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Huge Freshwater Bulge In Arctic Ocean
New submitter turkeyfish writes "UK scientists are reporting today in the journal Nature Geoscience that a huge bulge of freshwater is forming in the Western Arctic Ocean caused by a large gyre of freshwater. The gyre appears to indicate that the ice is becoming thin enough over the Arctic Ocean that the wind is beginning to affect the motion of water under the ice. A sudden release of this water or its emergence to the surface will greatly accelerate the melting of the remaining polar oceanic ice and likely alter oceanic circulation in the North Atlantic."
No, that is not the question.
The question is, what could happen, how likely is it, and how would it affect us.
I don't know if you are being a denier, but I'm now getting more tired of hearing from the "I don't have to care if it's Nature" crowd as I am from the "Oh no we are hurting Gaia, humans deserve to die out" crowd.
Why can't we all agree that shit is happening and we should investigate what to do about it?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
Read more about the thermo-haline cycle on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation.
I'll only start worrying if this gyre starts to gimble in the wabe.
It is the breaking of the well established currents.
More water in the system will destroy some of the well established ocean currents that drives the weather on the planet and have caused some stability for the last 15000 years or so.
Wealth will be measured using much different metrics.
Like how many canoes you own.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The fact that there was someone there to look at the formation of the plume means that it is not entirely unexpected, as in "someone got their project funded, and thus made a reasonable case for it".
Of course this would be found/discussed in fairly technical papers. If you trust journalists to do science reporting right, I have a bridge on the Moon to sell.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0924796395000062 for example dates from 16 years ago.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0889.2001.530504.x/abstract is from 11
years ago and directly related. Hint: sciencedirect or google scholar are a better way to get scientific information/papers than plain google.
Predictions are rarely that specific. They're not going to tell you that's there's a fresh water "plume" as TFA so indicates. What predictions do is give you trends, and the effect of these trends on the overall system. The predicted effects are also not specific, but instead the prediction of more trends.
Reality is a little different. There's a lot of noise in the system. The variances of what happens and is expected to happen can be extreme. But the average--the predicted trend--will remain barring unaccounted for variables that may make things much worse or much better. This plume may be a part of the trend. Or it may be one such deviation from the system. Or it could be an unaccounted for variable that's about to accelerate the glacial melt timeline significantly.
Only time will tell whether the initial predictions still hold after this. And if the data doesn't support it, it will be revised. But I can't imagine that 20+ years worth of data supporting the predicted trend will be outright reversed by one event. To even fancy such a notion so would be wishful thinking indeed. More likely, things will either get a little better, or a little worse.
Of course, there actually is a point of no return that we are quickly approaching, and even if things go better than expected for us and the predictions are on the high side, we'll still end up there if we don't change our lifestyles. There's a huge amount of methane stored in the Siberian tundra. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. It's a missile compared to the bullet that the trapped CO2 in glacial ice would be. As the tundra begins to defrost, methane gets released into the atmosphere. When the climate reaches the point where the permafrost is no longer permanent, no amount of CO2 emissions cuts will be able to prevent the sudden release of greenhouse gas into the environment. And at that point, everyone might as well start staking their turf on high ground.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Except Gore never lied about inventing the internet.
You're right, of course -- but the denialist side wins the argument anyway, because now we're no longer discussing global warming, we're discussing a politician's history and alleged misdeeds instead. Any discussion that ends up on a completely different topic counts as a tie, and ties count as a win for the status quo.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm not a climatologist so take this with a grain of salt. First off the models are VERY complex and there are subtle interactions arising here and there that weren't predicted in any of them. Then again you don't need to know your skin will brown in the oven to figure out that staying in it just might be bad. The data is in and the consensus is rather clear from what I've read. Exactly how things will happen is still being debated but we can already see the effects: extreme famine in Africa, increase in severity of storms in the southern U.S. and Caribbean, high heat summers in Europe (that kill a fair number of people). Personally, I see it in a simple way:
1. Climate change will be as bad or worse than predicted and we do nothing - basically we create our own nasty future and the next generations get our mess dropped in their lap and who knows we just might even wipe out our own species but hey at least we got that new ipad.
2. Climate change is not as bad as we think and we over-react in moving to a more localized and carbon neutral economy - this MAY create a short to medium term financial constriction for the time we are doing it but when the change has been made it most likely will increase the productive capacity since there will be less waste and more efficient energy usage as a result.
I really have a hard time seeing terrible fallout from this in the long term unless of course you happen to be an oil company.
You mention that you are giving up your freedoms to the government to battle climate change. What freedom exactly are you giving up? To be honest I've seen a lot of freedoms in the U.S. given up to "keep us safe from terrorism" which seems a side effect of the U.S. middle east policy. It sure seems to me that if we didn't need oil from the middle east tensions would most likely decrease there and maybe, just maybe we can get some freedoms back (say like the freedom to go through an airport with dignity in tact and without your wife/mother/daughter getting molested or the freedom to not be arrested without warrant and tossed in some foreign prison, you know things like that). Climate change would most likely be battled through regulation on energy/transportation/other energy consuming industries. How exactly will that impinge your basic freedoms or do you have a right to cheap foreign goods?