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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."
What a nice lovely and simple world you live in. Best coat youself in mustard as you play in the garden to give those Moorlocks something nice to eat and thus finally make a positive contribution to the world.
I actually worked in consulting and have helped fixing the Y2K bugs in a multinational's ERP system.
You don't know what you're talking about. There was good money to be earned in those days because companies couldn't postpone fixing their systems anymore.
Your "planes dropping from the sky" is likely just a straw-man, though. We're more talking about database errors, failures in logistics systems, that kind of thing.
"Those who are yelling global meltdown"; who's that then?
I happen to also have learned a bit about infrared spectroscopy in my chemistry study, and have *seen* the C=O double bond stretch vibration's broad peak. Arrhenius was right in 1906 that CO2 acts like a blanket and causes the greenhouse effect. It's real. You can try it out at home with 2 jamjars on a sunny day, if you like. Breathe in one of them not the other, cover with a glass plate, measure the temperature after a sunny day.
I also believe the IPCC AR4 consensus report (you can call me gullible if it makes you feel better).
Most of the people concerned about Global Warming believe that it's better to adapt our society to use as much fossil energy as in 1990 (or even less) rather than to wait for the CO2 to reach levels that will have full climate impact 250--500 years from now and will make the Earth a lot less hospitable to mankind *then*. Yes, we will be dead in 250 years. For some people, being dead eventually is no excuse to not try to improve the legacy we leave our children and children's children.
It is arrogant of you that, just because you've not personally experienced something, that therefore you call the people who say they do know what they're talking about, liars and fear mongers. If you'd never seen a hand grenade before and I'd warn you to not play with that thing, you'd probably call me a fear monger as well!
Try to learn as much as you can about the world from different sources, try to experiment yourself (maybe not with hand grenades), and maybe one day you'll learn to see past what the TV is spoon-feeding you.