Slashdot Mirror
The Himalayas and Nearby Peaks Have Lost No Ice In Past 10 Years, Study Shows
DesScorp writes "A story from UK's Guardian reports on a study of ice levels from the Himalayas area, and finds that no significant melting has occurred, despite earlier predictions of losses of up to 50 billion tons of ice. 'The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,' said Professor Jonathan Bamber, who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions. 'It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,' he said." Readers have sent in a few other stories today relating to melting (or persisting) ice around the globe; read on for more.
bonch writes "New research from the University of Colorado concludes that the polar ice caps are melting less than previously thought. Almost 230 billion tons of ice annually melt into the ocean, 30% less than past predictions. The new data comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite, which provides more accurate estimates than previous methods."
The earth being a complex thing, though, note that these observations don't mean an end to predictions of elevated sea level.
Finally, an anonymous reader writes with another ice story: "NASA's Terra satellite saw a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and it is all set to give rise to an iceberg the size of Manhattan! The huge gash in the snow is 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) long and nearly 100 meters wide, and is widening every passing minute. This is expected to create an iceberg more than 900 square kilometer in area, as compared to the 785 square kilometer area of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Bronx combined, said NASA."
The earth being a complex thing, though, note that these observations don't mean an end to predictions of elevated sea level.
Finally, an anonymous reader writes with another ice story: "NASA's Terra satellite saw a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and it is all set to give rise to an iceberg the size of Manhattan! The huge gash in the snow is 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) long and nearly 100 meters wide, and is widening every passing minute. This is expected to create an iceberg more than 900 square kilometer in area, as compared to the 785 square kilometer area of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Bronx combined, said NASA."
I think the lesson to take away is to strive for a rational, "healthily skeptical" position when presented with climate data. It's just such an unpredictable thing--literally, a complicated system the size of the entire world with a scale spanning molecules, continents, and beyond. The media doesn't help, either--it's drive for alarmism tends to overly simplify or exaggerate situations, and perhaps even the scientists involved get caught up in it.
For example, do you remember how polar bears drowning in the Arctic sea due to global warming were cited as a reason to classify them as an endangered species, and how they were used as a symbol of climate change in Al Gore's movie? The lead scientist was actually placed on administrative leave, and several questions were raised about how the bears actually died and how the corpses were observed from 1,500 up in a helicopter rather than examined to actually determine their cause of death. Whether or not they were really drowning, there just wasn't enough data to come to the conclusion that was presented to the public with the level of certainty that was conveyed.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics. If you question a conclusion or suggest a way of doing things, and you maintain a nuanced or balanced position, you get shit on by everybody, and nothing gets accomplished.
George Carlin did an insightful (and profanity-laden) bit on alarmism in modern society.
healthily skeptical
It's really very wrong to say skepticism is "healthy", and yet I see people say this almost daily. It's no more 'healthy' to be systematically 'skeptical' than it is to be systematically credulous. It's 'healthy' to follow the data and not make any assumptions before you analyze it.
Disbelieving things by default isn't really much better, from a scientific perspective, than believing everything you hear.
Just doesn't work.
The science is settled? No. The science is shoddy.
Controversy over AGW aside, this means nothing. The world can warm while some regions gain, lose, or maintain ice. It's GLOBAL climate change so what matters is the GLOBAL ice pack.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So basically what you're saying is that CLIMATE CHANGE may cause things to happen that have already happened to the planet before? Like when the Sahara was a lush forest? Somehow in our human ego-maniacal way we must be the cause of this change because it has NEVER happened before.
'Normal' cycles would indicate that they should be increasing; the fact that they remain 0 is still a concern.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions
Right, 8 years isn't long enough to draw conclusions when the 8 years of evidence doesn't point to the conclusion you want it to.
But if it points to the conclusion you want, then it's all the proof you need.
(Sorry... I think there are MANY forces at work that shape our climate, and people are pretty arrogant to think they understand all of them.)
I am glad that seemingly hard facts are being presented.
While I still think the overwhelming evidence supports the hypothesis that 1) GW is occurring and 2) man is responsible, at least this is better than the ranting and raving that I've come to expect from skeptics.
Of course my thinking is sustained by much more complete data sets of a GLOBAL perspective provided by climatologists. There was a recent animation produced by NASA recently that showed a map of worldwide temperature readings for the past 150 years. (I submitted it to slashdot, for some reason it was rejected). If the skeptics can continue to produce data that shows the GW is not happening I'm open to changing my thinking. But again, from what I've been following in the literature, there hasn't been much supporting their point of view.
Look, I'm not ideologically opposed to fossil fuels per say; with the vastly increased amounts of natural gas in the U.S. I'm happy to use a fuel that doesn't directly fund people who hate us. However I'm also not one to overlook an inconvenient truth.
There is extremely solid evidence that the climate has been getting steadily warmer since the industrial revolution. http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. That holds true even when we take into account things such as cities radiating heat and reduce them from the gathered data. And that holds true even on years when sun activity is low. That's as established fact as anything in the science can be: You can still claim that the earth is flat and call yourself a scientist, if you want to. You won't get much attention in peer reviewed scientific journals, though.
You know, I think that if everyone who believes AGW is a serious danger got together and used their political donations to instead fund a private foundation to support technological research to make "green" advancements more cost effective, and then shop those to private business, there would be more than enough money get the job taken care of, and without the political BS.
Some people just don't like the government telling them what to do. And other people are pretty annoyed with being forced to do something that one billion Chinese can't be bothered with. And yes, I know that they are working on green energy too, but really, if people think that's really making up for the sheer ecological disaster that China is, they have never been to China.
Point is, those who are trying to get the government to stop AGW are just as obstinate and counterproductive in their own way as the people who simply ignore or deny AGW. Just get as many people on your side as possible, collect the money from them, and do the PR and product development yourselves.
Those who are yelling "Global Meltdown", like their "Millennium Bug" counterparts a decade or so ago, are nothing more than fear mongers
They engage in fear mongering for one very specific purpose, and that is, they benefit from public panics
The "Millennium Bug" fear mongers spreaded fears so wide that even ridiculous fear such as "Planes dropping from the sky" were uttered by many
The "Millennium Bug" was little more than a hiccup precisely because the publicity spurred decision-makers to invest huge amounts of effort into reviewing/fixing old systems so that they didn't have problems. Had it not been for the publicity, many of the systems probably would not have been fixed and then there would have been hell to pay (as in "How could you eggheads let this happen?")
It was a no-win situation for IT professionals (at least in terms of the general public's view of them; I hear it was a major win for consulting companies who could scrounge up COBOL programmers)
Here, here!
There's a great blog and book called You're not so smart, and it goes into deep discussion of how people think and behave. and for the most part we aren't open to new ideas, we just cherry pick facts to justify our philosophical positions. It actually takes a tremendous amount of intellectual rigor to look at the MANY sides of an idea to come away with some concise idea of where the reality of the situation lands. This by the way is complicated in this modern age by the fact your search engines are designed to help you find what you're looking for. So if you're looking for justification, not only will you find it, but you will soon be virtually unable to find anything else... the engine will be leaned in the direction you push it. Just as an aside, this is one more reason to look for all sides of a conversation, because you want to prevent your primary source of information from becoming so biased that it becomes just another feedback on your point of view.
In the area of global climate change. We have a lot of very interesting information. Greenland is experiencing TREMENDOUS melting events and there is a huge influx of fresh water into the arctic ocean. The problems with polar bear and brown bears is well understood, including a recent event in which unusually warm coastal water prevents salmon runs in southern Alaska and resulted in serious die off of young brown bears. Glaciers through the Americas, Europe and Africa are disappearing. The loss of glaciers in North America is so pronounced that within 20 years the International Park name "Glacier" may have no glaciers to speak of. Ocean chemistry is changing, and measurable rises in CO2 have resulted in acidification threatening a wide variety of species that require carbonaceous shells (everything from coral to shell fish to crustaceans and their larva.) On the other side, chemical changes have caused a massive increase in ocean jellies (a well known survival response to perceived threat designed to ensure species survival in the face of potential calamity.) We're seeing dramatic shifts in the flowering and fruiting seasons of plant around the world. Shifts in animal migration. Statistical changes in weather patterns consistent with predicted models (increased numbers of floods and droughts and increases in precipitation and storm intensity.) Serious rise in droughts and wildfires in the Western US, Africa and Australia. These are all facts. Part of a larger picture and as some have already said, so complex that we don't understand it. However, we can begin to see patterns emerging. It would be profoundly foolish to ignore these signs, or wait until catastrophic environmental failure became clear and incontrovertible.
Wise money suggests there are a hundred good reasons for looking at ways to conserve energy, become more efficient, find renewable resources and create an energy economy that begins to move people and long term solutions off planet. Wise money suggests that rather than argue and justify a negligent past, it would serve us all best to invent a workable future and to that end, arguing against the impacts of fossil fuels and there growing scarcity would seem (at least to me) like a fools errand.