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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."
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.
Zealots...to your respective corners!
In this corner, we have Chicken Little, the frothing-at-the-mouth environmentalist who thinks the world is about to explode and every cute polar cub in going to drown if we don't do something RIGHT NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!
And in this corner, we have Jesus H. Capitalist, the denier who thinks that pumping shit-tons of crap into the atmosphere and abolishing the EPA are good things because BP and Chevron say it's okay and Jesus says "Vote Republican!"
Gentlemen, when the bell sounds...begin your crazed hyperbole! Remember, bonus points are given for the most convoluted Nazi analogy.
Ding, ding.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...Big Oil must've airlifted extra snow up there when nobody was looking! :)
CLIMATE change means, climates will change locally, and in micro-climate level.
global warming means, the AVERAGE world temperature will rise. 2 degrees celsius rise in a temperature, wouldnt be felt in your locale if happened. you wouldnt notice it.
but, if AVERAGE world temperature rises by 2 degrees celsius, this means that to effect that AVERAGE rise, innumerable local and micro-climates around the world will change, in WHATEVER fashion.
hence, the CLIMATE CHANGE term. a more correct term that describes the EFFECT that the CAUSE, global warming, has.
some locales may not see ANY change. some locales may get freaking hot. some locales may get cold. some locales may become rainforests. some locales can go humid, some go dry. some become exceedingly windy. ANYthing goes.
so, some ice melting around the world, some staying, is perfectly normal.
climate change is more destructive, because it is impossible to predict what will change and how.
Read radical news here
Just remember that 10 years ago "skeptics"(how exactly they define that term, I don't know) were pointing to how little ice was being lost from Antarctica in the preceding 5 years as indisputable evidence of a hoax.
As evidence that people believed this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=antarctica+gaining+ice&source=newssearch&cd=1&ved=0CDMQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csmonitor.com%2F2002%2F0118%2Fp02s01-usgn.html&ei=Yko0T6zmIYrXtgegk4mwAg&usg=AFQjCNHtA3NtryZuUSi1k3FLEueaP9NWfg
Whoops, right?
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"?
In related news from last year, global sea levels dropped 6mm over 2010.
The new study used a pair of satellites, called Grace, which measure tiny changes in the Earth's gravitational pull. When ice is lost, the gravitational pull weakens and is detected by the orbiting spacecraft.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."
--
So what they were measuring was mass loss. Not exactly ice loss.
But in general ice/water moves a lot faster than rock. Still rock ways more than water. So they assumed all changes or not were ice/water.
What if the moutains got a bit taller as the ice was removed? That would seem to balance out the loss of ice.
Hmm, "The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year "
I sure hope they at least subtract out that known growth rate. 1cm of rock over the entire mountain range is a lot of mass.
Anyone have the actual article did they subtrace mass increases due to mountain growth? And how did they calculate mountain growth. These things can go from positive to negative really quickly with a small change fudge factors like this.
'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.
Politically motivated.
HAND.
Seems to me this points toward something other than CO2 causing the warming. Something like, I don't know, water vapor, of which there is little in the Asian highlands, but plenty around the much lower areas where the glaciers are melting.
Even AGW people admit that water is the REAL problem, and that CO2 is just a trigger for increases in that heat-storing gas. But for some reason they seem to chafe at the idea of using condensers and other methods to remove the water from the air. For some reason they can't process the fact that water is being continuously pumped into the air, and that even though it falls back out in a few days, it is CONTINUOUSLY pumped up. Install reflux condensers (which are super cheap) on factories and automobiles and you reduce the humidity by as much as a few percent, which should easily negate the last century of warming. The best part is that it is effective instantly--no need to wait for three hundred years for the CO2 to come out on its own.
and understand why? HINT, it's not because of cooling or creating more ice.
It's because of more rain fall over land.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Shouldn't the vast global environmentalist "AGW" conspiracy have prevented these scientists from publishing their results? Isn't climate science controlled by a crowd that ensures their future prosperity by preventing dissenting opinions? How could this be?!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm assuming we're going to find the same kind of issue with the data that we did with polar snow fall. Yeah, it was higher at the poles because there was more snow melt and more humidity, but the overall there was a loss of snow.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
'It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,' he said."
Sounds like something to take to heart, as the Climate Change people have only been looking at a few hundred years of warming, since the little ice age, instead of looking at the averages over the last couple of thousand years, and are making major predictions, with very little evidence.
The Guardian article goes on to say:
---
“Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year,” said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.”
His team’s study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world’s oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.
--
This same cherry-picked factoid has been doing the rounds of the "skeptic" blogs since the article's publication, and has made it's way here.
For reference, the paper this is all based on (subscription required): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10847.html
You might have nailed it. If you remove the mass from the top of the Himalayas in the form of water, the reduced weight will cause the mountains to rebound upward from the pressure from underneath.
Effectively, missing water mass is replaced by mineral mass, in what might be an almost perfect balance.
The term for this is isostacy, there's a wikipedia article on it.
--PM
Could it be because they haven't received a sufficient level of pollution, or the ice and snow are too cold to dissolve and allow the pollutants to dissolve in water? Adding solute to solvent depresses the freezing point. Just shortly (a year or two) after we started getting news about noticeable and unavoidable amounts of pollutants showing up in the cubic meters of air tested atop the Swiss Alps, we started getting news about the imminent collapse of the Alps' mostly glacial makeup. But that's because the alps, just warm enough for the glacier ice to melt just enough on the surface to admit pollutants, ended up with a depressed freezing point. On the other hand, I don't know about the quality of air on the Himalayas, but it could be possible that the ice never comes below freezing and so even if there were pollutants settling on the snow, they wouldn't make it into solution.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Note that this is not a reply to any particular prior comment...
From TFA:
That is exactly what one would expect for some degree of overall warming. The highest parts of the Himalayas are still high and cold enough to freeze out every bit of moisture in the air that brings them snow, but that air (mostly monsoon flow from the south) is generally moister because it and the ocean it has passed are significantly warmer than in the past. The result is low glaciers melting back from the warm air and rain instead of snow and higher protoglacial snowpack growing faster than the existing glacier paths can move out.
This is very basic weather science: more snow in routinely cold places does not mean they are getting colder, it means they are getting more injections of warm humid air. Of course that's only true as long as the cold predominates, because eventually it all turns to rain. I've watched this happen in Michigan, where we've gone from record snowfall years (but not record cold) to unusually warm and soaked-through winters.
It doesn't matter what studies you publish regarding climate change, the pro-AGW people will say that it either supports their claims or that the data in the study isn't enough to draw substantive conclusions from. Meanwhile, the anti-AGW folks will say that either the data in the study isn't enough to draw substantive conclusions from or that it supports their claims.
Meanwhile, the rest of us get to sit around trying to work out if a) mankind's effect on the environment is a significant enough contributor to the current climate trend that anything we can reasonably change is going to make any difference and b) if there's any chance in hell that you can get a *room* of random people to agree to noticeably reduce their energy consumption, let alone an entire planet.
You don't know what the word "skeptical" means. It doesn't mean that you disbelieve something by default. It means that you don't believe something by default.
"Sufferin' succotash."
From the summary: "bonch writes 'New research from the University of Colorado concludes that the polar ice caps are melting less than previously thought...' "
Are we seriously expected to believe that Bonch wrote that without attributing it to Apple heroically staving off Google's evil plans to flood the world?
It is impossible to determine sealevel rise from the amount of melt water entering the oceans.
If you want to determine the content of any system, you must account for both everything entering it as well as all the stuff leaving it. If you count 500 people leaving the exit of a building, you should not conclude that there are now 500 more people outside the building - because you didn't count the number of people going in.
That's not cherry picking, that's pumpkin picking.
Drastic weather patterns kill off everything on the planet, but the Himalayas have ice, so who cares! Some things can change while others can stay the same. We are just learning how to analyze complex weather patterns. The US is having a nice springtime in winter right now, while Europe is frozen over.
This description of the study seems a little more informative: "The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all Earth’s glaciers and ice caps between 2003 to 2010 was 1,000 cubic miles, about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie. “The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr" http://summitcountyvoice.com/2012/02/09/global-warming-cu-led-study-pinpoints-earths-ice-loss/
The funniest quote was from the University of Colorado Professor Wahr who states: ""It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century," he said." That's what us deniers say! Maybe we are reaching a 'consensus.' He prefaces his comments by saying: "Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year, people should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before." I can assure Professor Wahr that denier concern levels about the melting of the world's ice is unchanged from before the release of the study. Most importantly for Prof. Wahr, 'everyone else' is still solidly behind the 'we are losing huge amounts of ice' school of thought in spite of the pesky Himalaya study.
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.
As predicted, the predictions are wrong. Man can not predict the weather. We simply do not understand it yet. Is it bad to mine trillions of tons of a chemical that's been trapped in the earth for millions of years and pump them into the atmosphere? Probably. Is there any chance we NOT mine all the hydrocarbons on earth and burn them for energy? No. So we had better start planning for what is likely to happen now and stop wasting money on trying to stop what we can't.
In your post, you called me "addicted to exaggeration", "liar", "careless in comprehension", "sloppy" and "worthless". You also said that the claims I made were "laughable" and "not supported by facts". The problem is that you spent so much time calling me names that you forgot to... do anything else. Usually I'd dismiss a post like that as obvious flamebait but as someone evidently modded you up, I guess I'll try to find the factual claims there so I can respond.
Apparently, you think I've made some "industrial revolution claim" which is partially true. The whole point of my post was that whatever is the reason, the climate is getting warmer currently. That was the only claim I made and I can't find anything in your post that would show you actually disagree here. I also referred to the industrialization in a manner that pretty clearly shows it's a point in time. i.e., "The warming started about when it'd have started if it were due to industrial revolution". I was claiming correlation, not causality... and I guess you disagree very strongly and on a personal level here.
At the end, you link to the same graph I linked to (the source of it is on the NASA site I used as a source and a link to it is on the page I linked to. I considered linking to the graph specifically, but then decided it'd be redundant). It's the main source of my post so you linking to it still doesn't explain what you disagree with. What the graph doesn't show is the "40 years of cooling", though. In 1880-1920 it fluctuates steadily and after that the trend is rather obvious.
I guess that all the namecalling was because you think that if the warming was caused by industrial revolution, it'd have started a few decades earlier? Is that what you're trying to say?
Or maybe you're cherry-picking quotes to support the denialist agenda.
That's never happened before.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
... you think they won't exaggerate "Global Meltdown" ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The science is settled? No. The science is shoddy.
Best Global Warming quote I've heard all day.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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)
Eight years isn't enough data. But when we stories such as "hottest year on record" come out, that's more than enough validation for the global warming alarmists.
Liberty in your lifetime
Well, it turns out that when the IPCC predicted the Himalayan glaciers would be all gone in 2035, it was a simple typo. They misread the prediction that said they would be melted by 2350. So it's on track as predicted!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Climbers who visit the Himalaya annually are constantly adding to their series of slides showing the decline in ice conditions on Himalayan peaks over the last 20 years. This is particularly noticeable on 6000m peaks. Google for Mera or Island peak for example. By my own experience the same is true of New Zealand. Once upon a time you could climb there in January February - no longer. The ice is slushy, downright muddy over most of the glaciers and the crevassing is constant.
Shouldn't the vast global environmentalist "AGW" conspiracy have prevented these scientists from publishing their results? Isn't climate science controlled by a crowd that ensures their future prosperity by preventing dissenting opinions? How could this be?!
They are probably still stunned by the release of the Climategate 2.0 emails.
Climategate 2.0 - A new batch of leaked emails again shows some leading scientists trying to smear opponents. - NOVEMBER 28, 2011
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
230 posts and not one person here has mentioned the solar cycles as a possibility when it comes to global warming/cooling? The sun has been very inactive concerning sunspots for the past few years and from my understanding, the temperature change seen on earth can also be seen in other planets in our solar system.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
>>It was a no-win situation for IT professionals (at least in terms of the general public's view of them
We should have taken Newt's advice and let at least a couple big name disaster's happen then.
The only interesting thing from Y2K was my bank sending me a letter thanking me for my -95 years of loyalty to Wells Fargo.
We are talking really high altitudes for these peaks. If the earth suffered a five degree temperature increase and the normal for those peaks was -35F and it is now -30F there would be no melting ice despite a huge temperature rise. This does not sound like much of a scientific measurement system to me. We all know global warming is hitting us hard already and it should be frightening to all of us.
They are called denier because 1) they are not climate scientist but still pretend to bring up OFT debunked theory to explain away their "skepticism" (solar activity anyone?) and 2) when pointed out that it has been debunked and linked to real climate or whatever they immediately distrust that source of info whereas 3) at the same time they link or accept much more dodgy source of info 4) total ignorance of the real research and refusal to actually publish a falsification of climate change, at which point they will usually whine about a conspiracy to NOT publish anti-climate change papers. There is a huge gap with skepticism.
This is the typical non-skeptic attitude, which you find nearly 1 to 1 in holocaust denial (not historian , did not study or do not accept actual evidence of holocaust, point at alternative explanation which make no sense and have been oft debunked, whine that there is a conspiracy to not publish their theory that holocaust did not happen. Remind you of some attitude ?). This is why they are called climate change denier : not because they are skeptic or whatnot , but much more because they use the same (wrong) process that holocaust denier use. Sure they dislike the word, but frankly, it is earned.
Skepticism as a process is totaly different, and a skeptic for example would keep a mind open for a possible falsification and error on previous data, but would not deny the mound of data we have by now.
So, yeah, climate change denier is spot on those people are not at all "skeptic" and don't apply skepticism as a process.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They use idiot computers to (predict) this stuff, are you kidding me? When Science stops using computers to analyze everything then we may get some where.. They use this for car crashes, shit a whole host of stupid stuff, you cannot CANNOT use a program to simulate reality, a computer does not understand and it appears neither do this idiot scientists (with all there brain or lack of brain power) there are factors within REALITY that are not seen nor understood that make a computer prediction laughable. I am getting tried of this shit!!! There is no doubt the ice is melting it as been since biblical times, even long before that. It is part of reality and the cycle of the planet.. What part does man play in this?? Have we promoted this cycle even faster? These are questions no scientist has answered ? It would a little arrogant to think we the human race have not helped this cycle further along. Instead of coming out with data over the obvious, why not use that brain power to come up with a solution? But I guess that is beyond the scientists who spend day and night with there head up there ass trying to predict something that is far beyond themselves......... BY the way!!!!!!!! Can someone tell me why I cannot separate paragraphs while logged into my account? I can do it without logging in Anonymously ?????????
Climate change denialists can pick all the nits they want, but the fact is that climate change is real.
Climate change is definitely 100% real. The climate is always changing and it always will. Right up until our sun goes red giant. Is anyone claiming that the climate is 100% static and unchanging for all time? Is anyone hoping that the climate will stop changing if everyone buys a Prius?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Usually I'd dismiss a post like that as obvious flamebait but as someone evidently modded you up, ...
What has become of slashdot... There used to be an agreement to give mod points for quality, but they are more and more abused to encourage bullying and to support a political agenda. Rockoon's post is wrong in many ways, including facts and style, but people find it "Insightful". Unbelievable. The geeks have lost. The dork side has taken over.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Global warming is having a noticeable impact in areas where the normal climate is only a couple of degrees below freezing. Alaskan permafrost for example is normaly 29 degrees or so. A couple of degrees change to : the warmer and that stuff starts melting which releases more c02 as once frozen plant matter begins to decay. The himilayas are much colder than the permafrost and a couple degrees of warming isn't enough to get anything melting. It's the same reason you see icecaps on mountain tops when its summer.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Something immediately pops into my mind after reading this article. This is for the readers of /. as much as a statement to the general "anti-science" public.
It was the research of scientists that brought this anomaly public for discussions. Next time, before you go accusing scientists of running an "environmental agenda", remember that it was them that had the guts to offer a tidbit of evidence suggesting a circumspect opinion on the problem.
The evidence is pretty good for shorter Arctic winters and rapid Greenland melting. The Antarctic is less clear with some areas staying very cold and others melting. I've heard Susan Solomon of ozone-hole fame discuss the Antarctic situation a few times. The so-called "third pole" the Himalayas, appears to be equally ambiguous. that is currently the most important pole, supplying a third of the worlds population with water.
They use idiot computers [SNIP] BY the way!!!!!!!! Can someone tell me why I cannot separate paragraphs while logged into my account? I can do it without logging in Anonymously ?????????
You must be using one of them thar idiot computers. >;->
There's a number of Internet Libertarians on here who hysterically equate AGW being real with OMG GOVERNMENT WILL TELL US WHAT TO DO and then go into full-on deny mode so that horrible possibility could never happen.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
From the article:
"People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."
Corrected to:
"People should be just as worried that we have no idea what's going on, yet blunder through the press like we do."
It's not denying global warming to deny the people doing the science. These guys are consistently wrong and there are obviously emergent properties to the worlds global weather system that are far out of their reach. Enough of the propaganda based on reductive fallacies.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
let the other countries that do not have snow, who would like to have the entire stock in the Himalayas many. free grab
Ok, I filed the story on /. way earlier than this version and it got ignored. http://slashdot.org/submission/1937273/global-ice-loss-quantified-from-grace-sat-data
So what did I do wrong?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Yep like Burt Rutan. An otherwise intelligent man who has become a leader in climate denialism because of his ideology.
But seriously at some point, libertarians are either going to need to leave Earth and form their own space-societies or accept the fact that they must at least share the planet with other people.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
BY the way!!!!!!!! Can someone tell me why I cannot separate paragraphs while logged into my account?
While logged on click on "Account" at the top of the main page then the "Posting" tab then change "Comment Post Mode" to "Plain Old Text". Otherwise you have to use HTML tags to make your paragraphs.
I stopped being a libertarian when I realized it wasn't workable, and that it never worked. Mike Huben has a great Non-Libertarian FAQ and Critiques of Libertarianism.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
Extrapolating from 0.075% of all glaciers may or may not be valid. It's strictly a statistical question. After all national polls use responses from 3,000 people to extrapolate the opinions of over 300,000,000 people with an error of +/- 5%. That's less than 0.001% of the population.
Haven't you got the point yet that there is no polite reply to somebody who pretends to be too stupid to breath in order to fool people into following some form of argument? You know your above post is over simplifies to the point of being entirely useless, yet you still wrote it. Why do you think you deserve anything other than contempt in return? If you want to appear to be completely worthless then why get upset when others play along?
But those 0.075% are not a statistically representative sample. They are those glaciers located conveniently enough to have regular measurments taken. Hence the lack of data from the much more inconvenient high-altitude glaciers of Asia. Same story goes for the rest of the world.
If you think scientists are projecting future temperatures just based on past temperature trends it's obvious you have no idea what they are doing.
Do you have actual scientifically valid evidence that they are not a statistically representative sample or did you just pull that out of your ass?
Anytime someone is more worried about the money than the science I can tell it's their ideology (often libertarian) driving their views rather than science. If you think the CO2 you exhale when breathing is in any way part of the problem then you don't have a clue what you're talking about scientifically.
Do you have actual scientifically valid evidence that they are not a statistically representative sample or did you just pull that out of your ass?
That's what the original article said:
"The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world's 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting. The bias was particularly strong in Asia."
Read the article at
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0208/NASA-satellites-reveal-colossal-ice-melt-greenhouse-gasses-blamed
and look at the image
http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/2012/0208-ice/11695646-1-eng-US/0208-ice_full_600.jpg
Most areas are unchanged, like the one the article mentions, but other glacial areas have had a colossal ice melt.
The main changes are in the northern hemishpere (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42392), as predicted.
As for the other bit, why is writing about abandoned towns due to desertication in the past dumb?
No I was not and it is fucking obvious that I was not. What is this shit about prentending to be incredibly stupid in order to pretend you've won some sort of prize when people give up in disgust?
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.
Anyone can say anything they want.
Anyone can call themselves "expert" in anything.
That does not mean anyone who says that he or she is the "expert" of that field is the expert of that field !!
To call me arrogant, Sir, you better take a good look in the mirror.
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!
In your case, Sir, it's not a hand granade, but a tiny little fire cracker.
It's the "CHICKEN LITTLE SYNDROME" that has made you so fearful of everything that you will warn everyone that this world going to blow up to pieces because of the existence of one tiny fire cracker.
I am sorry for you.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !