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Northeast Passage Becomes Viable Trade Route
Stirling Newberry writes "The New York Times reports on the continued expansion of the sea route along the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean. It was only in 2009 that outside ships were allowed to ply this lane, but Russians have used it since the early 20th century. What makes this year a landmark is that the polar ice cap is smaller at its September minimum than before, allowing large container ships and oil tankers — the backbone of sea commerce — to travel between Europe and Asia, saving time and money over the Suez route, as well as avoiding several politically unstable regions of the world. Putin has been pushing development along the route. While the northwest passage is only gradually opening, the opposite side of the Arctic Ocean looks set for expansion. Siberian Riviera anyone?"
is bubble comrade, have sold condo to buy bitcoins while cheap!
This one was so locked in ice that it could never be used. Now, however, it is viable?
To quote the summary: "Russians have used it since the early 20th century". Hard to understand how it being used for 100 years to you constitutes as "never", and at the same time as proof of global warming due to it recently opening.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The Russians use nuclear icebreakers. That doesn't really scale for most commercial traffic, and now you don't need them in summer anymore.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
exactly. raising waters may flood low area's like Manhattan, or new orleans.
This isn't bad, but the only way to really clean up wall street is to push it literally underwater.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If NYC was so undesirable why does it have half the population of the state?
That is only the city, the metro area has a higher population than NY state. I would postulate the undesirables are folks like you that use such a term to refer to fellow humans on a regular basis.
Sure, all coastal cities might be gone in fifty years, but who cares; it's lovely spring weather at the pole.
No, we'll just have *new* coastal cities. Much cleaner and nicer ones that New York, for sure.
I wonder at what point you deniers will finally throw in the towel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In Soviet Russia, bitcoins buy you!
I'm poor, so to me, money is a LOT more important than the environment.
As sea level rise,
unwise to throw in towel,
for then you get wet.
Actually quoting the register
So this is sort of non-story hype.
in democratic US, dollar buys you!
Soviet russia was ruble...
bitcoins.. vell dey sit in da corner.. being like the iphone 4s, cryptic but ultimately disappoint.
I'm honestly unsure what the truth is regarding climate change, there's too much shouting and I just don't have the background for it. But I do know that if you categorically reject any challenge to your position then you're no scientist.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
For we all know that typos are only made by those with anesthetized testicles.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I don't see anything saying republicans are the instigators of this or that it's political at all. There's no reason to make hateful accusations. It's just convenient side effect of the melted pole.
I'm not clear what Al Gore has to do with this. I don't care what Al Gore has to say on anything. Why do you?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Most climate change skeptics are not of the ilk you describe (although there are very famous ones, many who are politicians)... What most climate skeptics dispute is anthropogenic global warming, and most of them ask the next question thoughtfully - what does global warming (anthropogenic or otherwise) mean? The shrillness on both sides of this debate seem to resort to name calling and revel in the erection of straw man arguments such that they can make the other side look crazy.
For my own part, I don't believe the case for anthropogenic global warming is an open and shut case. I realize there are others who think I'm a lunatic for not being able to come to that conclusion. But the essence of science is thoroughly vetting theories... anthropogenic global warming is a theory whose final chapter is yet to be written.
As for the "what does global warming mean?" - well that is even less well thought out by both sides. Climate change believers think it's the apocalypse. Climate change deniers think it means nothing. Deniers point to harsh winters like last year and say "Global Warming is hooey"... Believers point to every hurricane and say, "See? I told you so"
Melting ice caps point to a warming planet. Opening up new shipping lanes is just one positive that is a result of global climate change. There are undoubtedly negatives. What all those positives and negatives are is unknown by all.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Well, for now, all exploratory holes up there have pretty much come up dry. The fabled cornucopia of arctic oil might well be just a dream. But the simple fact that all major players are going apeshit over the prospect of new, err, prospects up there seems to be a strong sign to me that a) global warming and b) peak oil is pretty much a fact. And that combination can pretty much scare the hell out of anyone with a brain....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
First, the 'deniers' all denied that anything was happening, that it's all normal variation, etc.
Now they MUST accept it's happening, but they deny that people could have anything to do with it, and insist that we are powerless to do anything about it.
Next, look for 'deniers' to accept that humanity is 'a factor' but not the only reason, and expect them to refuse any actions to ameliorate the problem, because they can't completely fix it anyway. (already starting)
Finally, expect the blamestorm to fall upon climatologists for failing to convince them there was a problem, and the reaction to be 'well, it's too late anyway, why change?'.
It's ALL a rationalization to deal with fear of change, lack of responsibility, and a failure to imagine any other way of doing business or building technology and agriculture.
That's shortsighted thinking.
Even in a city, you depend on the environment. It's not just about polar bears. It's also about crops, coastal cities, and illnesses, for instance.
For instance, if coastal cities start getting flooded in New Orleans style, that's going to be pretty darn important, if only because dealing with the resulting mess is going to cost a lot of money, which will eventually come out of your pocket.
Also, even if wherever you are benefits, some other places will suffer, which will result in mass migrations to wherever you are. That will also have economical costs.
Yes, it is good. It makes major economies more efficient which is a step towards increasing wealth overall.
Never mind that orders of magnitude more wealth than that is going to be squandered having to build levees, dikes and seawalls over the next century.
That's shortsighted thinking.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the OP, but short sighted thinking is precisely what makes money on Wall Street. Poor people tend to live in the short term as well, as in "what am I going to eat TODAY?"
Until these problems are addressed, I don't think most people in the world are going to care much about the environment.
I don't know, but it works for me.
We'll have none of this realistic view on climate change hooey here. Please revert to wild accusations and finger pointing, please.
Just another ignorant American.
A mind is a terrible thing to not use.
Educate yourself, son:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
thanks comrade
Is it as ironic as AGW believers who live right next to San Francisco Bay, which was dry until about 20,000 years ago?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
While in theory (chuckle) science leaves the door open, at some point the practical scientist will just conclude the evidence of evolution is overwhelming and the creationist will continue to ramble forever because he's on a religious agenda. While there's natural variations in temperature it is starting to get extremely unlikely that there aren't man made effects at play, there's so much vested interest here its starting to look like the tobacco industry's research into the health effects of smoking.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Between 10 and 12,000 years ago, well within the time of Man, the seas rose and fell dramatically while the glaciers went back and forth over the Northern Hemisphere. For thousands of years North America and Asia were connected via the Bering Land Bridge.
Climate change happens, with or without Man's impact, those who reject that climate change happens without blaming man are the true deniers.
Even if I were to accept this is just normal climate cycles (and basically claim that the overwhelming majority of the climatology community are liars or morons), that would still leave the fact that long-chain hydrocarbons are eventually, and probably not that far in the future, going to be come very expensive, and the whole foundation of our industrial global economy is going to become very shaky. Even if we happily keep barfing CO2 in the atmosphere by burning coal and various methane/natural gas derivatives into the atmosphere, just how do you propose to replace oil in all those non-energy industrial processes in material fabrication. How do you propose to replace the petroleum that ends in plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and son and so forth?
Whether AGW is real or not (and I'll accept the opinions of the experts), one thing is sure, at our rate of consumption, we're going to hit one helluva lot of brick walls by the end of this century. Global warming is only one part of it, the other part being cheap long-chain hydrocarbons coming to an end means even if we burn every once of coal and methane we can get our hands on, we're faced with a shortage of epic proportions. To turn these simpler hydrocarbons into the chemically-malleable long chain hydrocarbons will take vast amounts of energy itself, and if we're just using other fossil fuels to do it, how long do you expect it all to last?
AGW or no AGW, the solutions are the same. To wean ourselves of oil as a principle energy source, to maintain it for what ultimately are far more important uses than sticking it in our goddamned gas tanks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So, select glaciers being watched are shrinking. Your link is just as bad as the GP. Now, when we can measure them all, and average out the amount of ice lost/gained, than that would be something to point to.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That has been looked at and it doesn't appear that even if the Sun went into a Maunder minimum type period it would be enough to stop global warming. How would a Solar Grand Minimum affect global warming.
Oil Shale says you are wrong.
Estimates of global deposits range from 2.8 to 3.3 trillion barrels (450×109 to 520×109 m3) of recoverable oil.
"A 2005 estimate set the total world resources of oil shale at 411 gigatons — enough to yield 2.8 to 3.3 trillion barrels (450×109 to 520×109 m3) of shale oil. This exceeds the world's proven conventional oil reserves, estimated at 1.317 trillion barrels (209.4×109 m3), as of 1 January 2007."
That puts your end of "long chain hydrocarbons" out to about 2175-2200 at current use levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale#Reserves
Actually, I did/do understand what they were/are saying. And I appeared to be one of a very small minority at the conference that were actually listening to the so-called science behind climatology. That is why I'm so skeptical.
You should look up the word "anthropogenic".
"There is ALWAYS an upside."
Canada may become habitable!
I, for one, welcome the annexation of our Northern Province.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
For me the irony of that isn't in the anthro vs. non-anthro debate. The irony is in people regarding a few more meters of rise as apocalyptic, when the "apocalypse" has already occured in their own backyard.
As for the "anthro" aspect of it, I always like to imagine a couple of guys in the area during that time. One turns to the other and says, "Put out that fire. If you don't, the earth will heat up, the valley will fill, and we won't be able to walk to the Farallon Hills anymore".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
As for the "what does global warming mean?"
Dead simple on one level. Higher average global temperature. More energy in the atmosphere and eventually the oceans. (We can probably ignore the effect on rocks.) This is a direct consequence of a higher CO2 concentration in the air, by simple physics. (Some other gases too.) Given that CO2 diffuses pretty well, it's not too hard to measure the increase. The problem is in the detail.
It does not necessarily mean warmer weather where you are located. Climate and weather are very complex, and very non-linear. It probably means things are stormier, but we really don't know that for sure. (It might well make things drier in your area.) The effect on sea levels is easier to calculate, or it would be except for the effects of melting permafrost and ice, which are seriously complex monkey wrenches in the sums. What we do know is that it changes the loading on the climate dice, and we don't know all the game rules yet. Alas, what we also know for sure is that this is a game we can't really afford to lose because of the stake we have in it; that's why climate scientists are so insistent, that along with the fact that by the time it's clear to absolutely everyone, it'll definitely be too late to do anything about except die by the million. (You might like playing russian roulette where you don't know how many chambers have live rounds, but many people have less appetite for risk.) I hate it when a green fanatic points at a big storm and says "evidence of global warming"; it's not. The longer term frequency of these things, the size of the peaks, the total energy across the whole world, that's the evidence. Maybe it's not as immediate and easy to see, but it's far more dangerous because of its sheer scale.
And is it anthropogenic? Well, that's certainly the #1 theory (combined with a whole mess of complicated feedback effects) as the alternatives are all rather more far fetched. Humanity as a whole has been very busy over the past century or so burning fossil fuels, and many of the natural buffers are now believed to be used up. (Deciding this beyond all doubt is a long-term project; the real question is whether the evidence is good enough to act, and again, a lot of people think it is.)
Just to be clear, if there really was a truly cheap believable technical fix for all this — a "magic wand", if you will — then the climate scientists would be proposing that we wave it. Right away. But nobody seriously thinks such a thing exists, so they're trying the cheapest and most humane option that could work: changing the economic system. I think the alternatives are worse, much much worse.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Ok, so you push the problem out a few hundred years. When you think about it, is nothing when looking at all of civilized history. By the time we start to run out of cheap and abundant hydrocarbons, we'd better have some wicked technologies to replace our current source of energy to meet demand. Otherwise we'll just have to re-learn how to live with less and perform more manual work.
I really hope that in another 5,000 years from now, historians in that time don't look back to our period and label us "The Party Era". That is to say, in this time we live in now, life is like a giant party where food is cheap, entertainment is plentiful, and everyone is addicted to cheap energy as though every man, woman, and child were drunk on alcohol. Eventually the booze ran out and reality reared it's ugly head.
Life is not for the lazy.
No, they only had... wait for it... steam and diesel icebreakers! And they were prone to getting stuck, which is when they mounted a heroic rescue with pilots' deeds posted all over Pravda.
Traversing the passage was only viable in the sense that the Soviet Union was willing to pour resources into it, for not entirely economically motivated purposes.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
There's a lot of money in converting one form of energy to another even if it results in considerable loss of energy. Take electricity for example, there is a lot of loss of energy in heat when converting coal to electricity. This is even more "wasteful" when the electricity is used to make heat, such as an electric stove, oven, or furnace. This loss of energy is recovered in the convenience.
With oil shale the loss of energy can be a non-issue if the source of the energy is in an "inconvenient" form. People like to drive cars. People like to drive cars for distances that are currently impossible for electric cars. If we can somehow find an "inconvenient" energy source that can be turned into a "convenient" one like gasoline then we have found a way to maintain the convenience of our gasoline powered cars.
From my understanding the means to remove the oil from the oil shale and oil sands is by heating the oil until it is liquid enough to boil away (to be condensed) or liquified (to be filtered out). This heat could come from a number of less convenient energy sources like natural gas, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or just burning some of the oil shale to recover the oil from other oil shale. This heating of the oil shale to recover the oil could be from heat that might otherwise be wasted from some other energy production or industrial process, turning an energy negative process into an energy positive one.
Some very real limitation of technology, physics, economics, etc. means that we will be burning fossil fuels for the next fifty years even if that means energy lost in the process. Airplanes need kerosene, cargo ships and trains need diesel fuel. The operational lifespan of these vehicles is on the order of decades. The infrastructure needed to support any other kind of fuel does not yet exist and will also take decades to shift. The US military thinks fifty years into the future on what weapons they build now. That means, barring some kind of war on the scale of WWII, what is on the drawing boards now will be in production in ten years, be used for thirty, and kept in reserve for another ten. This time scale seems nearly universal from combat boots to battleships.
There is no way that I can see moving away from an economy that does not run on hydrocarbon fuels in less than fifty years unless someone is already designing airplanes that run on liquid hydrogen, prototyping nuclear powered cargo ships, and planning out transcontinental electric rail lines.
This loss of energy is only a theoretical one. In reality, or economically speaking, there is energy gained in that energy is gained in a form that is useful (or just more convenient) and therefore valuable. The economics of energy is more complex than the physics. This is especially true when politics is added to energy and economy.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I too admit I'm ambivalent. Certainly, there may be man-made effects involved, but how involved? More than solar cycles, or any number of other phenomena? Is it AGM, or just another natural process or cycle we've not previously run across?
At this point being ambivalent is the equivalent of never having bothered to check it out. Or really being a denier and just pretending to be ambivalent just to make people think you're objective. Since you threw in Al Gore as the sample "shady characters" but didn't mention Lehman Brothers or Oil Companies or the Koch Brothers, I'm guessing your ambivalence is a sham.
If you wanted the scientific evidence, it's not easy to find, because of all the sham sites (wattsupwiththat, ourcivilization.com, globalwarminghysteria). But if you stick to actual scientists and government agencies it's there. Realclimate and skepticalscience have distilled the evidence down pretty well. This page is a good starting point.
It's not the sun or volcanos. Temperatures have not been declining. Climate models have done a good job of predicting temperature, and they can only do a good job of matching past temperatures and predicting future temperatures if human greenhouse gas emissions are included. The negative effects of global warming outweigh the positive.
And nobody is seriously proposing kicking dust into the upper atmosphere. Although in 150 years, when we've done nothing because rich assholes like to make money too much, it may get to the point where such drastic measures are the only survivable options.
Al Gore's carbon trading system isn't a very good solution. It was proposed because it was the only solution Republicans would go for, and their friends on Wall St. could suck money out of it the way they suck money out of all the other commodities markets. Of course they've changed their minds since then. They'd rather rely on Jesus to save us than see Al Gore make a buck. If the Koch Brothers had gotten in on the ground floor of the carbon trading market, it would have been implemented by now.
A revenue neutral carbon tax is a much better way (although the carbontax.org version of that isn't quite what I would choose).
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Let me put this is a way the real Wyatt Earp would understand. Your argument is "People used to die before there were guns, therefore the smoking gun in my hand and the bullet hole in his chest cannot be used as evidence. He obviously died of natural causes."
Reality refuses to be that silly. Human CO2 emissions are driving current climate change. That doesn't mean there aren't natural processes that change climate, too. They are even operating now. They are smaller than those caused by humans. Natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. If the planet accumulates heat, global temperatures will go up. Currently, CO2 released by human activity is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past climate change actually provides evidence for our climate's sensitivity to CO2.
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Evolution has been shown to happen in the lab, and among populations of wild animals (for example, Australian snakes developing smaller heads to stop them from eating poisonous cane toads that were introduced some 60 years ago). AGW, not so much. Rather, we just have a single sample with no control, unless you count the other solar system planets, which just happen to be getting warmer too, though that doesn't mean much. This makes it very difficult to PROVE anything. Anecdote simply is not an acceptable basis for scientific evidence, and one hundred years of measurement is a single anecdote on the geological time frame. Extrapolating linear or exponential trends will pretty much always leave you red faced at some point.