from "safe to walk on" to "no trace of ice" in a few days. I never once thought "Holy crap, some dude must have caused this!"

That's what happens when someone pees in the lake.

Re:Logical fallacy

[Antisyzygy]

That person is me.

Re:Logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does this even matter?
Seriously, why does the debate always come to down to arguing over the cause of global warming?
Let's say we're not causing any of this. Let's say it's entirely natural.
Does that mean that Bangladesh won't be entirely underwater in a century?
Does that mean that the ocean won't cover Florida because it's not Florida's fault?
Fundamentally, blaming this on the human race, or on nature, or on anything else, is not going to help in any productive sense.
Instead of bickering over irrelevant shit, we should be researching ways to stop the warming trend, manage ocean acidification, limit the rise of sea levels, or any other number of things that would actually improve our lot here on Earth.
But that would involve work. No, it's much more enjoyable to argue about where to point our collective finger.
We're fucked.

Re:Logical fallacy

[microbox]

Why?

He is saying this because the climate models are extremely conservative in their predictions. The entire AGW argument isn't contained in a few melting ice-shelves.

Re:Logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

If these Canadian ice shelves and your counterexample lake ice had approximately the same thickness and temperature at the beginning of the process you may be on to something interesting here! Otherwise you're just a raving nut. But I'll let you get back to me with the numbers before I jump to any conclusions about your sanity.

We need more pirates!

[Oswald McWeany]

We all know by now that global warming is caused by the lack of pirates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Pirates_and_global_warming

Re:We need more pirates!

[xhrit]

There are more pirates currently living on the earth then ever before at any other time in history. And I am not talking about pirates dowloading music on the internet; I am talking about pirates boarding ships then looting, raping, and killing in places like Somalia and Indonesia. I know you think pirates are funny, but it is really not funny, and certainly not informative. Thousand of people were killed this year alone by pirates on the high seas, and tens of billions of dollars have been lost.

Great unit, that

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen the Great Pyramid, so that's completely meaningless to me. I mean, I assume it's big. Otherwise, Not-So-Great Pyramid.

Re:Great unit, that

[halivar]

Is that a metric Giza Pyramid, or a US/Imperial Giza Pyramid?

The Happening vs Natural Argument

[ChrisKnight]

Summaries like this irk me. It ends with "These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural." This is a complete invalid conclusion.

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming is not happening." is a more reasonable statement based on the facts presented.

As to proving that it is not natural, that is a different argument that needs to be made by demonstrating the causes not reciting the symptoms.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[DNS-and-BIND]

Global warming is scientifically proven already, the debate ended a few years ago. Didn't you get the memo? More evidence, as if it was needed, and denialists do what they do - deny. Oil company is paying you to post, right?

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[Thing 1]

As to proving that it is not natural, that is a different argument that needs to be made by demonstrating the causes not reciting the symptoms.

I think we should first prove that humans are not natural. Before we start saying that climate change is not natural, regardless of the cause.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

Oh, come on! The evidence is incontrovertible!

Oh, wait.

I see your department head and raise you a Nobel Prize winner...and not the Peace Prize winner.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[flaming error]

He never said the science was wrong. He said he didn't like the politics.

I give his political opinion about the same weight as I would give the scientific opinion of a winner of the Peace Prize.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

AGW is all about politics.

As your dunderhead post shows.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[subl33t]

"I give his political opinion about the same weight as I would give the scientific opinion of a winner of the Peace Prize."

Peace Prize? OH! You mean like all the authors of the IPCC AR report?

The next time you see someone from the IPCC flagged as a Nobel Laureate remember, it's NOT a science prize...

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

Gore called. He wants all his sycophants to meet him next week at the secret lair.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[flaming error]

Except for the climatologists, to whom it's about empirical data and the scientific method.

If you want to win this fight, you'll need to leave the sports bar and get in the scientific arena.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

Yeah, Hansen protesting and getting arrested with a bunch of smelly hippies is all about science. Protesting a fucking pipeline.

Nope...this is ALL about Politics. Otherwise, all these climatologists would be going in front of government bodies and saying that we need to go nuclear and switch.

Just think, if they lent half of the weight to advancing nuclear technology, advocating for increased deployment, etc,. for the last 30 years, we'd be well on our way to make all this irrelevant. Instead, they advocate (they meaning people like you) austerity, higher taxes, rationing and bullshit like that.

What we have now is people bitching about something they have a solution for, but refuse to use.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[subl33t]

"Except for the climatologists, to whom it's about empirical data and the scientific method."
Riiiiight...
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/09/27/here-an-activist-there-an-activist/

"If you want to win this fight, you'll need to leave the sports bar..." ... and you need to step out of the Opium den.

Karma be damned.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[mbkennel]

"Nope...this is ALL about Politics. Otherwise, all these climatologists would be going in front of government bodies and saying that we need to go nuclear and switch."

And why is that? Why should they jump out, in public, of their personal area of true expertise into something which is not their job?

Maybe they're doing their work and analyzing data and experiments about their field?
And what does the actual science show? It shows that to slow down or stop climate change humans need to do things which reduce the infrared emissivity of the stratosphere. How that happens is not a matter of physics, but of human decisions.

Many people, especially scientists, think that increasing nuclear power will be needed.

Somebody who is an expert in analyzing temperature data from aircraft in the tropics is not an expert on the economic modelling and analysis. There are experts on that who do that for a living, and they come up with more quantitatively justified and realistic scenarios (as in everything needs to be done, not just nuclear power) and they do go in front of government bodies. There are IPCC reports on mitigation strategies and scientists and others who contribute to those as well.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

And why is that? Why should they jump out, in public, of their personal area of true expertise into something which is not their job?

Because they are jumping out in public now to advocate for various measures. I give you one Dr. Mann.

And then there are the nuts at the IPCC.

Of course, I think you are being rather disingenuous by retreating to the cover of objective science and claiming that they (you) are merely reporting the facts. It is plain to even the casual observer that Climate Science and schemes for fighting Global Warming are all part of the same group.

There is no separating the greater AGW community from the calls to impose limitations on CO2 through government policy that almost exclusively entail cut backs on energy use, rationing and taxes. Once you get past all the stupid sniping and name calling on Slashdot you inevitably find a call for these policies. Every major political figure/initiative I've heard of that is remotely related to AGW is sole focused on these kinds of policies. Maybe I missed the Nuclear Advancement and Energy Independence Act being introduce and discussed in a State of the Union addressed and Presidential speeches, but I doubt it.

And lastly, why wouldn't they? If, as Dr. Jones thinks, AGW is a threat to the world as we know it, why would he and his colleagues not all jump to endorse the one technology we have here and now that would do the most to mitigate CO2 emissions?

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[flaming error]

If they've got the science wrong, show them their mistakes.

Otherwise, ask yourself why you are so passionate you are right and the professionals are wrong. Ask yourself why all your posts are ad hominem attacks.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

Ask yourself why you are resistant to a solution that solves everyone's problems?

Are you a screeching anti-nuke activist? Do you fear AGW becoming moot?

As for the Science, I don't have to prove anyone wrong, they have to prove themselves right. Funny how folks who scream Scientific Principals all the time ignore the basic tenet of proving your claim. Instead the claim is simply floated and those who may disagree or have reservations are asked to prove it wrong.

Then, when an alternate theory is suggested, they are told to prove that right. Seems the AGW crowd doesn't have to prove anything other than an acute case of Group Think.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[flaming error]

> Are you a screeching anti-nuke activist?
Whether I screech about nukes proves nothing about AGW, just like your red herrings prove nothing.

> they have to prove themselves right
That's the irony - they already have. Time after time, more conclusively with every passing year.

"Skeptics," who've never read a single scientific paper on the subject, reassure each other that climatologists haven't taken into account the Sun, or that climatologists are ignoring previous climate changes over Earth's geologic history. They immerse themselves in echo chambers of opposing opinions, be they FUD about the accuracy of data from a weather station, or Al Gore's hypocrisy, or "smelly hippies" "fucking pipelines."

But "skeptics" as a rule don't look anywhere near the proof scientists have been publishing for the last forty years.

> Do you fear AGW becoming moot?
No, I fear AGW not being moot. I would really like AGW theory to be a collosal error - maybe you're the guy who can prove it is. But you'll need to post it to Nature Magazine, not the blogosphere.

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[sycodon]

Whether I screech about nukes proves nothing about AGW, just like your red herrings prove nothing.

Oh, but it is.

AGW is being posited as a problem, a problem of such importance that it requires a solution. If you don't think that is important or relevant to the discussion then I can only assume you don't think AGW is a problem. In that case, discussions about AGW are a waste of time. It may be interesting, but it has as much practical impact on the ordinary person as does CERN finding another quark. Interesting, but I don' give a shit.

If, on the other hand, you DO think it's a problem, then foremost in your thought process should be, "how do we solve it?"

There are essentially two approaches. The first involves devolution of industry and living standards in the West and the other involves further developing and deployment of an existing technology that is well understood and has a very promising technical future. The first option really isn't even a solution because half the world won't go for it. The second option is a solution with the added bonus of going a long towards extracting the West from Middle East politics and reducing the chances of environmental damage associated with fossil fuel exploration and extraction.

So you have to ask your self...do you want to solve the problem or not? If not, then you are no better then some ex-wife screeching about something that no one cares about and we'd all prefer you just shut it. But if you do, then a wise individual would be thinking about doing an end run around the entire debate and advocating a solution that addresses everyone's concerns.

So which is it? Are you someone who cares about what happens or are you just a fat bitch of an ex-wife?

Re:The Happening vs Natural Argument

[DerangedAlchemist]

A carbon tax would promote nuclear energy because nuclear power doesn't produce carbon dioxide. The same is true of many other methods of generating power. Why wouldn't they promote an effective, market driven approach to accounting for the cost?
AGW hasn't been in any real dispute for a long time. In The Skeptical Environmentalist it was pointed out that back then there was no real dispute among anyone who knew about climate science. Of course it also pointed out that environmentally the 'bang for buck' on global warming spending was worse than about anything else and economically didn't look sensible. There is dispute over how big the effect is, which is being lost because these people are getting lumped in with the 'it is not happening' denialists who seem immune to evidence or facts.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

How did Harper let that bit of news slip by him?

The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

I'll just point out the corresponding lack of sea level rise. I'm going to have to put this in the same category as the atlas maker that said 15 percent of Greenland's ice melted. If that had actually happened the oceans would have gone up by feat. That hasn't happened so 15 percent of greenland's ice didn't melt. Likewise if this ice pack is so significant in canada there must be a corresponding rise in sea level.

Over the last century we've had a rise of about 8 cm in sea level. That means ice has absolutely melted. Just not as much as the alarmists would have us believe.

We can take GW seriously without getting hysterical about it. What we're seeing is SLOW melting and SLOW sea level rise.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[OverlordQ]

I'll just point out the corresponding lack of sea level rise. I'm going to have to put this in the same category as the atlas maker that said 15 percent of Greenland's ice melted.

15% could have melted and someplace else grew by 15%

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[sourcerror]

Except that it didn't. They used an inaccurate Atlas.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[FatAlb3rt]

Oops, sorry. That was me. I added 15% more ice to my freezer. Didn't think anyone would care, guess I was wrong.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

The atlas makers relied on a US data set that they misinterpreted. They inferred that a reduction in 15 percent of the area of the ice was equal to 15 percent of the volume of the ice. A very very stupid mistake... and they're paying for it.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[stubob]

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Most of the current global land ice mass is located in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (table 1). Complete melting of these ice sheets could lead to a sea-level rise of about 80 meters, whereas melting of all other glaciers could lead to a sea-level rise of only one-half meter.

So a 15% melting should show a 12m rise in ocean level.

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2009/climate-change-sea-level

Measurements gathered by tide gauges through the 20th century show that global sea level rose at an average rate of 1.7 mm per year – this translates to about two-thirds of an inch per decade. Satellite altimeter data gathered from 1993 to 2003 indicate that the rate of global average sea level rise increased to 3.1 mm per year, or about one and a quarter inches per decade.

There has been an 18 cm rise since 1900, and the rate of rise is increasing.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Ichijo]

I'll just point out the corresponding lack of sea level rise.

Because the current sea level and sea level change is uniform around the globe?

Wrong.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Anonymous Coward]

If half of the ice shelf had melted, the sea level would have undoubtedly risen significantly over the past 6 years. 8cm in 100 years is not a significant change. That could be caused by people peeing in the ocean over the past 100 years.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

I'm assuming you know how water works... so to answer your question... yes... and a duh. :-)

There are some minor differences due to tide which is mostly the moon but that's happening to the whole world all the time and couldn't mask a global increase of a few feet in sea level rise.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

Whatever... it isn't half the Canadian ice sheet or 15 percent of Greenland as these alarmist articles keep claiming. That was my point. If you want to say it's 18 cm... that's plausible.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[microbox]

An atlas maker that makes a mistake is not scientific discourse. That's just looking for petty errors, and then harping on about them. If only deniers would own up to making mistakes themselves.

In fact that is the give-away that the deniers really are in denial. It is a classic symptom of denial to refuse to acknowledge any deficits in one's own interpretation. Denial proceeds by finding minute details and then making as much noise about them as possible.

It is not GW, it is AGW, as is /clearly/ argued in the scientific literature. There is *no* cogent argument against the scientific argument. The scientific community /would/ change their tune if an argument was made. Somehow, people like you expect scientists to change their minds because atlas makers make a mistake (for example), which is completely irrelevant.

AGW may be slow by the standards of government terms in office, and it may be slow enough to adapt to. But it may not. We are already seeing increases in violent storms and flooding and heat waves, and that costs money and lives.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Spoke]

I'll just point out the corresponding lack of sea level rise. Likewise if this ice pack is so significant in canada there must be a corresponding rise in sea level.

I'll just point out an important fact about these ice shelves you've missed. They are floating, just happen to be attached to shore. Which means that even if they melted 100% - there would be no (significant[1]) change in overall sea levels because of it.

That's a science experiment you are welcome to perform at home.

[1] Note that because ice is salt-free and fresh water is less dense than sea water, once floating ice is melted it will slightly rise sea levels but the amount is pretty much insignificant at current levels of floating ice melt.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[izomiac]

Well, there is a fair bit of variability in the weather. Assuming it follows a normal distribution, about half of places are warming at this precise moment, while the other half are cooling. The theory of global warming would suggest the distribution is slightly skewed, but it's still going to be close to 50/50. People get suspicious when someone mentions a warming spot, which "proves" global warming while a counterpoint that some other place is cooling is "just a localized event". No falsifiability. Plus, observations without experimentation are a quite low level of evidence, below serious consideration in harder sciences, as they're far too prone to bias and confounding effects.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[mbkennel]

The rate of sea level rise has recently started to accelerate substantially.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[surveyork]

Mod parent up. Regardless of whether the melting of these ice shelves is man-made, a natural process or fairy-made, it's ice shelves we are considering, not ice sheets. As a side note, climate scientists were quick and vocal to point out the big mistake of the Greenland atlas.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

So they say but the actual amount of sea level rise is negligible. No one is evacuating anything over 18 cm.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

Exactly. Which is why simply looking at sea level rise is a good check on alarmism. It's freely available information with hundreds of years of records. We also have a very good understanding of the relationship between melting and sea level rise. As a result, whenever we see some article or paper about glaciers disappearing we need only calculate the mass of those glaciers, take the percentage they've cited as melted, and then determine how much that would increase ocean depth.

When we see something nutty like 15 percent of greenland or half of the canadian ice pack... we just need to check "did the oceans rise by several feet in the last few years?"... No? Then the report is wrong. QED.

I can't think of any other empirical and verifiable way to deal with these frequently vague and poorly sourced reports that seem more interested in stirring political action or inspiring donations then actually investigating the science.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Anonymous Coward]

That's slow on a human scale. Incredibly rapid on a geological scale.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

It is harping on details but science is about details. If we don't harp on all the little details then it's very hard to make any kind of argument one way or the other.

Science is details. As to an atlas not being a scientific discourse... it is a respected reference work that is cited as evidence and reviewed throughout the world by laypeople and experts. So while it's not a peer review paper it's actually read by more people then a peer review and likely more critically analyzed. Thus if anything it's probably a more authoritative picture of things then any peer review. After all the peer review is often read by as few as 50 to 100 actual experts. An atlas is examined by thousands of experts and possibly hundreds of thousands of laypeople with varying degrees of knowledge. Tell a man that lives in a given place that the lake near his home has a different name and he'll correct you. He might not know anything else or contribute otherwise to the atlas but he will know that and together the collective knowledge of all the laypeople is probably superior to any one expert even if it might take hundreds of lay people to collectively has the same grasp as any one of them.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

That's a good point. To counter that, I'd point out that most free floating sea ice is seasonal and reforms and melts throughout the year. There are down years and up years but total ice cover in the northern hemisphere has actually been fairly consistent since the 1970s when we started taking pictures of it from space. You can review the pictures yourself if you like. The difference between 1970 and 2010 isn't remarkable.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

perhaps but geologically the oceans have been a great deal higher and a great deal lower. Furthermore, geologically we have records of faster changes in ocean depth so this has happened naturally in the past. And on top of that, geologically and ecologically the rising oceans don't really matter. The rocks don't care and the biosphere is perfectly capable of adapting because it has previously adapted to this happening many times in the past.

What is relevant is the human scale because the geological and ecological scale aren't relevant to the question of some moderate warming. Roughly 70 percent of the earth's population lives near and around the oceans. So a doomsday rise of 50 feet especially if it happened quickly on HUMAN terms would be catastrophic. However, if it only goes up a foot or so over several centuries then it's really not a huge deal. While some low lying populations might have to move or rebuild large parts of their cities to accommodate that they would have to do that anyway since human structures must be rebuild or heavily maintained on a fairly regular basis. The total cost in human terms is relatively minor unless the rise in the oceans is rapid and extreme. The ecological cost is negligible and the geological cost is a non-concept.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[microbox]

It is harping on details but science is about details.

The commercial production of atlases is business, not science. That someone made a mistake putting an atlas together has nothing to do with the scientific consensus on climate change. The denier argument amounts to: "look, there is uncertainty here, because there's this mistake over here". At this rate, you might think that there were no forest because there is some space between the trees.

But whatever. You know best, right?.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Spoke]

To counter that, I'd point out that most free floating sea ice is seasonal and reforms and melts throughout the year.

You do realize we're talking about ice shelves which have been around for thousands of years, and not sea ice extent, right?

To counter that, I'd point out that most free floating sea ice is seasonal and reforms and melts throughout the year. ... The difference between 1970 and 2010 isn't remarkable.

The experts on the subject strongly disagree with you.

From The NSIDC - Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis:

The last five years (2007 to 2011) have been the five lowest extents in the continuous satellite record, which extends back to 1979. While the record low year of 2007 was marked by a combination of weather conditions that favored ice loss (including clearer skies, favorable wind patterns, and warm temperatures), this year has shown more typical weather patterns but continued warmth over the Arctic. This supports the idea that the Arctic sea ice cover is continuing to thin. Models and remote sensing data also indicate this is the case.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

Look at the pictures yourself. They're almost identical measuring from a season to season basis. A scam people sometimes play with those photos is that they'll show one picture from a winter and compare that to another year's summer. So obviously the sea ice will be radically reduced in the summer. Take a couple photos from a given season in 1980 and compare them to a couple photos from the same season in 2010. They're very similar.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

The publishing of peer reviewed journals is also a business or did you think they just gave those away for free? Log on to any of them and try and download the latest issue without entering a member password or getting your credit card out.

As to someone making a mistake on an atlas... I'm not blaming the global climate change movement for this error in the atlas beyond simply creating an atmosphere where such errors are going to be more likely. By ginning up all this hysteria and misinformation on the subject they're going to confuse people. Furthermore, that atlas makers otherwise known as cartographers are not fools. That is a highly technical, precise, and demanding profession that cannot be dismissed as simply a group of bozos. This is especially so because it's a highly respected series.

Everyone has the legitimacy and credibility they've earned. You can't claim it unless you've personally earned it. That atlas has a long track record of accuracy, precision, and thoughtfulness. From that they've earned a easily as much credibility in their many years of publication as any group of climate scientists that can't seem to keep themselves out of one scandal or another involving methodology, ethics, etc.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[riverat1]

Lack of sea level rise is partially due to the record setting precipitation around the world, Pakistan last year and this, Australia, the US Midwest. The some of the rainfall gets absorbed in the land and aquifers and doesn't return for a while.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[riverat1]

You should look into sea level, it's really pretty interesting. There are all sorts of regional effects. For instance the gravitational attraction of mountain ranges like the Andes and the Antarctic Ice Sheet make sea level adjacent to them higher than it would be otherwise. The Antarctic Ice sheet increases sea level around the continent by as much as 30 meters (damn, that's a lot). Here's a paper on the subject but since that's paywalled, here's an article on it.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[riverat1]

No, ice shelves melting don't change sea level significantly because they are already floating on the ocean. But the glaciers that feed them no longer have as much resistance at the bottom end and so typically speed up feeding more ice to the sea. That does raise sea level.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Spoke]

Look at the pictures yourself. They're almost identical measuring from a season to season basis.

The pictures I'm looking at show a HUGE difference in summer arctic sea ice for the last 5 years compared to the last 30. This year sea ice extent dropped to 4.33 million square kilometers. The median minimum since 1979 is appx 6.75. +- 2 std deviations is between 5.75 and 7.75.

4.33 is not even close to any reasonable definition of "very similar".

A scam people sometimes play with those photos is that they'll show one picture from a winter and compare that to another year's summer. So obviously the sea ice will be radically reduced in the summer. Take a couple photos from a given season in 1980 and compare them to a couple photos from the same season in 2010. They're very similar.

The only time sea ice extent looks similar is in the winter - that's because it's cold enough in the winter for most of the arctic to freeze over. But sea ice extent in the winter doesn't tell you anything about the volume of ice that is there.

Global warming has significantly thinned the arctic sea ice. Instead of thick multi-year ice that sticks around through summer, now you've got lots of thin ice that rapidly melts when the sun comes out in the spring and summer.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[riverat1]

Record high temperature outnumbered record cold temperatures by 2-1 in the 2000's. Admittedly that only covers the US but in 2010 17 countries had all time record high temperatures.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

Somehow I think 5 feet of sea level rise isn't hiding in greater rainfall leading to some marginal storage in the aquifers.

You might explain away a few mm that way but not feet.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

The effect of this sort of thing is extremely minor and while perhaps interesting distracts from the actual point here. Global sea level rise hasn't gone up much. Whatever the regional distortions are they're ancient and thus incapable of suddenly absorbing a lot of water and thus hiding it from a global survey.

Again the sort of distortion you're talking about is measured in mm not feet. If 15 percent of Greenland melted you'd be seeing a significant increase in water volume.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

Even if that's true the arctic ice isn't relevant to sea levels since it's mostly suspended in the water anyway. The south pole's ice is more relevant there. And inconveniently to your narrative, the south pole has been quiet cold leading to if anything the opposite effect.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Jubedgy]

We are already seeing increases in violent storms and flooding and heat waves, and that costs money and lives.

Fail, you are confusing weather with climate, a common fallacy. Try again.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Spoke]

The Antarctic ice sheet certainly isn't growing according to the experts. Not sure where you got that idea.

Is Antarctica Melting?
The Future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[microbox]

Fail, you are confusing weather with climate, a common fallacy. Try again.

LoL! You really think you "checkmated" me there don't you.

One storm is weather. A global trend of increasing storm events over years is climate.

Care to play again?

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Log on to any of them and try and download the latest issue without entering a member password or getting your credit card out.

Works fine for me, but I am at a university. Most professors would prefer that the journals were free, and there is a big push to remove their strangle-hold.

By ginning up all this hysteria and misinformation on the subject they're going to confuse people.

This is absurd. The scientific discourse if very *conservative* on the issue. Sure there are Malthusian crack-pots running around. There is *no* scientific argument against AGW, since the science is essentially bullet proof. So you get anti-environmentalist free-market crackpots like Monckton running around spreading disinformation. Now there really is a pandemonium in the public debate, (the scientific debate is unchallenged), and self-made experts like yourself that think they know more then people with truly superior intelligence and a career's worth of experience on the issue. That is exactly what Frank Luntz was aiming for, and even *he* believes that AGW is happening.

Everyone has the legitimacy and credibility they've earned.

That is such a well-known naive mistake, that there an established and well-studied fallacy for it.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[riverat1]

What does 5 feet of sea level rise have to do with it? That's about the maximum rise expected by 2100 under current predictions. I was talking about the fact that sea level hasn't risen for the past couple of years.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[riverat1]

And nobody but some mistaken atlas has said that 15% of Greenland ice has melted. Sea levels will continue to rise in millimeters per year although that may become centimeters per year after 2050. In another answer to you I explained that rainfall is a factor in the lack of SLR in the last couple of years.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Anonymous Coward]

how long can melted and evaporated ice flux from gaseous to precipitation back to evaporation and so on over land?

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020820southseaice.html

Even your own citation said it was growing.

I don't claim to be an expert here... I just see this stuff in the paper and try to pay attention.

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Spoke]

Even your own citation said it was growing.

I guess you didn't read it. From my first link:

Meanwhile, measurements from the Grace satellites confirm that Antarctica is losing mass. Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her work shows that the ice sheet is not only losing mass, but it is losing mass at an accelerating rate.

I don't claim to be an expert here...

Seriously? You might want to educate yourself instead of spouting off on topics you don't understand.

1. You are referencing an article 9 years old. Things have changed and so has knowledge on the topic at hand.
2. Sea ice extent is not the same as sea ice volume. That's like saying it sure is hot here today - sure proof that climate change is true!
3. First you say we're talking about land-based ice since it's melting will affect sea levels - now you are showing me how sea ice extent is growing? Stick to a topic!

Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail

[Karmashock]

I didn't change the topic. I responded to comments.

If you suddenly start talking about parakeets I'll probably respond to that with something about parrots... and then doubtless someone will have a snarky comment to throw at me about changing the subject again...

Whatever. The reality is that climate change has been hyped and politicized to the point where it's very hard to have a rational discussion on the issue unless everyone throws away all their preconceptions and starts fresh. The issue is just too poisoned at this point. Both sides will blame the other for this but it doesn't really matter who started it. What matters is that it happened.

I'd comment on my thoughts at this point but it would really require a restart of the investigation sans political agendas. Absent that agreement there is a political stalemate that will not be overwhelmed by more hyperbole or recriminations.

what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[iggymanz]

Other glaciers in Canada are *growing* (an inconvenient truth), like Helm, Pace and on Mount Logan. In one swoop, this proves......

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[halivar]

It proves that some Canadian glaciers are eating too much processed American-style fast food. And I, for one, would like to know what we are going to do about it!

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Ten percent of the glaciers in the world are growing. Draw your own conclusions.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Other glaciers in Canada are *growing* (an inconvenient truth), like Helm, Pace and on Mount Logan. In one swoop, this proves......

I like it when people post references for their claims.
I tried to verify yours on my own and was not successful.

The claim that Helm Glacier is growing seems to be out right false.

The claim about Mount Logan seem to be based on an increase in height - the assumption being that it's due to ice accumulation, but that does not translate one way or the other to the total mass of the glacier, just the thickness at one point.

I couldn't easily find what "Pace" refers to since the word "pace," as in speed, is commonly used with the word "glacier" so I couldn't verify your claim either way.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[buglista]

If they're like the ones in NZ, it's because of increased precipitation which is how glaciers happen. If the input is greater than the rate at which the snout is melting, then it gets bigger - doesn't say whether it's hotter or colder, so please think for 2 seconds before you type.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[iggymanz]

this was in response to article by people who didn't think 2 seconds before they typed with their claims either.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some glaciers should grow due to AGW while others should shrink. We can, to a degree, model which ones should grow and which ones should shrink (but that's a bit harder than recognizing the generality).

AGW raises that atmosphere's temperature, and its temperature affects glaciers by at least two general proximal mechanisms: more or less directly, by melting them, melting the snow that would accumulate to form them, lubricating their flow, etc.; and by changing the amount and type of precipitation that might fall on them. The mass of a glacier is dictated by the balance between melting and accumulation. If the extra moisture in the atmosphere falls as significantly more snow than would have fallen without AGW, as might occur at certain latitudes and elevations, or due to peculiarities of geography, it can swamp the loss of mass caused by warming. Those glaciers will accumulate mass even in spite of somewhat higher temperatures.

The most endangered glaciers are those at modest latitudes and elevations, especially in places that don't get dramatic amounts of snowfall, or areas that will see adverse changes in precipitation levels and patterns as a result of climate change.

That said, I have no idea how Mt. Logan might be affected by this dynamic, but no single mountain or glacier's behavior will prove or disprove anything about climate change. Overall, however, the world's long-lived temperate glaciers are losing mass and receding, the cause of which can only be climate related. The most reasonable explanation for the abrupt change is AGW.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[microbox]

lol! You are so gullible. I believe that there is at least *one* glacier in the world that is growing. Therefore climate change must be false! And there was also this really cold day last year sometime!

You really think scientists are just idiots, right?

There is an inverse relationship between someone's competence, and how competent they think they are.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

this was in response to article by people who didn't think 2 seconds before they typed with their claims either.

I think this needs to be modded up, higher even than your original post.

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Farmer Tim]

Ten percent of the glaciers in the world are growing. Draw your own conclusions.

The other 90% believe in AGW?

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[owlstead]

Somebody mod this AC up?

Re:what do Canada's growing glaciers prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a look too, and found:
--Mount Logan
Article as per your statement. http://www.iceagenow.com/Glaciers_growing_on_Canada_tallest_mountain.htm
--Pace
It looks like the glacier name is "Place" (still not nice for searching). See http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1998/of98-031/cdnassess.htm
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1406 contains graphs for individual glaciers - http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1406/F2.large.jpg - which shows Place declining like most of the others, though the graph ends in 2007 so says nothing about the last few years.
--Helm
Shown retreating to 2003 in http://www.sfu.ca/~jkoch/gpc_2009.pdf, but diagram on p.165 (if I'm interpreting it correctly) does show some growth since 2003. Paper was written in 2007.
Helm stated in http://objectmix.com/cobol/326369-ot-list-glaciers-growing-not-ot-thanksgiving.html to have decreased in 2004, but there is no supporting information.
Helm and Place are shown as growing in http://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm (et al), but there is no supporting information.
Another article on Helm http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2009/12/19/helm-glacier-melting-away/ confirms the overall retreat to c.2006, but makes the interesting point that this has taken it to where it was 6,400 years ago ["Older trees discovered in 2006 and 2007 by more recent retreat were killed 6400 years ago, {trees dated} We have gone from a glacier at its smallest extent in 1000 years, to its smallest extent in 7000 years and still retreating"].

But a few glaciers growing over a few years don't count for much. Skeptical Science http://www.skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing.htm makes the point that "There are still situations in which glaciers gain or lose ice more than typical for one region or another but the long term trends are all the same. ".

Fair enough. But, thinking globally, is the last 30 years a long term trend, or is it part of a natural cycle? I would argue that Earth hasn't warmed for the best part of a decade, and for CO2 to be as powerful as it is claimed to be, then the warming has to start again very soon. Otherwise we have more likely experienced a 30-year warming phase of a natural cycle, and the last few years may well have been the start of a new cooling phase.

That doesn't mean that CO2 plays no part, of course, but the fact that the Helm glacier is now where it was 6,400 years ago does give a tiny hint that nature may be the major force.

No sequitur detected

[Dunbal]

These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.

Oh? How? By the way the Island of Krakatoa had been in the Sundra strait for thousands of years, and then it disappeared overnight. This would dispel in one fell swoop any notion that volcanoes could be natural.

Re:No sequitur detected

[microbox]

It only appears a non-sequitur, because you are unaware that climate models of arctic change failed to predict the present rate of melting, because they are so *conservative*. Far from being alarmists, climate scientists urge on the side of caution in the materials that they produce, and in particular the IPCC reports.

Re:No sequitur detected

[Dunbal]

You cannot argue around a logical fallacy. While your statement may be true, it does not support the original false statement.

Ward Hunt Shelf

[sbrown123]

The Ward Hunt shelf started melting close to 100 years ago.

s/natural/gradual

[Anonymous Coward]

s/natural/gradual. There. FTFY.

Conversion To Busses

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible to get a conversion function to go from GPG to Yellow School Busses or maybe Football Fields?

Why is this on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of when Hollywood actors mistake their fame for wisdom and start espousing political views.

Re:Why is this on Slashdot?

[haruchai]

And get elected as Republicans in high office.

Re:Why is this on Slashdot?

[fuzznutz]

You mean like Al Franken?

Re:Why is this on Slashdot?

[haruchai]

Ever heard of a little-known actor named Ronnie Reagan?

It doesn't matter...

[dpilot]

There are 2 basic threads to anti-anthropogenic global warming arguments...

The first is, "It's not really happening, you've cherry-picked your data and/or misinterpreted it." and the refutation usually seems to consist of cherry-picked data with very specific interpretations.

The second is, "It's not anthropogenic, it's natural, because of..." with some reason or other.

For the moment I won't take sides on either thread, but I'm going to take very serious issue with the second. However I get the very distinct feeling with both threads that the real message is, "Since global warming is not real / not anthropogenic, we don't need to modify our actions. We can keep our fossil-fuel-based energy and transportation, unmodified." (and business models, might I add...)

But assuming you're on the second thread, and assuming you're saying that global warming is real, just not man-caused, it must be apparent that we simply cannot keep going the way we are. We must come to grips with a changing environment. Global warming means more energy into the atmosphere, and that means more water evaporates and moves from place to place. Some places get even more water, some places get even less, storms get stronger, and it's not even a smoking-gun kind of thing, it's statistical. No new killer drought or killer flood or killer tornado, just a slow ramp on the severity and frequency of the ones we have.

All the while people living in marginal areas get stressed, our agricultural systems get stressed, our emergency response systems get stressed. It's not "a disaster", it's more of the disasters we've had all along.

Not planning for it, not studying it very carefully to understand the extent, not taking some action to mitigate it, is hiding our head in the sand, and waiting to get smacked in the butt.

When you get flattened by a giant rock, you're just as dead if the rock rolled off a cliff as if it was dropped by a crane. One is "natural", the other "anthropogenic", but you're still dead.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[russotto]

Not planning for it, not studying it very carefully to understand the extent, not taking some action to mitigate it, is hiding our head in the sand, and waiting to get smacked in the butt..

In order to plan for it, one must be able to predict it. I don't have any confidence in climatologists to be able to predict the temperature increase, nor (to any useful level of detail) the effects of any temperature increase.

When you get flattened by a giant rock, you're just as dead if the rock rolled off a cliff as if it was dropped by a crane. One is "natural", the other "anthropogenic", but you're still dead.

In the anthropogenic case, maybe you need better cranes or better operators. In the natural case, you better move your butt out of the way -- and no amount of scapegoating and restricting crane usage will help one iota. The cause makes a difference to the solution.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Antisyzygy]

Both sides have their fair share of bullshit. Furthermore, getting oil and coal out of the ground and refining it (or in the case of Coal the byproducts of burning it) aren't good for the environment anyway, so their reduction should help certain things regardless of human CO2 output affecting global warming.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to think the overall global warming is alarmist primarily because it's a much larger system than average joe can understand.

There are things that are worrisome, but it's not going to be "and overnight Manhatten was drowned by several meters of sea water." This is all gradual, and mostly what we as humans are doing are ineffectual, and only cry about it when we've ignored the problem too long to fix it (See damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.)

In the next 100 years, the seas will rise, they will not rise by several meters, but by maybe a foot or two. On the west coast we are seeing much less of this because as the glaciers melt, the sea level goes DOWN, resulting in more earthquakes.

If the oceanic gyres stop circulating because of too much freshwater, then we're in trouble as that turns off earth's air conditioner. That's the real concern.

Also the population bursts of jellyfish.

So earth 2112 is going to look much the way it does now, except you won't be able to buy sushi (it will be all farmed and extremely expensive), and you won't be able to swim in the oceans because the jellyfish have taken over.

Some parts of Louisiana and Florida will be underwater, but nobody will miss them much. Venice Italy might also be more underwater. The desert regions will have become larger and more inhospitable, Mexico to Montana will be unlivable, and too expensive to ship water to.

The world is not going to end in 100 or even 500 years, but as stands now, wars are going to break out over fresh water and oil in countries that can't make either.

We have the solution for water already, and it also solves the salinity of the oceans problem (but not the the acidity), just desalinize water in coastal cities. We also can make biodiesel, gasoline, and natural gas from organic waste. Pretty much we have the technology already to solve every problem caused by global warming except for one. Oxygen ratio in the atmosphere. We keep burning things, which consumes oxygen. We need to move to a closed loop oxygen/carbon system. The future isn't pretty, but it's not terrible. Waterworld is not going to happen.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you get flattened by a giant rock, you're just as dead if the rock rolled off a cliff as if it was dropped by a crane. One is "natural", the other "anthropogenic", but you're still dead.

"We can't be certain whether this rock was dropped by a crane or fell off a cliff, despite the rock being discovered next to a "Beware of Falling Rocks" sign by an unstable vertical rock face. Conclusion: let's ban cranes and therefore suspend all construction of buildings taller than one story. Our children's children will thank us for the brave new world of self-imposed poverty we will leave them!"

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Kaenneth]

Some marginally inhabitable places may become uninhabitable, but other uninhabitable places may become habitable.

It's change, not always bad, or always good. Fighting against global warming is acting like the RIAA in the face of online music downloading. You arn't going to be able to stop it, so you best learn how to deal with it. Prepare to deal with people moving from flooded areas, and prepare to plant crops futher north in Canada/Siberia, those melted glaciers will expose rich virgin soil that will need good managment to prevent erosion.

In any case, and reguardless of cause, it's too late to stop global warming (barring an extreme solution like a giant space parasol) since the gasses already in the atmosphere arn't going away overnight.

The blame game is all pointless politics, since we'll be out of fossil fuels soon enough anyway. We need to be able to move past that, and rationally deal with the effects, whatever they may be.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite so. There has been too much arguing over whether or not it's natural or man made, and not enough focus on what can be done to adapt to the situation.
Blindly blaming it on one or the other is like saying the Black Death was a curse from God and had nothing to do with natural diseases.

Of course, leaving the sensationalist summary aside and reading what the original authors wrote would still be new to slashdot.
FTFA:

The researchers say the reason for the change is a combination of warmer temperatures and open water. The ice shelves were formed and sustained in a colder climate. The researchers say their disappearance suggests a possible return to conditions unseen in the Arctic for thousands of years.

[emphasis mine].

Re:It doesn't matter...

[tyrione]

Both sides have their fair share of bullshit. Furthermore, getting oil and coal out of the ground and refining it (or in the case of Coal the byproducts of burning it) aren't good for the environment anyway, so their reduction should help certain things regardless of human CO2 output affecting global warming.

Anti-Climate changers won't like your rational position and uncommon sense to pointing out that the Earth's diarrhea is a byproduct of recycling, heat compression, etc., and burning it makes about as much sense as shooting up heroin in the morning to give one a clear head.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[sycodon]

The problem is that none of the supposed "solutions" are actually solutions. They do, however nicely match the political agenda of the wacko environmentalists.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Cabriel]

[quote]However I get the very distinct feeling with both threads that the real message is, "Since global warming is not real / not anthropogenic, we don't need to modify our actions. We can keep our fossil-fuel-based energy and transportation, unmodified." (and business models, might I add...)[/quote] This is a dangerous statement. I'm of the very firm belief that "Global Warming" in general isn't anthropic or anthropogenic or whichever one you want to use. However, any idiot must realize that humans are contributing more energy to the system now than we used to. There's so much waste heat generated by practically everything we do from burning fuels to, well, I guess burning fuels is the basis of pretty much everything we do. We use it to heat homes in winter (duh, heat generation) to cooling homes in the summer (not many people think of this one, I'm sure) to general use in electronics (ever watched the temperature in your house rise while watching TV on that 60" screen without the furnace on in the middle of a Canadian Winter? I have) and even more generally in electrical systems (ever touched that light bulb that's been on for a few minutes or all day?).

The Question shouldn't be whether or not human action is contributing. The Question should be about how much we are contributing. If you're going to keep going off the deep end with implicit claims that the world would be in an ice age if not for humans (I'm exxaggerating. Simmer down), then you're being as damaging to the larger issue as those few who do claim that humans are completely innocent. The Science of Climate Change needs to pin down the amount contributed from ALL sources--not just humanity--in order to accurately model and predict the future changes and identify efficient methods to reverse the trends, if such action is even needed. So far, from the most direct commentary from scientists I've read, they appear to agree that the models all overestimate how much warming is occurring, and actual measurements are either at the very low end of or entirely below the predicted rates.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Cabriel]

My apologies to those who read my above post. There's a reason for the "Preview" button that I just can't get used to. =\

Re:It doesn't matter...

[microbox]

Both sides have their fair share of bullshit.

It is easy to tell that one side is full of shit, and the other is trying its best to be really straight-forward. Firstly, one side repeatedly makes previously discounted arguments never, of course, taking into account any information coming from their opponents. Secondly, one side fails to make coherent arguments -- constantly changing their story and shifting goal-posts. Thirdly, one side fails to make scientific arguments at all, instead talking about conspiracies, and impugning the motives of people who spend their lives studying these things.

It really is very straight-forward, when you see that some people are: never wrong, always changing their story, and making personal attacks instead of discussing the underlying issues.

The mechanisms of denial are well documented, and it happens at a group level.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[microbox]

Intractable arguments are generally based on people being dishonest about what is really important to them. Climate science dissenters believe that the environment is robust, and that humans really cannot change it. Environmentalists, therefore, are naive control freaks that are going to interfere with the correct way that things should be run, and for no good reason. That is why there is no real discussion of the science -- the deniers really only care enough to say something that sounds good, so that they can hold onto the underlying meme that is so important to them. My understanding of behavioural genetics suggests that there may be biological factors at play. I suspect that you could predict a climate denier from biological parents, but do no better than chance with adoptive parents.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's okay, no apology necessary. I just tl;dr it on your behalf.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[scot4875]

The problem is that none of the supposed "solutions" are actually solutions.

So you acknowledging that warming is happening. Ok, good. Now you're just moving the goalposts; no "solution" in your mind will ever actually be a 100% perfect, no-cost-to-anybody solution, therefore you can just impugn the credibility of whoever suggests the solution.

Yeah, we know your type well.

--Jeremy

Re:It doesn't matter...

[scot4875]

*acknowledge; edited part of the sentence and didn't edit the verb to match. Too hasty on the preview.

--Jeremy

Re:It doesn't matter...

[sycodon]

Actually, nuclear power would go a long way towards making you happy by reducing CO2 and me happy by reducing our reliance on foreign oil.

But the majority of AGW folks won't have it. You see, if we have a solution, then they can't bitch and moan. And, I suspect, they are not interested in anything that doesn't leave them in control.

BTW, higher taxes, rationing, etc. are not solutions. Especially since they would only be in effect in the West. China and the rest will have none of that.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[sycodon]

As far as acknowledging that it is happening, I have a theory...it will get warmer and then it will get colder. You cannot refute that.

Constructing temperature analogs going back thousands of years that are accurate enough to predict a few degrees of warming is bullshit.

Even the modern temp records are all fucked up with missing data, extrapolations, etc.

In the end it's all statistics, which is an inexact "science" at best, and best guesses.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Belial6]

Funny. I see that behavior from both sides. I'm not sure which you are arguing for.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[riverat1]

... and prepare to plant crops further north in Canada/Siberia, those melted glaciers will expose rich virgin soil ...

Generally there is no soil beneath glaciers. It is scraped off by the glacial action. It would take hundreds of years for soil to develop there.

... it's too late to stop global warming...

But it's not to late to keep it from getting worse than it is already going to get.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[riverat1]

The scientific solution it to quit raising the level of CO2 (and that of some other emitted GHG's) in the atmosphere. It's that simple. I'm willing to listen to anyone with a suggestion of how to achieve that.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Jubedgy]

Yeah, if she had left out the last sentence, I would say that GP left the post intentionally vague to whore some karma from both sides.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

All well and good, but your entire point is based upon the premise that we need to do something to counteract global warming. Why? Does not logic say that, in a warming world, new land areas will become more arable, especially in the vast landmass of Eurasia? Yes, lower latitude desert areas will likely increase and inordinately affect some countries, but overall, from a human species perspective, the effect of a warming world should be rather negligible.

Humanity survived an Ice Age. I'm pretty sure we're smart enough and adaptable enough to handle a "Warm Age".

It always shocks me how "conservative" very liberal enviro-freaks are. They want the world and its climate to stay EXACTLY THE SAME. Well, buckaroo, I got bad news for you: the world changes. It always has and it always will. The key is being able to adapt to it, not trying to prevent it from changing, because that's a losing battle.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Both sides may engage in this type of behaviour, but the /scientific discourse/ is quite free from these types of things.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Skeptics can accept that man is adding some increment to global warming. However, the cost of removing this increment, at this point in time, seems unacceptably high. Further, it is not clear the higher temperatures are considered detrimental to human activity. If so, populations would be moving away from Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Florida and towards upstate New York, Maine, Illinois or Ohio. It's just not the case. All other things being equal, people prefer warm climates. No one retires to Buffalo; they retire to Florida or Arizona.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 2 basic threads to anti-anthropogenic global warming arguments...

The first is, "It's not really happening, you've cherry-picked your data and/or misinterpreted it." and the refutation usually seems to consist of cherry-picked data with very specific interpretations.

The second is, "It's not anthropogenic, it's natural, because of..." with some reason or other.

For the moment I won't take sides on either thread, but I'm going to take very serious issue with the second. However I get the very distinct feeling with both threads that the real message is, "Since global warming is not real / not anthropogenic, we don't need to modify our actions. We can keep our fossil-fuel-based energy and transportation, unmodified." (and business models, might I add...)

But assuming you're on the second thread, and assuming you're saying that global warming is real, just not man-caused, it must be apparent that we simply cannot keep going the way we are. We must come to grips with a changing environment. Global warming means more energy into the atmosphere, and that means more water evaporates and moves from place to place. Some places get even more water, some places get even less, storms get stronger, and it's not even a smoking-gun kind of thing, it's statistical. No new killer drought or killer flood or killer tornado, just a slow ramp on the severity and frequency of the ones we have.

All the while people living in marginal areas get stressed, our agricultural systems get stressed, our emergency response systems get stressed. It's not "a disaster", it's more of the disasters we've had all along.

Not planning for it, not studying it very carefully to understand the extent, not taking some action to mitigate it, is hiding our head in the sand, and waiting to get smacked in the butt.

When you get flattened by a giant rock, you're just as dead if the rock rolled off a cliff as if it was dropped by a crane. One is "natural", the other "anthropogenic", but you're still dead.

I count a lot more than two basic skeptic arguments. But only two are easy for alarmists to contest. Amazing that you only refer to those two.

I am not a skeptic, and get pilloried by them when I address some of their arguments. But their arguments are far more diverse than you suggest.

The most common is in fact that global warming is real and has an anthropogenic component, but that estimates of atmospheric sensitivity are too high.

I'm curious as to why you don't include that in your list.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically you think that if the parents aren't anti-business hippies they'll won't be nut job alarmists? That you can predict this based on "behavioral genetics". Sounds as plausible as the rest of the warmist agenda.

Re:It doesn't matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

"dissenters" "deniers"

Pass the koolaid.

Sea ice extent the last few years

[Kohath]

This year doesn't seem too unusual or alarming:

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png

More info:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/

Re:Sea ice extent the last few years

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. You picked a graph that doesn't contain any baseline for comparison or clearly indicate what kind of trend is happening over time. I wonder if you did that on purpose?

Here's a graph of the same data that does contain a baseline for comparison and does indicate what is happening over time: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png. Same data, different presentation. But notice how all of a sudden the trend is blatantly obvious.

Re:Sea ice extent the last few years

[Kohath]

Yeah, I linked to the page containing that graph.

The trend in the last 4 years is unclear. Also for all the years prior to 1979.

Re:Sea ice extent the last few years

[haruchai]

Extent is not the only important trend as it can be signficantly affected by winds, either clumping or spreading out. Another, arguably more important is total sea ice volume, which is down 65% from 1981 which was a remarkably low volume for the period.
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/sea_ice_VOL_min_to_date.png

Also, while this year's extent was slightly above 2007's record low, the area was slightly lower. Having lurked on several skeptic and denialist blogs, I see a lot of talk about extent but a glossing-over of area and volume.

People killing the world!!! Ooh well.

[Anonymous Coward]

How many inches of loss do you think slashdot and it's readers are responsible for?
If only there were a carbon neutral way to transfer information, like telepathy, or teaching messages to parrots and training them to home like pigeons.

No !! It possibly cant be due to Global Warming !!

[unity100]

it must be something else. maybe baby farts, or honky tonk truck drivers. but it cant definitely be due to global * gasp * warming !!!

1816 called

[countertrolling]

It wants its long-johns back

Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[MarkvW]

Global warming is happening.

Why do we care whether global warming is human-caused, or not? Are we all Catholics trying to assess guilt? What does it matter whether or not global warming is human caused or not? Global warming is here and it is happening. The cow is already out of the barn.

What's relevant is whether or not humans can alter the course of global warming.

Answer is obvious!

[hilldog]

We have had enough of voodoo science and liberal agenda dweebs! The answer is obvious why the ice is melting. Bird poop and pee! That's right migrating sea birds land on the ice and after a meal of fish poop and pee to their hearts content and that my friends warms the ice and that is why its melting. My name is Rick Perry and I endorse this message.

Re:Answer is obvious!

[rikkitikki]

We have had enough of voodoo science and liberal agenda dweebs! The answer is obvious why the ice is melting. Bird poop and pee! That's right migrating sea birds land on the ice and after a meal of fish poop and pee to their hearts content and that my friends warms the ice and that is why its melting.

My name is Rick Parry and I endorse this message.

FTFY

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's relevant is whether or not humans can alter the course of global warming.

If they can alter it, should they? I live in an area that was under a mile of ice 15,000 years ago. If we could magically reduce the atmospheric CO2 to pre-human levels it might just end up starting another ice age, which would bring about the complete destruction of most of the populated area of Canada and the United States.

Fast way to reduce CO2 global warming...

[Commontwist]

Create a cheap device that creates industrial-use diamond from the carbon in C02 for fashion beads! Or, more seriously, hybrid windows or wall glazing.

That would suck most of the carbon from the atmo right quick.

Re:Fast way to reduce CO2 global warming...

[riverat1]

8 Gigatons per year of diamonds? (That's how much carbon is going into the atmosphere each year). That would quickly make diamonds worthless.

Do Slashdotterers read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Professor Steven Sherwood, Co-Director of the University of NSWâ(TM)s Climate Change Research Centre, said the rapid pace of melting showed that recent global warming was unnatural.

"... the rapid pace of melting showed..."

TFA is a blurb from CBC, but nearly the entire commentary from the fine /. "community" (at a point where there are already 100 comments) seems hell bent on critiquing the article and the few quotes from Dr. Sherwood as if they are the sum total of his work and any of you have a legitimate basis for doing so.

Is this really the way intelligent people discuss anything?
(Decartes would have disappeared in a flash of dissipated vapor had he read these bare threads.)

enterprise grade "fell swoop"

[epine]

I buy a different grade of "fell swoop". Every year on this planet there is some place where the physical environment changes in a way it hasn't change for 1000 years, probably going back a billion years.

A watched pot never boils. An unwatched pot glows molten. Ever experienced that? I have. Hard on the pathetic human brain to track between two lines of paint unless one of those is just the other one displaced by 12 precise feet on the asphalt ribbon of foregone conclusions.

It's a fucking conflated system where you might never find a smoking gun of irrefutable causality in any single detail.

Out of a large cloud of suspicious linkages, consensus will ultimately emerge. Consensus is a very slow human process. In science, it can be a brief half century. More like 400 years if the science steps on any purple robes.

If the genetic deluge has yet to persuade even a small minority of creationists, I wouldn't be watching the ice shelf with prompt expectation.

Finally

[smacinn]

The great cooling caused by the dinosaur thermo-nuclear war is coming to an end!!!!

I, for one...

[chrishillman]

I, for one, welcome our formerly frozen overlords.
Stuff is melting. Ice that had been there for thousands of years went away "quickly". We really don't know why, an honest person will tell you that. A hack with an ideology/theology will say different...
Things we should do anyhow:
-Be more energy efficient - would it hurt us to have lower energy bills and not buy so much gasoline?
-Get energy from cleaner sources - would it hurt to not burn things in a way that produced hazardous fine particulates into the air people breathe?

No one needs to live in a cave in order to pollute less. Look at Al Gore, he still flies in a private jet. These climate scientists still put carbon in the air (don't give me offset BS, we all know that is a gimmick). I would not mind driving an electric car, if it was more or less the cost of a regular car and could perform in more or less the same way as a regular car. If these clean and green technologies could compete with the old way today then we will all move to them, while they are just fancy science experiments or amount to a ton of rocket fuel in your basement I and many others will stay away.

Eldavojohn...

[subl33t]

... you rabble-rouser you...

get your ice books from the environmentalist

[Anonymous Coward]

get your ice books from the very same environmentalist that have been secretly carving up the ice shelves, then reprocessed them and pass them off as mineral water in single serving sized bottles.

Go away, oil industry shill!

[mangu]

they are from the last ice age, so they would melt anyways

They have been there for a thousand years, then they lose half their size in six years and you think that's nothing to worry about?

If the rate of melting had been the same for those thousand years as it has been for the last six years that ice would be 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006735 times the size it is now.

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[gfxguy]

Where in the law-book of nature does it specify things are always required to happen at the same rate? Things often build up over time and then have major, relatively immediate shifts... volcanoes, plate tectonics, plagues and diseases, to name a few.

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[gilleain]

Where in the law-book of nature does it specify things are always required to happen at the same rate? Things often build up over time and then have major, relatively immediate shifts... volcanoes, plate tectonics, plagues and diseases, to name a few.

Nowhere at all. You're absolutely right that there are rapid changes (or 'phase changes' in the jargon of some fields). However, if those happened to ice sheets, we might reasonably expect to have seen them before, right?

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Coolhand2120]

Your comment reminds me of the Sinfield episode where Jerry and Kramer are trying to train a fighting cock (named little Jerry) and they are timing his laps up and down the apartment hallway when George walks in:

Jerry:"Little Jerry can run down the hallway in 12.7 seconds!"
George:"Is that good?"
Jerry:"I don't know!"

They have been there for a thousand years, then they lose half their size in six years and you think that's nothing to worry about?

To quote David Putty: "Uh huh, that's right"

Did you know there's a caldera under Yosemite today that's causing some unprecedented seismic activity? Perhaps you would like to pose a rhetorical question about that: "It took 10,000 years for the caldera to build up and now in the last 50 years there's some yet-to-be-seen seismic activity and you think that's nothing to worry about!?". Maybe we can look at some heavenly bodies next and opine rhetorical about that.

If the rate of melting had been the same for those thousand years as it has been for the last six years that ice would be 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006735 times the size it is now.

Now that's some real science! What is that the ja-billionth placeholder? More like the jabroni placeholder. I think you've got that ice down to the size of a flea's underwear. Maybe you should add a few more zeros just to help drive the point home. Take the advice of Mark Twain: "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[amiga3D]

You do realize that global warming began about 18,000 years ago? That the world has warmed over 16 degrees since then. It has accelerated since the beginning of the industrial revolution but it was well on it's way to warming up the planet thousands of years ago. The oceans have risen about 300 feet in that 18,000 years. I don't think you can blame the.....well, hell I guess you can blame the republicans for it. It doesn't have to make sense after all.

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[amiga3D]

It has happened before. 8 thousand years ago the land bridge between across the Bering Strait was drowned by receding glaciers. Those damn neo-con rebuplicans! I bet Sarah Palin did it! It was a plot by those racist rich bastards to keep out people from siberia.

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Coolhand2120]

...we might reasonably expect to have seen them before, right?

True, but only if someone was observing and recording the data. All we know about "back then" is what we can infer from tree rings and ice core records. All we really know for sure about "back then" is that nobody was taking any sort of accurate measure of what was happening. We have a metric shit ton of anticdotal evidence that the ice sheets were not there as early as a thousand years ago (northern farms in greenland, Roman maps of an ice-free Antarctica) but since nobody bothered to write anything down it's anybodies guess. The issue is, some people are making guesses, admittedly educated guess, but guesses nonetheless, and then portraying them as actionable fact.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Educated guess+Computer modeling != extraordinary evidence let alone fact. Just do a word find for "fact" on this page to find the number of pro AGW guys claiming that AGW is a fact, these people are non-scientific zealots. These zealots are the face of AGW. I am not a zealot, I am a skeptic, I take nothing at face value, I question the existence of god. I use strong deductive logic to support my arguments. I am a scientist.

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[catchblue22]

Nowhere at all. You're absolutely right that there are rapid changes (or 'phase changes' in the jargon of some fields). However, if those happened to ice sheets, we might reasonably expect to have seen them before, right?

Alone, maybe these ice sheets melting may be seen as strong evidence of global warming. However, when one takes the bulk of evidence into view, the picture becomes even more certain. Firstly, we have an idea that a great deal of the extra energy being trapped on the Earth is in fact in the deep ocean, where it doesn't yet have a direct interaction with the atmosphere. The temperature of the deep ocean is somewhat simple to measure, and any results from such measurements should be relatively uncontroversial. It seems likely that that stored heat will eventually reach the surface, and when it does, we will definitely notice it in our weather. One place where warming oceans are posited to have an impact is at the interface of the ocean and glaciers, otherwise known as ice shelves. It seems very likely that warmer oceans have already, and will cause an erosion in these ice shelves; when this happens, the speed of ice flow into the ocean will very likely rise, causing increased ice mass transport from the land to the sea. This is already being observed, in Greenland, and elsewhere.

If one combines these observations with other weather phenomenon around the world, the picture becomes even more certain. Catastrophic floods, in Pakistan, in Australia. Droughts in the US South, in Asia, and also in Australia. Retreating Arctic sea ice. Record heat waves. Massive increases in Arctic average temperatures. Disappearing ice shelves. Disappearing glaciers. Steadily rising sea levels. The list of anomalies could go on and on. It is this huge list of anomalies that I find most convincing, especially since these anomalies fit with what has been predicted by scientists. It fits together, with what I understand of the science, with what I observe, with what I read about what others have observed. It fits. Science is always about probability. One evaluates the probabilities of various options and picks the most probable as the most reasonable explanation. This fitting together of my scientific understanding, of my observations, of the observations of others, of the theorizing of others who spend their lives studying these things makes for a highly probable explanation.

On the other hand, we have the so called deniers. Their explanations for my observations, for the observations of other scientists are baffling and shifting. They seem to veer from one explanation to another. First it is sun spots. Then cosmic rays. Then it isn't warming. Then it is, but we cannot be causing it? Why? Because it has warmed before in the past when we weren't there. Then it is all a conspiracy. Somehow all of the independent scientists around the world are conspiring to cook the books, to falsify. Falsify what? So those melting glaciers aren't really melting? The heat waves aren't really happening? The arctic ice sheets aren't really melting? The permafrost isn't really thawing? Oh no no, they say, "the Earth is warming, but we aren't causing it". Well then what is causing it? Why specifically are the scientists wrong? What are the alternative theories? "Well, it might be sun spots, or it might be cosmic rays. " The problem is, their explanations do not gybe with the evidence. For one, they trends in sun spots and cosmic rays do not match the temperature trends observed, as Mike Lockwood of Rutherford Labs has opined in published scientific literature.

Looking at the balance of the above, I must ascribe a higher probability of truth to the cogent arguments put forward by scientists, rather than the muddled and seemingly dishonest arguments put forward by others. Either most of the world's scientists are constructing an elaborate conspiracy, complete with inter-related falsified data that, across tens of thousands of papers creates a uniformly

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Jhon]

However, if those happened to ice sheets, we might reasonably expect to have seen them before, right?

Not necessarily. How long has humanity been looking at ice sheets and logging data on record sheets? When the ice is melted, its gone -- as well as any indication of how long it took. The best you can do is try to deduce things from the rise/fall of the sea level.

Considering how old the earth is -- and how many cold/hot periods their have been there's at last a reasonable question to consider... Is this abnormal over geologic scale vs. recorded history?

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Ol Olsoc]

You take nothing at face value? I call bull.

Do you need to stick your hand in a flame to determine that it is hot? Is every flame hot? Can you say with certainty that the laws of the universe don't change with every breath?

Yeah, I'm a skeptic too, but that means that I do take some things as fact, then try to make sense of them, lest I sound like one of those people who believe that nothing else exists, but what they experience.

The possibility of the earth having an average temperature that changes over time. It would appear that it does. I don't know for sure, because I wasn't alive forever, so I have to take it on likelihood that it did, based on evidence presented that does not contradict what I know.

That certain gases will affect the heat retention in a gaseous mixture is a fact that you can confirm to your own personal belief. It's done all the time in school science fairs.. The amounts that are put into the air by humans, very well might have an effect in our atmosphere. That can be calculated. So does it or does it not have an effect? It probably should, especially since the present focus is on Carbon Dioxide, and not methane, or other gases that are more powerful agents of heat retention.It is very likely that there will be more effect than calculated for CO2 alone.

Theory: Human activities have an effect upon the average temperature of the earth via greenhouse gas emissions.

So now we have something that is falsifiable, and possible avenues of refutation of the concept.

If global warming via human activity not causing the atmosphere to retain heat from insolation, what would be the mechanism that prevents the expected warming effect?

Now we have something we can sink our teeth into. I can think of a few possibilities, such as increased cloud cover compensating for the increased greenhouse gases, perhaps. Perhaps changes in the composition of the atmosphere might make for reflectivity changes in the highest level of the atmosphere. I don't know, these are just initial thoughts, of the sort that need a lot more research to have some clue.

Duly noted that you didn't mention the anti - AGW crowd. Do you approve of their Intelligent design and Creationist type arguments for their position? That sort of thing where any and every misstep is fuel to discredit an entire concept? That crowd will not accept AGW no matter what. That American professor that they have been after, and has been cleared by multiple inquiries, but they just say the inquiries are flawed. The false dichotomy of if it isn't one, it has to be the other? Why don't we see any of your skepticism about that?

Perhaps you aren't as much of a skeptic as you think you are...

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Ol Olsoc]

Whoosh! Dude was making a joke, man.

"Unprecedented seismic activity" in Yellowstone? can you give me citations regarding that? Is that a fact?

Come on, man, you present yourself as a skeptic, and write that?

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Coolhand2120]

Can't you Google Yellowstone Caldera? My point is, if you have nothing to measure against, what exactly are you getting at? Yes, there is unprecedented seismic activity in Yellowstone, but this does not mean there will be an eruption anytime soon... or maybe it does! Nobody knows! It's anybodies guess because we (the collective mass of human knowledge) cannot predict volcano eruptions any better than we can predict the weather. But to sit there an and shriek "Don't you think you should be alarmed!?!" without explaining exactly why I should be alarmed is just a waste of time and stupid. This is exactly like the chicken little story. In case you don't remember, chicken little got hit in the head with an acorn and took this portent to mean that the sky was falling. I fail to see the difference.
Yellowstone Caldera

Due to the volcanic and tectonic nature of the region, the Yellowstone Caldera experiences between 1000 and 2000 measurable earthquakes a year, though most are relatively minor, measuring a magnitude of 3 or weaker. Occasionally, numerous earthquakes are detected in a relatively short period of time, an event known as an earthquake swarm. In 1985, more than 3000 earthquakes were measured over several months. More than 70 smaller swarms have been detected between 1983 and 2008. The USGS states that these swarms could be caused more by slips on pre-existing faults than by movements of magma or hydrothermal fluids.[14][15]

In December 2008, continuing into January 2009, more than 500 quakes were detected under the northwest end of Yellowstone Lake over a seven day span, with the largest registering a magnitude of 3.9.[16][17] The most recent swarm started in January 2010 after the Haiti earthquake and before the Chile earthquake. With 1620 small earthquakes between January 17, 2010 and February 1, 2010, this swarm was the second largest ever recorded in the Yellowstone Caldera. The largest of these shocks was a magnitude 3.8 on January 21, 2010 at 11:16 PM MST.[15][18] This swarm reached the background levels by 21 February.

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Coolhand2120]

Sorry, you can't pigeon hole me into another person's argument. Why not argue with what I said instead of making up new claims that I never said.

You take nothing at face value? I call bull.

When I said "I take nothing at face value" I was talking about this report and many others that claim the demise of the Earth is nigh. But I will continue, just to prove how foolish you are, because you seem like the sort that needs proof.

Do you need to stick your hand in a flame to determine that it is hot? Is every flame hot?

Not all flames are hot, moron. You can stick your hand in many flames. That you don't know that speaks volumes about you.

Can you say with certainty that the laws of the universe don't change with every breath?

The laws don't change to be sure, but our interpretation of the laws change every day. Someone finds something that invalidates our previous understanding. Take an obvious recent case like Maybe - nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

That certain gases will affect the heat retention in a gaseous mixture is a fact that you can confirm to your own personal belief. It's done all the time in school science fairs.

And only a moron, like yourself, would believe that an experiment at a school science fair accurately predicts how gas mixtures will radiate heat into space.

The amounts that are put into the air by humans, very well might have an effect in our atmosphere. That can be calculated.

This just is false. How do you "calculate" something that is not quantifiable? Nobody knows how much C02 the earth itself creates Without that, what the fuck are you doing?

So now we have something that is falsifiable, and possible avenues of refutation of the concept.

Sorry bro, AGW is not falsifiable. That is in fact the biggest issue I have with the theory. Can you tell me what "event" or "condition" would falsify it?

If global warming via human activity not causing the atmosphere to retain heat from insolation, what would be the mechanism that prevents the expected warming effect?

Because it can't possibly be wrong, right? Listen to yourself, you say in one breath it is falsifiable, then get within inches of realization then step back and say "well, it can't be wrong, we just haven't figured it out all the way".

Now we have something we can sink our teeth into. I can think of a few possibilities,

I noticed you omitted "we may be wrong". Sounds a lot more like a religion.

Duly noted that you didn't mention the anti - AGW crowd. Do you approve of their Intelligent design and Creationist type arguments for their position?

And why is it that I would talk about another group of people that have nothing to do with this argument? I'm sorry, did I say: "I am a priest" earlier? What makes you think creationism has anything to do with it? You know what, I'll bet these crazy creationists also think communism is bad, murder is bad and that you shouldn't paint your house magenta. I happen to agree with all of that. Does that somehow make me a creationist?

That American professor that they have been after, and has been cleared by multiple inquiries, but they just say the inquiries are flawed.

I'm guessing you're talking about Hansen. It may be stressful to you, but Hansen did get caught

Re:Go away, oil industry shill!

[Ol Olsoc]

Ah, you call your self a skeptic. then you call me a moron? Well played sir! Duly note the sarcasm. Me being a moron is probably innacurate.

Kind sir, you are not only not a skeptic, but you are rude to boot.

You think that I am a moron because of your belief that a school experiment cannot be extrapolated to the real world? You don't believe that CO2 affects the heat retention properties of the atmosphere? Explain why, rather than toss off gratuitous insults. That's pretty strong statement, like saying Ohm's law only exists in the classroom. Talk about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary proof!

Explain why the heat retention properties cannot be calculated. Whether or not we know exactly how much CO2 is being belched into the atmosphere by natural sources, is not relevant. If the effects don't fit the model, find out if the model is wrong and why. Is the effect being mitigated? Are there more or less sources of CO2? Is there a surprise CO2 sink? And your claim that AGW is not falsifiable indicates that you just aren't up on the scientific method. I gave a perfectly falsifiable experiment.

You are correct that you didn't mention the far right crown with their flawed debate style. I asked you. Do you determine what is allowed to be discussed here? In that case, better go back and get permission from the OP. And duly noted that you use the deniers exact same argument technique:

You agree with some of their concepts, therefore you must be one of them. Duly noted you try to apply the dichotomy argument to my argument. It isn't my argument. But I have had my question answered, at least in the part. You do employ either-or arguments.

I'll let you have last post in this argument, because you are probably the type that needs that, and there really isn't much point in arguing with a denier.

Harper and the north....

[mevets]

It is a great funny. His party of 'no-global-warming-problem and CO2 is good for you', has been devoting huge attention to develop the arctic region of Canada - just in time for the Arctic being less arctic.

Meanwhile, people treat the global warming deniers like ignorant shovel heads. With apologies to JS Mill, the deniers aren't all stupid people; although all stupid people are deniers. Many deniers are self-interested bastards, fully aware of what is going on, just lacking concern.

Hurray for Mythical Thinking

[Vegan Cyclist]

Polar ice will soon be a myth, much like how many claim climate change currently is...

Major impact of global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is caused by global warming. When summer is hot...global warming. When winter is cold...global warming. Floods AND droughts are BOTH caused by global warming. Hell, if its muggy out...its still global warming's fault

Canada's Glaciers

[Anonymous Coward]

I have examined in person and reported on many Canadian Glaciers I know of hundreds that are retreating none advancing.
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/apex-glacier-retreat-british-columbia/
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/bridge-glacier-retreat-acceleration-bc-canada/
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/spearhead-glacier-and-decker-glacier-retreat-whistler-british-columbia/
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/freshfield-glacier-retreat-new-lake-froms/
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/retreat-of-columbia-glacier-columbia-icefield-canada/
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/tulsequah-glacier-british-columbia-jokuhlaups-and-retreat/
and up by Mount Logan
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/spectacular-retreat-of-melbern-glacier-british-columbia/

Re:Canada's Glaciers

[glacierchange]

It is also not just ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic that have had problems. Almost all of the Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves have as well from Larsen A-B and Wilkins. The geography is now different for places like the Nordensjold Coast. It is not just the ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic that are losing mass, note the Penny Ice Cap or Devon Ice Cap.

Ice Ages

[Hentes]

Ice Ages interrupted by warm periods have been here since the beginning of time. There was ice covering the bigger part of Europe for thousands of years that happened to melt in a natural way.

Unprecedented?

[Hentes]

It's repeating every 100k years. I'm not saying that global warming doesn't have an artifical part but this is no proof.

units of measurement

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I need that reduced to how many blue whales, or double-decker buses. Who has an intuitive understanding of how much the great pyramid of giza weighs, for heaven's sake?

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Hentes]

Well, we can only alter it if we are the ones causing it.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming is happening.

Why do we care whether global warming is human-caused, or not? Are we all Catholics trying to assess guilt? What does it matter whether or not global warming is human caused or not? Global warming is here and it is happening. The cow is already out of the barn.

What's relevant is whether or not humans can alter the course of global warming.

When arguing with non-rational people, do not concede to meet at a reasonable middle.
From a practical perspective, the point of denying anthropomorphic climate change is that it implies denial of the relation between climate change and greenhouse gases, which in turn implies we do not need to change our energy- and carbon-inefficient lifestyles in the least. Behind it is either economic interest, religious fatalism or a sense that man is too small to have such an impact on this big planet. Instinctively, I also feel we are small, but we are billions, and our impact on the ecosystem is not to be underestimated. The economist had some interesting articles on the topic of the anthropocene (such as this one http://www.economist.com/node/18741749).

"Natural"? WTF

[wanzeo]

The real problem surrounding global warming is that any data we gather is in SOME way affected by our presence. We don't have a control earth next door that we can just fly over to and take measurements independent of human effects.

We need to evaluate warming trends using other criteria rather than whether they are "natural" or not.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[amiga3D]

All we need to do is kill off about 5 billion people or so and it should get a lot cooler. Nuclear winter I think they call it.

Re:Totally Faulty Logic

[amiga3D]

Slashdot has editors? Do you have any scientific proof? I've never seen any evidence of it.

Supply and Demand

[ProzacPatient]

There must be a decreasing demand for Canadian ice. It's the only reason I can think of why super markets would halve the ice shelves.

Controlled Experiments

[Krennson]

Unless you have a controlled experiment, showing the last time glaciers dissapeared under near-identical circumstances, but where you KNOW man-made involvement wasn't a factor, you can't really say whether THIS ice melt is 'natural' or not.

Well.. ok then we have to chuck

[bussdriver]

If you raise the science bar that high then most science has to be thrown out; a great deal of it lacks that level of testability. "Soft" science would no longer be "science" in that nearly everything would not be able to reach your high threshold of proof.

Realistically, you study small amounts that can be tested then find differences between it and larger amounts then PREDICT best guesses based upon "all" available human knowledge/skill -- and that is the best we can possibly do in many situations. So... you go with the best possible answers you have and put resources towards improving the quality of your answers going forward. This still will not help people like the parent because we can't have a controlled experiment.... Even if this was possible, then some other stupid excuse would be created by powerful corporate interests to create doubt.

Sea rise.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really, really, serious! 3 billion tonnes of water, flowing into 360 million sq km of sea, could rise the sea level by almost 4 microns. if this keeps up, in 3,000 years the sea will have risen by almost one full INCH.

We must do SOMETHING now!!!!!

I also blame teaparty

[Anonymous Coward]

many things are assumed

1. A static climate exists on earth.

2. Any change to the climate would be bad.

3. A multibillion year old planets climate future can be determined by thousands of years of glacier change or 150 years of weather data.

4. Increases in co2 are bad because they are.

To which I offer

1. earth has experienced many climate changes over its history. just look at the climate data provided by science.

2. When dinos ruled the earth co2 and temp were both higher and life flourished.

3. Climate shift is real and evidence shows that the window for habitable life on earth is wide by the margins determined over the last few hundred million years.

4. Tree hugger should love this one. Ater we "die" of climate change the plants will have a co2 filled greenhouse. O wait co2 makes plants grow. The percentage of free o2 in the air is a small percentage of the whole and even a 1% change in o2 could be adapted to naturally after all people live in high altitudes without long term health effects. So if the water level rises the only people hurt will be the rich property owners in densely populated lowlands and beach fronts. I thought you people hated them(climate worriers) rich property owners. If the world becomes a place where plants grow in abundance, the rich farming companies will loose money on cheaper crops. More rainfall would fall in the Sahara helping to end famine in north africa. hmmm turns out even if climate change is real we could adapt. and we could look for a way for mankind to benefit from it.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the earth's human population has doubled in the past 50 years and that the only birth control that will ever be effective will be resource and/or environmental collapse, I would say the argument that humans are causing global warming is irrelevant. Eventually we will be warming the earth with our own body heat that will be fueled by Solent Green.

I like to keep both a neutral and positive perpective.

That's Silly!

[HiThere]

Just because something is large and threatening doesn't mean it's unnatural.

FWIW, I *do* believe that anthropogenic climate warming is well established. But it sure wasn't *this* kind of argument that convinced me. By this argument you could say that the Tsunami that recently hit Japan wasn't natural...*IF* you accepted the form of reasoning as valid. Which it isn't.

Lets go on averages and go nuclear

[Stonefish]

The pro greenhouse factions have been pointing to isolated areas where there has been ice reduction.
The pro fossil fuel group point to areas where ice is increasing.

There areas of reduction are larger and more prominent than the areas of ice increase. If I were a betting person I would want long odds before supporting the ice increase camp and what would I spend the money on if I lost.

Now climate change doesn't need to be a bad thing, it depends upon your perspective and context however I'm more worried about the impact of lots of CO2 on the oceans pH. This will change life as we know it and I suspect that the oceans will become a not very nice place to be close to.

If I had the power I'd be making society go nuclear big time and taxing the begessus out of any C02 emmiter to fund the change. It not that I like nuclear its the only real option that is palatable to me. I like using lots of energy, I don't want to be frugal with my energy budget which the green loonies think is the best option. The situation in Japan is simply poor planning, Anyone who thought that putting fundamentally unstable nuclear plant designs on the coast which are plagued by extreme earthquakes and tsunamis needs their head read. By the way the Japanese aren't the only numbnuts.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/google-earth-maps-out-at-risk-populations-around-nuclear-power-plants.php
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/nuclear-reactors-in-earthquake-zones-in-the-us-map.php

The answer is better reactor design and better plant placement.

 

There's also career selection bias

[unassimilatible]

Do you go into climate science as a field if you think everything with the climate is hunky dory?
It's like saying most sociologists agree that the government should spend more on social programs.

Re:There's also career selection bias

[khallow]

Do you go into climate science as a field if you think everything with the climate is hunky dory?

Why not? I went into mathematics because I was interested in the field not because I thought there was something wrong with it. I don't think, for example, that there's a need for government to spend more on mathematical research.

So, the ice melts in summer? Who'da thunk?!

[FishOuttaWater]

Why are they showing us alarming pictures comparing winter and the summer in one year?! Yes, ice melts in the summer. This is not informative data. Show us what summer looked like in 1950, 1960, 1970, ... not January 2011 and August 2011. So silly!

It's so hard to get good information on this through all the ideological crap people spew.

Less than a cubic mile.

[barv]

Come on. Using all that emotive language. Three billion tonnes is three billion cubic meters, which is three cubic kilometers which is less than a cubic mile.

I'm Afraid the Professor's Findings Don't Track

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see how observations of melting ice shelves translates into "...These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'". In fact the evidence suggests precisely the opposite, with other studies showing prior Ice Ages both coming and going in less than a century.

In any event, he's making a class mistake, confusing correlation with causation....one of the many fatal flaws of AGW.

Ferret

The Mayans predicted this...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mayans predicted this long before we discovered fossil fuels.

In One Fell Swoop?

[davesque]

This is part of the problem with this issue. People want to be convinced about global warming in one fell swoop. The truth is, it takes patience and intelligence to understand the issue. The reality lies in the data. The data takes time to understand. It takes willingness to understand. It is what shows that recent warming trends are not natural. Just because glaciers which have been there "for thousands of years" have now almost disappeared, that alone doesn't prove that warming is not natural. Those glaciers were naturally not there thousands of years ago, otherwise they wouldn't have been there "for thousands of years".

Skeptics are not going to be convinced until they can learn to have the patience that it takes to cultivate a scientific mind.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[jovius]

Its tragical that these kind of questions are asked only after we have leveled half of the tropical forests or used most of the fossil fuel resources, mostly without any kind of compensation mechanism. Our carbon dioxided emissions are over 100 times bigger than that of all of the volcanoes, per year.

The volcanoes are part of the natural long cycles whereas the human input has been immensely dramatic and something totally extra to the delicate and more or less balanced processes.

I don't believe we really can't alter anything. All of our processes should be carbon neutral and about 100% recycable and reusable. Even that is not enough because the extra gases would still be in the atmosphere and the warmth stored in the oceans takes long time to dissipate. The forests cannot be replanted and the cattle population cannot be massacred, the businesses relying on unnecessary marketing based human needs don't want to kill themselves.

Or maybe then there is a possibility of developing better tech, procedures and methods, but what is most important is that we ourselves have to chance to preserve the only pearl of life we have here on Earth. These debates about AGW are silly, because "A" is the only logical answer. We as a lifeform need to evolve.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear, hear.

The "not human made" argument is a strawman. It's driven by the industry who would need to cut into their obscene profits in order to build cleaner technology.

What is saddest is that some people just go along with the PR from such companies, parroting the arguments and repeating that same old strawman argument, and then stopping to think further. They think their life depends on their ability to transport themselves with their gas-inefficient SUV, burning gas for energy and inhaling harmful particles coming out of the coal-powered power plants.

It doesn't matter if it's human made or not. Climate change is a fact.

But really - why do some people side with the corporate PR? It's a form of denial for those people. By attaching to an argument which in a way denies discussion, thinking and resolution of problems caused by climate change, they hope to "lock" the situation into its current form. They want the world to continue as it always were for them. The people are scared and insecure, but they cannot admit it.

But the world will not stand still because of the changing climate - the climate is ALL AROUND US, any changes in it will cause changes EVERYWHERE. Some places will be more impacted than others.

For what it's worth, humans can alter the course of climate change. But it requires actions to be taken and a new thinking, the stale old rhetorical circle-jerking sound bites of the tea party / republicans / democrats will not cut it anymore.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans have a negligable impact on the environment. Truly. We may warm it up a little bit, but not multiple degrees. I think some research puts the human effect at around 0.7C over the last 80 years. Meh. It's not like we're going to boil alive.

GW and proof.

[databaseadmin]

Please don't get uppity and troll mark me. But it seems to me that it barely takes a second semester undergraduate physics knowledge and a laptop running a spreadsheet to prove that global warming is significant and real. The problem remains, it is impossible to prove how bad, if bad at all, it will be for humans. I like warm sunny beaches. move them around a few hundred yards here and there, no big deal. Put me out of a job, now that's a BIG deal. And we still chat forever about ice, well until its all gone at least. ;-{

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's relevant because we have a bunch of assholes trying to convince people it has nothing to do with fossil fuels, and that we can keep on buying oil and coal from them pretending the whole thing isn't happening.

Global Warming is Natural

[lsatenstein]

The catalyst to it happening is Man and all the oil companies and other similar energy companies who pay politicians and news media to say it is not happening.

Media not scientists

[DerangedAlchemist]

You can check for yourself, during the 70s and 80s "the next ice age" was mentioned quite a bit. try news.google.com/archivesearch and look for yourself.

"global warming" popped up in 1985.

althoiugh it was first mentioned in the popular press in 1953

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/med_greenhouse_effect.jpg

The news was fond of the next ice age thing. People studying climate were never very convinced and as more and more data came in global warming kept looking more and more probable. Don't confuse media hype with the state of research or an informed opinion.

2007-2011 Sea Ice

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the sea ice was stabilizing it. With the much lower sea ice covering the ocean from 2007-2011 that might have effect. As the sea ice recovers we'll see if the shelf re-establishes itself. The hubris of humans especially on climate is appalling. Thousands of years so it has to be human effects? How about undersea volcanoes? Do we even know how many active ones there are on the Arctic ocean floor?

Please tax me and all carbon so you can fix all these problems. NOT.

Global warming? Check the data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Mark, Global warming is not happening and hasn't been happening for the past 13 years or so. Take a look at any of the temperature records. I tend to trust the satellite data more than others, and this shows cooling over the last 10 years. Strange that we never see this reported in the media. There also isn't much about the growth of the snowcap on mount Kilimanjaro. Does that prove global cooling? Anyone can get press time by saying any natural disaster (yes, including earthquake) are caused by global warming). However, if you check with someone who actually knows something about tropical cyclones (hurricanes) such as Roger Pielke Jr., you will find that there is no discernible trend over the last several decades. The dust bowl drought was much worse that this past summer, etc., etc., etc. Should we spend some money observing global weather patterns and watching OBJECTIVELY for trends? Sure. Should we listen to warnings of catastrophe based on climate models that don't work very well when the real data do not suggest coming danger and then spend trillions of $$ on a crash program to decrease carbon dioxide emissions? Of course not, that would be ridiculous.

by Stephen Pruett

this ice has reportedly been there for thousands

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the Japanese explorers that bought back stories of sailing across the top of what is now Canada were hallucinating... it's the only reasonable explanation...

lots of evidence for natural cycles

[Anonymous Coward]

It was only a few months ago that there was a flurry of articles showing that about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, there was considerably less sea ice in the Arctic, enough that waves lapped on northwesternmost shores of Greenland and left discernable evidence. That hasn't happened since, because there has been too much ice. In other words, we have seen 6,000 years of so of cooler weather.

Natural cycles do occur without the intervention of humans, even within the historically warm period -- an interglacial, between ice ages -- that we are in today.

It isn't that CO2 and other GHGs don't cause warming -- they do. But we need to understand how much, and possible effects, far better than we do. There may be significant consequences to warming, if left unchecked, but there are also significant consequences to the living, in particular the unemployed, today's and especially tomorrow's, if we go off the deep end fixing tomorrow's problem of uncertain consequences.

Icy Skepticism Hits Slashdot

[JamesonLewis3rd]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/01/icy-skepticism-hits-slashdot/

Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no question that the planet has warmed since the Little Ice Age. There is also no question that it has not warmed as much as during the Medieval Warm Period. Fixing Climate change? If it is caused, (I don't think so) by burning fossil fuels, we cannot fix it. China and Oceania are emitting 13 Giga tons of C02 and they will continue to increase 10% a year. Haven't even counted in India and Africa yet. They also don't have to slow down. You could shut down North America, South America and Europe and other than killing everyone there, it would't do a thing. So we will have to adapt as humans always have. If the warming is being caused (as I believe) by the more than tripling of the planets population in less than my lifetime, we might be able to do something about that. Just maybe.

Melted on one side.. created on the other!

[xtr3mist]

I hear from some sources about the ice loss. I hear from other sources about ice creation. I wish these two sources would speak with each other.

Incorrect vernacular....

[strangluv2]

The Ice shelves are not halving, they are calving

It is natural, did you read what you wrote?

[Anonymous Coward]

'The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for

thousands of years. ... These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural.'"

Did you miss the "thousands of years" part? Earth is millions of years old. In fact when the ice receeds they often find *HUMAN* villages. That's right, because we are coming out of an ice age. MM Global Warming is just a scheme for Al Gore and Mr. Strong to get very very rich over nothing by sucking all of us dry. That's right, our money to them. You didn't think only rich people and companies will pay those credits, did you? The REAL models back up that it's natural. Still don't buy it? Check into Venice, Italy. Look at the 1300s and find out that even back then the Adriatic was rising. Long before industrialization, cars and us adding CO2, which by the way has never been proven to actually heat up anything. It's good for plants though.

Stop blabla, and act

[stooo]

People wo don't believe the evidence just try to discuss it away. You can'T discuss away the earth.

Not analogous

[unassimilatible]

Why not? I went into mathematics because I was interested in the field not because I thought there was something wrong with it.

Straw man. I argued climate science, not math. Obviously (apparently not for you), this does not apply all disciplines. Not everyone chooses a career to save the world. But certain careers draw such minded people. People become social workers to help people, but become hedge fund managers to get rich. Obviously those two fields draw different types of people with different politics and worldviews.

So yeah, it is illogical to say that people don't become social workers because of some liberal predisposition because other people become hedge fund managers.

Re:Not analogous

[khallow]

You need to look up what "straw man" means. You asked a question of what I'd do, you got an answer.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, guilt is more important than anything.

Re:Gary Cooper. High Noon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming has happened, did CO2 cause it? It isn't currently happening and hasn't been for 13 years.

I used to think the alarmists were dong a good thing for the wrong reasons. The USA must become independent of the middle East and the development of renewable energy would be good in that respect.

We could be entirely independent of the middle East if we used our tar sands and natural gas or coal but we don't do it! Why not, because of the alarmist brainwashing.

Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we care if the ice shelves are melting, the sky is supposed to fall in 2012 or some shit so we won't be here to notice.

All the answers

[Anonymous Coward]

"These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural."

Really? It must be so nice to have such unassailable proof. So therefore I'm going to offer you a quid-pro-quo...

Human energy intensity increases by roughly 2-3% per annum. If we continue to grow our energy consumption at this rate then in 300 years the surface of this planet will resemble venus even if you convert all engines to the most efficient ones we can conceive and derive all our power from solar panels.

The ONLY thing that you can do to combat this effect is reduce population. The fact that everyone is trying desperately to whack a band-aid on the SYMPTOM which is carbon "pollution" means we are wasting precious resources chasing our tails. Unfortunately, our economies only work "well" under continued growth of... surprise, surprise at least 3%. Get off this rock or die. Sooner than you might previously have thought.

Ice Pirates!

[DarthVain]

I couldn't agree more!

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

Climate Change Research Centre

[DarthVain]

I think it is kind of sad that the name implies validation...

It seems odd to me that scientists, who should be testing or researching the validity. Its like taking a stance and trying to prove something, rather than being objective and testing results and making hypothesis as to what could be the cause... You know, small sciency stuff like that.

Because I am pretty sure if I worked for the Exxon Climate is just Fine Research Centre, that I would get all sorts of criticism of being biased etc...

It also implies they are getting funding basically to prove climate change, which is all kinds of wrong, and least in academia.

Anyway it just irks me.

I mean it would be fine if you are working on the Climate Change problem within the Climate Centre of some University, but to have it named after it seems a bit much to me. (Not that it is uncommon, we have a climate change section as well I believe.) Anyway It just sounds like you are taking a position before conducting the actual research, which is sort of you know, BS.