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Rapid Arctic Melt Called 'Planetary Emergency'
Freshly Exhumed writes "Drawing on new data released Wednesday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center that the Arctic ice pack has melted to an all time low within the satellite record (video), NASA climate scientist James Hansen has declared the current reality a 'planetary emergency.' As pointed out by Prof. David Barber from the University of Manitoba, 'The thaw this year broke all the records that we had previous to this and it didn't just break them, it smashed them.' So, not sure why your mainstream press isn't covering this story? 'It's hard for the public to realize,' Hansen said, 'because they stick their head out the window and don't see much going on.' Thankfully, some people are noticing, as Bill McKibben's recent Rolling Stone article, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math has gone viral."
So, not sure why your mainstream press isn't covering this story?
Uh, I saw this on both the PBS Newshour and CNN yesterday. Not sure how much more "mainstream" you can get (unless you expect People magazine to do a story too). Now, if by "not covering" you mean "aren't running around like Chicken Little alarmists screaming 'WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!'" then that's true, yes. But in a world with much more present and pressing issues like war, hunger, unemployment, recession, etc. you can't very well expect every newspaper to lead with a "Average Global Temps Expected to Rise By 1-2 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 50-100 years" headline.
Yes, it's noteworthy. Yes, we certainly need to address it. But, no, it's not the kind of thing that has people immediately scared or in present danger, nor the kind of thing that has the press running out with cameras to get the dramatic shot. It's more the long-term story that sort of simmers in the background.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Therefore it isn't happening.
Brace yourselves. The end is near.
But at the same time Antartic sea ice is being added per http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/
I'm assuming he's a guy with good credentials, held in high-regard, data and conclusions backed up by peer-review, etc.
Great.
So what do we do? Because we haven't been able to answer that question for decades and now we NEED to know the answer before we continue, if that's the case.
As fabulous as all this detective work is, what are we supposed to do about it and what effect does that work have? If it means we have to forgo electricity (say), then maybe we're better off just letting the climate rise and the icecaps melt (for instance). Maybe not. Who knows?
Because for DECADES people have been shouting doom with no reasonable, practical explanation for it, solution of it, or analysis of the impact of said solutions.
Let's work from the assumption that I believe you and you're 100% correct. What do we do now?
Does anybody watch Real Time with Bill Maher? Just about every republican on the panel has said, with a straight face, that there is no sufficient evidence for global warming being real and/or being man made. That's the real emergency, the fact that we have a bunch of people who outright ignore science. And, it's not like I'm talking about some random Joe off of the street. These are the people that have influence in this country.
If anything, I expect the third world to be punished the most. When the rising tide and drought becomes too much for them to handle without taking on debt from nations and corporations all too eager to lend, some of them could effectively return to a more occupied colony-like status.
many of us dependent on a rather thin surface of the hydrosphere, however, are not going to like what happens next.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
What I want to know is how many time shares you have planned in the future Yukon Riveria.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Already started if one tracks prices and supply closely.
I really like quinoa, but have stopped purchasing it since it has to be imported from so far away and the exportation from the countries which raise it has led to dramatic price increases there.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/
"Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year)."
Then again, there is this article from the Register today.
Nobody knows for sure what is really going on. The satellite record is too short for us to know if this is an extraordinary event, or part of a normal cycle.
Proverbs 21:19
Has anyone studied what would happen if GW was much worse? Vast areas of Russia and Canada would be opened up, yes, but those in low lying coastal areas would be forced to higher ground, losing their homes. How disruptive would it be? How much would that cost us all? What would the predicted increased rain do to the vast Chinese and African deserts? Would there be a vast increase in food production. Would there be increased populations, with the danger of horrendous starvation if the world started to cool again? Would the northern parts of the US be like, say, South Carolina (nice), or like the Caribbean(too hot)?. Would Florida be inundated with constant rain? Disruption is not necessarily bad. Does anyone know of any studies in this area?
It was such a horrible event...All civilizations which used all that land are now gone...under water.
Well, it took tens of thousands of years and we lost coastline, but gained almost all of Canada and the Northern US, Europe and Asia back from a deep ice sheet to usable land, so I guess we lost some land and gained some land.
I get a feeling I am being force fed a media manipulation based on our individual lifetime experiences rather than the long long term cycles that man can not affect in more than tiny ways. Man certainly has not affected the prior 2 dozen major worldwide ice age cycles.
"The planet will be fine. WE'RE fucked."
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
When was the last time tornadoes were a seasonal occurrence in New York City?
Palm trees and 8
Could we not just ignore that though and save a ton of money?
That's where the idea of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade come from: The goal is to take a cost that is currently not being factored into the price and make it part of the price. Then you let the markets do their thing and motivate people to switch to alternatives.
Trouble is, that for most libertarians, this kind of regulation is unwarranted government intrusion on the free and unfettered markets. And for most politicians, this kind of regulation is unwarranted intrusion on the profit margins of major campaign contributors.
I am officially gone from
CORRECTION: GameboyRMH made me realize it wasn't Michael Moore who produced "An Inconvenient Truth". I'm sorry for including him in my post above.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Apart from having a national Open-Your-Freezer day to cool things down [joke], what realistically can be done? We can't impound all fossil-fuel burning vehicles. We can't shut down the coal electric plants. We can't stop China and other developing regions from buying hundreds of millions of cars and refrigerators and electronics.
The random environmentally conscious person may trade in her Explorer or Accord for a Toyota Prius and feel nice and self-righteous about it, but has she truly helped the environment? The amount of energy expended to manufacture that Prius, and to dispose of that older vehicle (or merely to pass it on to another driver who'll use it for ten more years) far exceeds the trivial few barrels of oil per year that it conserves. Long term, sure, if we were all driving electric hybrids or pure electrics, we'd be generally reducing atmospheric carbon content, assuming the electric plants weren't making up for it by burning more coal and oil. (If we all switched to bicycles, an argument could be made, but of course our economy would all but shut down.)
So what can we do other than wring our hands and worry fruitlessly? Well for one thing, we can at least maximize our efficiency which in the U.S. is pretty easy because we're so wasteful. An engineer famously observed that California's rolling blackouts a few summers ago could have been prevented had they merely painted white the roofs of all public buildings in that state.
Technology is gradually solving these problems, without particular government intervention and sometimes despite such intervention. For example, solar panels are coming down in price, led by the increasingly dominant Chinese manufacturers. You know it's happening because American panel manufacturers are demanding an anti-dumping injunction. At the same time, a variety of new solar-to-electric technologies are in the pipeline, ranging from spray-on applications to bendable and foldable sheets, to bandwidth-specific crystals, to 3-D blocks that are more efficient per area, and on and on. DARPA is experimenting with 50% efficiency solar cells.
Ultimately, most homes and commercial buildings can and should have some form of solar on the roof; as costs of building these features into new construction or retrofitting them to existing structures fall, it will make enough economic sense that it will happen all by itself, and peak demand for electricity will fall even as demand for storage batteries and fuel cells and solar panel equipment skyrockets (now you know where to invest your money).
The other big trend is the availability of cheap natural gas from fracking, which is driving the construction of new gas electric plants and gas-heating in homes. Fuel oil is expensive; gas is dirt cheap. The simple economics will force a mass conversion to this relatively clean and cheap power source.
Ultimately, we will diversify away from reliance mostly on fossil fuels to a mixture of about half fossil and half clean. The impact this will have on the atmosphere is not fully understood, however, and probably would take decades to be observed. Nonetheless, in the latter half of the 21st Century we can expect to have cleaner skies, at least. If we can actively foster reforestation across the Americas and Asia, and if we can somehow reduce the pollution of the oceans which is killing the plankton that furnish most of our oxygen, we may long term reverse the CO2 increase and perhaps eventually this will drive down temperatures.
Or, maybe these climatic changes have little to do with human activity and nature will simply take its course, regardless of what we do. But at least we should, in my opinion, un-do some of the obvious damage we're causing and optimize conditions for a healthier planet.
My other pet solution is to push a trillion ton block of ice out of Saturn's orbit and dump it onto the North Pole, which might buy us a couple extra decades at least.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Glacier ice is aging, and in typically fashion old northern ice is moving south to a nicer climate. It's like how nearly all retired New Englanders seem to move to Florida (why anyone elderly person would move to a hot muggy swamp is beyond me - perhaps it's a government plot to trick elderly folk into dying more quickly to keep the Social Security budget balanced).
But likewise, Arctic ice is now inclined to moved south to the Anarctic...
Hey, maybe we could stop burning so much coal and switch to lower-CO2 emitting natural gas? Oh wait, we already did.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/08/in-a-surprise-co2-emissions-hit-20-year-low/1#.UFx1MI2PVkY
Or maybe we could raise the gas mileage requirements on cars?
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/08/27/tough-government-gas-mileage-rules-good-for-drivers-auto-industry
Anyone who thinks we aren't doing _anything_ isn't paying attention. Personally, however, I won't think we are serious until we start building newer, safer, CO2-free nuclear power plants. If you don't support more nuclear power, you aren't serious about stopping Global Warming, and you haven't studied the problem enough. Yes, I'm looking at you, Greenpeace.
Necron69
Is that if you look at this thread you see that a supposedly somewhat technical audience cannot even agree on the relative characteristics and density of sea water vs. fresh water let alone the ultimate fate of the planet. You need to get more granular on this issue. If I need to build dikes to keep New York from becoming the littoral version of "Rapture" from Bioshock that is something you need to let us, the Engineer's know. Other than that. Suck it up princess.
Just try getting this crowd to agree on a Friday night pizza topping.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
0) all 40 major climate models are in agreement and new tweaks over last couple of years do not adjust any of them significantly
1) previously assumed 2'C crisis point is looking bad. Current conditions indicate 1'C is likely edge of strange world. We are at 0.8'C now.
2) 265 GT of carbon release will get us to 2'C point
3) 2,795 GT of carbon in known preserves slated for exploitation
why does it matter -->>
In the course of this month, a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt, something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now leaving... in the dust.
Yet not a one climate model (to my knowledge) takes into account the biggest heat source and the biggest driver of that heat source.
https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+change+sun+spots
First hit is:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sun-spots-and-climate-change
most up-to-date climate models—including those used by the United Nations’ prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—incorporate the effects of the sun’s variable degree of brightness in their overall calculations.
This wasn't difficult. Are you being willfully ignorant?
The "we can't predict weather with any accuracy and predicting climate is going to be even harder" argument is the crappiest of crappy arguments. Consider a toss of a fair coin. Toss it once and I have a 50% chance of calling it incorrectly. Toss it 1000 times and my guess that it came up heads 50% of the time will come quite close to the actual percentage of heads.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The US mainly grows corn and soy because the government protects those industries from ever having to retool for more viable crops.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It's inevitable. Fossil sources will keep increasing in price slowly as extraction becomes more complex and expensive. We have enough coal and oil for at least another hundred years, but it's getting harder to extract. At some point it won't have a positive EROEI anymore and we'll have to stop using it as an energy source because it won't make economic sense to do so anymore.
The only thing that could possibly make this situation into a disaster is governments passing price controls that artificially lower the prices of fossil energies. That's the worst case scenario and something that must be prevented at all costs.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
1) No, that's not true. We have data extending back millions of years, although its quality does decrease with age.
2) Oh good, their models will become more accurate. Where's your model?
3) No, it is certainly a part of the discussion. The 3-day halt in air-traffic post 9/11 showed a spike in temperatures, revealing the fact that jet contrails are probably hiding some of the warming.
4) We are already in the part of the Milankovitch cycle where the glaciers should be returning.
5) This is a wonderfully ignorant statement that ignores feedback cycles in the biosphere and geological sources of CO2.
6) Yes, but at what timescale? Will the plants we happen to eat have the same nutritive value? What ecological shifts will occur?
7) Historically? So there were historians writing down what happened during the Pennsylvanian period 300 million years ago? Also, the "not true of oil" statement reveals you to be one of those morons that believes in an unlimited supply of abiogenic oil. Good luck with that.
8) So what? That occurred with a different configuration of continents and a different orbit around the sun.
9) So what? This argument confuses weather with climate. It looks like the Northwest Passage will be permanently open during the summer.
10) The Kardashians get far more clicks. It's actually very hard to get fat, lazy Americans interested in the planet they're destroying.
11) Move to Texas, then see how much you like the summers.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Funny you should mention the 80s. My grandfather told me that there is a 30 year drought cycle. It is here now. It was here in the 80s when my uncle went broke trying to be a farmer, and according to my granfather they slept outside during the 50s because it was too damn hot to sleep in the house. That said, I don't think this possible drought cycle explains it all. I have no idea how much is natural and how much is man made.
As far as the article goes, the mention of Ky (where I live) and the current corn crops is accurate. Farms that usually get around 130 bushels/acre this year are producing about 30. Many corn crops aren't even being harvested because it is not worth it. The stalks can't even be used for feedstock for cows and chickens. Soybeans have been hurt, too, just not as bad as corn.
Why is this Artic meltdown so important?
Three words: "postitive feedback loops."
All the "scary math" up until now has ignored this one very fundamental thing that could make things much, much worse than even the worst case estimates in the IPCC reports until now. The possibility of positive feedback loops accellerating climate change was explicitly excluded from the IPCC reports because they are poorly understood and introduce potentially wildly chaotic responses. They actually say litterally: we're ignoring this because we don't understand it.
The rapid Arctic meltdown has proven that at least some positive feedback loops are already operating, that for this part of the global system the curve is exponential, not linear.
Now the very real and very great danger is the Arctic meltdown will or already has triggered other, even more significant positive feedback loops. Such as releasing the vast stores of Methane in sub-sea hydrates and the permafrost. If that turns out to be the case, then fasten your seatbelts... we're on the fasttrack to global meltdown already.
Take a look at this site: http://www.ameg.me/
It actually doesn't really matter what a carbon tax is spent on to force the economy to adjust, although spending on combating global warming is probably a good idea.
Imagine, if you will, that you're in the market for a car. One car gets 24 km/l and costs $30,000, the other gets 12 km/l and costs $15,000. If gasoline is at about 50.0, and you drive 15000 km per year, then you save $312.50 per year and it will take you 48 years to justify the more expensive car. If gasoline is at about 100.0 (a bit cheaper than now), then you now save $625.00 per year, and it's now 24 years of use to justify the expensive car. But if gasoline is at 300.0 due to a carbon tax, it's now only 8 years of use before the more expensive car was a better deal, so you'll be more likely to make the adjustment, thus reducing your carbon emissions.
Another example: You own a home heated with an oil furnace. You could improve the insulation for $15,000 and cut your heating oil usage in half. If heating oil is $1000, then it's going to take 30 years for that investment to pay off. If heating oil is $3000, that same investment pays off in 10 years, so you're more likely to make it, thus reducing your carbon emissions again.
In neither case did the question of what the money is going to really enter into the calculations: Something that was a stupid economic decision without the tax became a smart decision with the tax, and in both cases you reduced your personal carbon output.
I am officially gone from
Nine out of ten posts will always fall into a couple of categories from it's no big deal or it's a natural cycle. The change is so small it'll have little affect or who cares because any change is hundreds of years off. What people need to look hard at is the last 12 years of stories and the progression. 12 years ago the general belief was if the ice cap is melting we might see no ice cap in summer by 2100. Most thought we'd see a stable summer northwest passage by then maybe as soon as 2050. We already have that and now some are saying the ice cap may collapse as soon as 2015 to 2017. That means no year round ice cap just floating bergs in the summer and those growing gradually smaller. We weren't supposed to see a major impact on climate yet but we are seeing severe droughts and bad weather like tornadoes. We've got hotter summers and worse snow in winters. Most say it's a trend that will soon reverse but the trend started in the early 80s and is accelerating and showing no sign of reversing. People argue about sea level rise but some islands in the Pacific are already under threat. They are seeing the island's water supply poisoned with seawater and waters flooding areas it hadn't historically before. No one on small Pacific Islands are debating global warming they are preparing to eventually abandon their countries. We're facing the classic frog in a pan of hot water scenario. If they saw ice melt and weather like we see now suddenly in 2001 there would have been panic. Stretch it over 12 years and the changes are less noticeable. Just imagine in 12 more years the potential changes? Already if we see another drought next year there will be severe corn shortages. In the past we had a year's worth in storage. Now it's down to a few months. Just look at this one thing, remember history class. Remember all the talk of finding a northwest passage? When they were originally looking some years one would briefly open in the summer. Most years there was no passage. The passage only opened within the last ten years and already we may be a few years away from no summer ice pack. In geologic time that's overnight. They are planning to drill for oil at the north pole! Forget the arctic because no one seems to care about sea ice. Forget sea level rise because until it starts flooding New York no one cares. How's this for hitting home, food prices are likely to double or triple over just the next five to ten years and that may be the conservative estimate. Alarmist? Far from. The aquafers are already badly depleted and we could easily be facing a ten year or more drought. They happen even without global warming. What if the corn crop gets cut in half. That could easily happen. Cattle, Chickens and pigs are all fed corn. Even many fish like catfish are fed mainly corn. Most of your processed food is corn based. Check the labels and you'd be shocked. Almost everything has some corn in it whether from corn syrup or oil or the starch. Corn is now better than $8 a bushel. What happens when it hits $25? There's no substitute. Corporate America has made sure of that. It would take years if not decades to switch over to other sources. Just import what we need? Well that means some one else goes hungry and in order to make sure we get our corn that's where $15 to $25 a bushel comes from. Most won't starve in this country because we'll stop buying toys to buy food but your lifestyle will change dramatically and the third world will start starving in the tens of millions to keep us stocked with what we need because we'll pay anything for it.
All the people who have ever lived on the earth would fit in a 1 mile by 1 mile by 1 mile cube. That cube would fit in the grand canyon. Now think about how big the ocean is. The amount of water locked up in people is a literal drop in the bucket.
I suspect it was too late to stop it even if we had gone all-in at the first warning. We're up against a wall of wombs ten miles high.