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."

Comments

Press coverage

[crazyjj]

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.

Re:Press coverage

[GameboyRMH]

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.

Or in short "people can't be bothered about long-term problems."

And it's really too bad because an individual has far more power to do something about global warming than any of those problems you listed.

Re:Press coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

Archimede principle: ice occupy as much space in water as it does once it has melted. The level of the oceans will only raise if inland ice melt such as in Antartica or Groenland.

Re:Press coverage

[GameboyRMH]

Or you could stop eating beef and dairy products or buy from suppliers that use the genetically engineered low-fart cows. Or you could plant some trees or put renewable energy devices on your house or get a shorter commute or replace flying with telecommuting or make your next car electric or see if there's an option to buy renewable power in your area or phase in lower-power devices in your home or maintain/reuse things instead of replacing them...but yeah it's hopeless and there's nothing an individual could do.

Re:Press coverage

[bondsbw]

And it's really too bad because an individual has far more power to do something about global warming than any of those problems you listed.

Bullshit.

You want to know why conservatives push back on global warming? Because the alarmists are claiming just what you are saying, that I (a hard working taxpayer who doesn't have the money to buy a new Prius) needs to go completely out of my way to do something that will make practically ZERO change to the current situation.

Yet removing one container ship from the shipping industry would be the equivalent of removing 50 million automobiles.

I heard the other day that our oil exports now exceed our oil imports. My question: why aren't we just using the oil we have, instead of shipping it across the ocean? Economics aside for a minute... this is having a huge impact to global warming, yet I'm the one being blamed?

Re:Press coverage

[betterunixthanunix]

the kind of thing that has the press running out with cameras to get the dramatic shot

Until a few years ago, tornadoes were a rare event in New York City, something that happened once in a while and made big news.

Now, tornadoes are becoming seasonable for New York. Yes, really, it is frequent enough to be considered seasonal, although I suspect the media won't report it that way for another 5 years. To give you an idea, there were two tornadoes in nearby suburbs this year, multiple strong tornadoes in 2010, a tornado in Brooklyn in 2007, and prior to that, one in 2006 in a nearby suburb, and in NYC in 2003, 1995, 1990, 1985, and 1974, and a few very rare ones before that. This is a becoming a clear change in New York City's weather patterns: tornadoes strike in the late summer and early autumn.

The news has not gotten into a panic over it, probably because it is still being reported as "rare," but it is not really "rare" anymore; it happens, and people in New York City and the nearby areas are going to have to learn how to deal with tornadoes. The tornadoes are also becoming stronger; eventually they will be so strong that the dramatic shots of the storm and the aftermath will be unavoidable.

Re:Press coverage

[Chris Mattern]

Um, no. You've just shown you don't understand buoyancy. A given piece of ice, when it melts, *will take up only as much space as the part of the ice that was underneath the water.* Ice floats because a volume of ice weighs less than the same volume of water. It only displaces in water the volume of its weight in water, and so it floats. And therefore, when it melts, it shrinks exactly enough that the water doesn't rise an inch.

Re:Press coverage

[h4rr4r]

I as a pretty far lefty must agree. It is like water conservation, consumer water use is practically negligible. This is the only utility I know of the more you buy the cheaper it gets, agriculture pays next to nothing for the water and yet uses the vast majority of it. This means in the end the only lettuce I can buy is the stuff from what should be deserts or the local hydroponic. I do buy the 4x the cost hydroponic stuff because they reuse the water and I am in an area with lots of water. I can understand how you could not afford to buy that food or just would not want to pay that price.

The problems are even real solutions will involve you paying a little more or waiting a little longer I am ok with that are you?

Are you ok with paying another $10 on an smartphone or waiting another week to get it because the container ship was wind powered? Or just keeping your "old" phone 1 year longer?

That is what real change would look like. I am fine with it are you?

Re:Press coverage

[trout007]

You missed the point. Floating Ice by virtue of it floating is displacing the same amount of liquid water it contains when melted. Experiment.

Take a Styrofoam cup. Fill it with ice. Pour enough water to float the ice and reach the rim of the glass. Some ice will be floating above the rim. Wait for it to melt and no water will spill.

Re:Press coverage

[Chris Mattern]

The difference between the density of saltware and freshwater is only 2.5%. The level rise would be miniscule; probably not even detectable.

Re:Press coverage

[h4rr4r]

When they start building trailer parks in NYC? We know that is what attracts tornadoes.

Re:Press coverage

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Well, if there is a chance that the average global temperature increase causes more war, hunger, unemployment and recession (the possibility is definitely there), you probably should expect that.

Re:Press coverage

[Vintermann]

The Sahara hasn't always been a desert. The people who live there might LIKE climate change.

Oh for heaven's sake this is descending into parody. No, the people who live there will NOT like climate change. More intense droughts (due to higher temperatures) and more devastating rainfall (due to increased moisture level in the air, following temperatures) will create a very unstable situation in the Saharan countries. If some of them luck into more pleasant conditions for a while, they will be swamped by refugees from droughts and wars created by the misery.

There is no honest way to spin a 2 degrees C temperature increase for the world as something positive.

Some researchers are contending that half the sea level rise we've seen to date is due to cities and farms pumping water out of ancient aquifers on an industrial scale.

For one, this is not at all clear. For another, it's not good news if it is - then we can expect even more sea level rise than projected.

If you had more rain civilization wouldn't be so dependent on depleting aquifers.

Rain doesn't work that way. It comes in many forms which are more trouble than good. A steady stream of meltwater through spring is a good thing, a flash flood isn't. Some areas are going to get drier, some are going to get far too much water.

its also true that the Earth doesn't have "one true" climate and we shouldn't pretend that we are going to lock it in to one.

Straw man. Yes, climate changes, same as species die out naturally. But if it's happening a hundred times faster than it naturally does, and we are the reason, and we are dependent on things staying the way the are (or at least having a long time to adapt), then "it happens naturally" is a damn thickheaded thing to say.

It's like shrugging over a bloody corpse on your doorstep and saying "everyone dies eventually, it's no big deal!" rather than figuring out what happened and whether you are in danger.

Re:Press coverage

[Kjella]

Or you could stop eating beef and dairy products or buy from suppliers that use the genetically engineered low-fart cows. Or you could plant some trees or put renewable energy devices on your house or get a shorter commute or replace flying with telecommuting or make your next car electric or see if there's an option to buy renewable power in your area or phase in lower-power devices in your home or maintain/reuse things instead of replacing them...but yeah it's hopeless and there's nothing an individual could do.

While every ounce helps the main issue is that there's billions of people that want the same standard of living as the top 1-2 billion and the corresponding CO2 emissions. If you don't have a car and can barely afford one you take the cheapest, not the most environmentally friendly. The small fraction of people of the world that don't have any more urgent matters to think of than their carbon footprint is dwarfed by the vast masses that want a modern home and a modern life instead of living in a shed.

Re:Press coverage

[bondsbw]

That article I linked talks about wind powered ships. It claims what is probably obvious, that most of the fuel is used near the ports to get the ships up to speed and to slow them down. Another reply below mentions kite-based "hybrid" ships that claim to reduce 20% of fuel consumption emissions.

I'll put these numbers together: 20% savings over 90,000 ships is equivalent to taking 18,000 container ships out of the ocean. That is the equivalent of 900 billion cars. Since there are just over one billion cars in the world, I'd say there couldn't be a more obvious solution.

And these hybrid ships don't cost any more or take longer to sail across the ocean. With $2000 in fuel savings, we could see the price of shipped goods reduced instead of increased.

Re:Press coverage

[Layzej]

As global temperatures rise, ocean temperatures rise and they are almost certainly going to push more water in to the atmosphere in the form of clouds and rain on land. Earth does have natural mechanisms to adapt to climate changes. More rain could mean floods, could mean places that aren't getting enough precipitation like the Sahara will get more and be more habitable.

There will undoubtedly be areas that benefit from global warming, but sub-tropical areas such as the Sahara, Mexico, and the southern U.S. will not. Sub-tropical areas are getting dryer. Sub-polar regions are getting wetter. This is due to the amplification of the global hydrologic cycle and it is expected to continue as the atmosphere gets warmer. The linked video describes the process: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/05/799721/climate-change-how-the-wet-will-get-wetter-and-the-dry-will-get-drier/

Re:Press coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

That graph shows that "SEA ICE" has been growing. Antarctica is a continent, AKA Land. So where is the sea ice coming from? Is it calving off the land? That would be bad.

Re:Press coverage

[dpilot]

There will certainly be winners as well as losers in climate change. But there are 2 things to remember about this.

First, our current agricultural systems are "optimized" (for some definition of optimized, though not a very optimal one) around climate patterns as they exist. Even if climate change were to increase the arable land, it would most likely be different land that became arable, and at least some existing arable land will cease to be so. It will take time to adapt our agricultural usage to the new areas. In the short term, this adaptation will likely be uncomfortable.

Second, one of the predictions about a warmer climate is that things will become more extreme. Continental interiors are expected on average to get dryer, coastal areas on average to get wetter. And as some say, there will likely be more water evaporating, so the rainy areas may get a LOT more rain, while the dry areas may still get dryer.

Finally, making any predictions is dicey at best. Even, or especially the climate scientists are cagey about exact predictions, because they know how inexact the whole thing is. Which is odd, because one of the skeptics' prime complaints is that there are not exact, testable predictions, and they don't seem to understand that fuzzy statistical answers are also testable.

Re:Press coverage

[aurum42]

No. The *sea ice* around Antarctica, which changes seasonally, has been showing a build-up for a variety of reasons, but the land ice mass, which is what's really important in terms of sea levels, has been decreasing. See here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm

Re:Press coverage

[Hatta]

Sounds like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper. In order to stop climate change reducing the amount of CO2 we produce is not enough. Ceasing CO2 production is not enough. We have to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

That means we need to stop using fossil fuels entirely. We also need massive CO2 sequestration projects, which can only be funded with public money. None of that is going to happen, because reducing energy consumption puts people at a competetive disadvantage, and we live in a world based on competition.

There truly is nothing an individual can do to even slow climate change. All of your suggestions amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The entire world has to come together to solve this problem, and we all know how likely that is.

Re:Press coverage

[rtb61]

I assume you are pointing out that when water has salt in solution it is more dense than water without salt in solution. However shallow thinker when you add fresh water to salty water, you do not have fresh water plus salty water, you have slightly less salty water. Sea water while salty is far from saturation point, and salt will not automatically appear in the melty ice to balance out sea water, the two will mix and you will achieve balance, no change in sea level.

So it has to be ice melt from land. The real problems the scientist are alluding to is a huge rise in methane as a result of thawing permafrost, rotting flood caused debris and rotting storm debris. Huge rises in methane have caused scientists to re-evaluate the nature of the end of the last ice age, rather than being gradual from start to finish. It was gradual in the beginning, the rapidly accelerated due to increased methane levels and the slowed again until it re-stabilised. So whilst the total remains the same rather than slow all the way through, slow, fast, slow is likely more accurately. That fast bit in the middle could be quite destructive as it allows significantly less time to adapt to the changes.

Re:Press coverage

[SiChemist]

I originally thought you were right, but a quick google search produces this article:

http://phys.org/news5619.html

TL;DR: Freshwater ice floats higher in salt water because salt water is more dense.
"When freshwater ice melts in the ocean, it contributes a greater volume of melt water than it originally displaced."

Re:Press coverage

[hey!]

As other have pointed out, melting ice that is is *entirely floating* (important proviso) does not alter the level of the water body it is floating in. Adding water to that body -- in liquid or solid form -- does. So sea level rise is produced entirely by water that is on land (mainly in glaciers or ice sheets) entering the sea.

But melting sea ice can still raise sea levels through effects on land ice that are indirect but potentially dramatic. The greatest concern in the Arctic is sea ice loss leading to warmer summer temperatures as the Arctic Ocean reflects less summer sunlight back into space. Higher temperatures increase the rate at which land ice enters the sea, for example by glaciers calving icebergs. Since sea ice itself is affected by warmer summer temperatures, you have a positive feedback mechanism that can result in rapid, dramatic changes in the Arctic like we're seeing here.

As for looking out your window, even a dramatic change in sea level like the half a meter might not look like much on a nice day. The beach that once stretched hundreds of yards from your door might only be ten yards wide. But the big change you'll see isn't in your routine daily view, it's in extreme events. The once-in-a-decade hurricane surge which once would have brought the sea to your doorstep now sweeps your house away. These events will have huge economic impacts. People take note of past flood events, and build right up to a line the reckon is unlikely to get flooded except maybe once in a hundred years. Move the hundred year flood line just ten or twenty meters back and suddenly a lot of stuff is routinely flooded every few years.

Now I live in Boston, which has a rolling landscape and enormous three meter tides (the record high tide is almost exactly 5m). The way people have built here, ten or twenty centimeters in sea level rise will have little effect on us. A city that is built on flat terrain adjacent to an ocean body with small tides is more vulnerable. Cities like New Orleans or Galveston. On a day to day basis there things would look unchanged from present, but when a big ten year storm rolls through turning everything on its head, the area over which it does that is greatly increased.

Re:Press coverage

[LateArthurDent]

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.

Or in short "people can't be bothered about long-term problems."

And it's really too bad because an individual has far more power to do something about global warming than any of those problems you listed.

Yes, but nobody wants to do the one and only thing that we can do to help the situation.

Because the solution is NOT to use less energy. The solution is to have less kids and lower the population. Individually, I hope that we're all using twice more energy than we use now in the future. Because it'd be great to have that flying car and robot maids. That's the nature of technology, we use more energy to increase our quality of life.

Environmentally, that's not a problem if the population has decreased to 10% of the current population. Total energy usage will be down.

Do you want to help the environment and lower your carbon footprint? Stop having kids.

Re:Press coverage

[geekoid]

I do. I know exzaclt how big it is. I know home many cubim meters of atmostphere we have.

In one can find that out.

Here is some stuff you should know:
Humans emit 29 gigatons of CO2 per year. ONly 40% of which is absorbed into the CO2 cycle. So around 17 gigaton of CO2 remains in the atmostphere.

Do you know how slow geologic change is? It's SLOW, and the massive change we are seeing has happened in about 100 years. Screaming fast geologically speaking.

AGW is real, provable, and solid science.

You sound like a goldfish in a 100 gallon take think this place is huge, our shit could never cause a chemical change in our atmosphere.

Re:Press coverage

[Zordak]

or waiting another week to get it because the container ship was wind powered

I am interested in this new-fangled "wind" shipping you are championing. How would the ship capture the wind power and convert it to momentum? I'm thinking you could have huge sheets of canvas that could pick up wind pretty easily, but I'm stymied where you go from there. Funnel it into some kind of huge turbine or something? Maybe we'll have the technology for this in 10 to 20 years, but I'm not convinced we have it today. And when we get the technology, doesn't that mean that the ship will be at the mercy of the winds? What will happen if the wind stops? You could have a ship sitting in the middle of the ocean for days, "becalmed" to coin a term, with no way of making forward progress. And what if the Somali pirates got their hands on this cutting-edge technology? Ships could be vulnerable to attack on the high seas. You would almost have to arm the ships with some kind of heavy weaponry to fend off hostiles. Also, what are you going to do about scurvy?

Re:Press coverage

[jovius]

Ice mass is decreasing while sea ice is increasing. The effects are connected, and both result from the warmer air.

Antarctica is melting and thus contributing to the total sea level rise - http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice-intermediate.htm

Re:Press coverage

[geekoid]

"There will undoubtedly be areas that benefit from global warming".. ug.. wrong.

Or maybe instead of wrong I should say 'briefly, maybe' Because if we don't stop spewing all the CO2 really soon, there is no reason to think the atmosphere will stop warming during our life time. Once the earth gets to a place where there is a strong enough cycle to absorb the extra CO2. Of course the situation has to get bad enough where the cause of the problem is removed.

Lets be clear, this isn't about destroying the earth. We would be hard pressed to do that. It's about keeping it habitable for humans.

Re:Press coverage

[hey!]

The Antarctic is a different situation entirely than the Arctic. Much of the sea ice there is annual, and winter ice doesn't have the effect on local weather that summer ice in the Arctic does.

In any case climate models do not predict a dramatic change in Antarctic sea ice. The change is predicted to come first in the Arctic then the Antarctic. The reason is that the Arctic ocean is surrounded by land. The Antarctic ocean is surrounded by vast extents of moderating ocean. Region-wide changes under a warming scenario would come to the Arctic before the Antarctic. The Antarctic would see local changes, depending on the prevailing winds.

This is similar to the situation in temperate continental weather. Under an AGW scenario not every place gets warmer; some get cooler. What you get is a very subtle shift in averages over large areas of the globe punctuated by unusual events like drought and excessive rainfall. If you throw all that into a pot you get a slight change in the global average. It'd be better to call "global warming" "more energetic global climate".

Re:Press coverage

[ColdWetDog]

Humanity isn't doomed at all. Business As Usual is doomed. The old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" is likely to become an obvious phenomena. You might see half of the human population (and 90% of everything else) go extinct. But there will still be humans screwing things up (again) for a long, long time.

Re:Press coverage

[scot4875]

So, that totally depends on where you are looking from :)

Yes, if the AGW debate has taught us anything, it's that people can take selfish, greedy, short-sighted looks at just about anything.

--Jeremy

Re:Press coverage

[scot4875]

It's a good thing you're smarter and more insightful than all the people who actually study climate change. This little factoid (every AGW denier seems to have one) clearly must have escaped them all.

Why don't you write a paper exposing this fact? You could turn climate science on its head and in 100 years be remembered as "Tastecicles, one of the greatest scientists of the 21st century."

For as pro-science as Slashdot tends to be, it's amazing how quickly throw scientists under the bus as soon as their research forces them to examine their ideologies.

--Jeremy

Re:Press coverage

[trout007]

There is a big flaw in this experiment. You have to look at salinity change. In the example you linked to it looks like half salt water and half ice. So the final mix is 1/2 the salinity. Assume the density started at 1.03 kg/L the final mix would be 1.015 kg/L. When the fresh ice is floating it is displacing it's weight in salt water.

So assume .5 kg of salt water at 1.03 kg/L and .5 kg of ice at .92 kg/L.
The volume as indicated by liquid level would be 1kg/1.03 kg/L = .97 L

OK now you melt the fresh water and it mixes to get 1.015kg/L solution = .985L

OK it goes up about 1.5%. This looks reasonably close to what their experiment showed.

But lets do it in a 10:1 and a 100:1 mixture of sea water to ice

Both start at 5.5 kg/1.03 kg/L = 5.34 L
5kg salt water .5 kg ice = (5 kg * 1.03 kg/L + .5 kg * 1 kg/L )/5.5kg = 1.027 kg/L
5.5kg/1.027 kg/L = 5.36 L or 0.5 % increase

50kg salt water .5 kg ice = (50 kg * 1.03 kg/L + .5 kg * 1 kg/L )/50.5kg = 1.0297 kg/L
5.341 L or 0.02 % increase

The rise keeps going down with the increase in ratio of sea water to ice.

For reference the world sea ice varies but from what I can find is around 3x10^4 km^3.
The volume of the ocean is 1.3x10^9 km^3. So using these values:

Ice mass
3x10^4 km^3 * 1000 kg/m^3 = 3.000x10^16 kg
Sea Water mass
1.3x10^9 km^3 * 1030 kg/m^3 = 1.339x10^21 kg

Initial Volume (3x10^16 kg + 1.339x10^21 kg)/1.03 kg/L = 1.300029x10^21 L

Final Density (1.339x10^21 kg * 1.03 kg/L + 3x10^16 kg * 1 kg/L )/(1.339x10^21 kg + 3x10^16 kg) = 1.029999 kg/L
Final Volume = (3.000x10^16 kg + 1.339x10^21 kg) / 1.029999 kg/L = 1.300030x10^21 L or 7.7x10^-7 increase.

The surface area of the oceans is 361x10^6 km^2 which is 3.61x10^14m^2
The initial average depth of the ocean is 1.300029x10^21 L / 3.61x10^14m^2 = 3601.188 m
The final average depth of the ocean is 1.300030x10^21 L / 3.61x10^14m^2 = 3601.191 m

So the ocean rise from all fresh water ice melting and mixing would be 2.7mm

Just to mess it up further there are various temperature and salinity gradients in the ocean by location and depth which require a more complex analysis than I will write here.

Re:Press coverage

[fnj]

I heard the other day that our oil exports now exceed our oil imports.

If what you heard is talking about CRUDE oil, which is what counts, then what you heard is WRONG. It is astonishing that anyone would believe such an absurd claim.

For the 4 week period ending September 14, crude oil trade was:
    imports, 8.986 million barrels per day
    Exports, 0.040 million barrels per day
    Net, 8.946 million barrels per day IMPORTS

What you heard was probably talking about oil PRODUCTS, which were indeed a net outflow:
    Imports, 2.206 million barrels per day
    Exports, 2.838 million barrels per day
    Net, 0.632 million barrels per day EXPORTS

reference

Oil products are gasoline, blending components, distillates, kerosene, jet fuel, propane, and so on. Almost the entire volume of these products comes from, you guessed it, crude oil. So the USA imports crude oil, processes it, and exports a large proportion of the resulting products. Corporations are making money by importing the raw material (crude oil), refining it and processing it into various products, and selling these products overseas. Economics 101, to be sure, but what it means is that some substantial portion of the USA crude oil imports (far from the major portion, however), are not necessitated by domestic use.

Re:Press coverage

[riverat1]

Actually the Arctic sea ice melt is about three times greater than the increase in Antarctic sea ice. Antarctic sea ice has not increased because it's been getting colder in Antarctica because it hasn't. It's really kind of an interesting and complex explanation.

One part of the explanation doesn't have much to do with global warming but rather the Antarctic ozone hole. Ozone is a greenhouse gas and the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica causes the stratosphere to cool. This increases the strength of the circumpolar winds around the continent which pushes the ice around opening up polynyas exposing more open water to subsequently freeze thus expanding the ice area.

The second part does have to do with global warming. "The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted." The paper on that effect is (Zhang 2007)

One other interesting fact, the Antarctic sea ice melts (nearly) completely every year before reforming the next winter as opposed to Arctic sea ice which has multi-year sea ice (for a few more years anyway). The reason being is that the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents and the Antarctic is a continent surrounded by ocean.

Re:Press coverage

[budgenator]

The Sahara is a desert because it's in the desert belt, the same latitude band is a desert all around the world, both north and south. This is caused by Hadley Cells, which are an integral part of the planet's heat pump. In the Equatorial band, Solar Equatorial band that is, warmed air rises, the wind increases the evaporation of sea water, the water vapor being lighter than air provides positive feedback increasing the upward circulation and lifting vast amounts of heat in the form of water vapor above the CO2 saturation point where it condenses and falls out as rain. The dry air moves pole-ward and descends over the horse-latitudes at about 30 degrees north and south, causing the desert band. This feedback does cause the desert band to expand a bit but causes tremendous amounts of cooling for the planet providing negative feedback to the heating.

Re:Press coverage

[bzipitidoo]

No hyperbole. War is what will happen if we do nothing. You obviously don't think matters could come to that pass. Sounds naive and childish to me, this refusal to take responsibility for this problem. I would rather not wait until matters have deteriorated to the point that we're at the final option: mass death.

However, we will do something. What, I don't know. Wait until even the dimmest bulbs in our society see that we have a big problem, then spring into action with typical muscular and very costly solutions. Wall off our coasts, like the Netherlands? Huge water projects? More dams, canals, desalination plants, sewage reclamation, and the like to deal with droughts? Powered removal of CO2 from the air? Easier solutions like cutting down carbon emissions now appear to be politically impossible, thanks to people like yourself. Expect you'll claim it would wreck our economy. If so, you couldn't be more wrong. It will stimulate the economy.

I don't believe this is happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Therefore it isn't happening.

balance?

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Fabulous

[ledow]

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?

Re:Fabulous

[i kan reed]

Build your own solution there are more than enough options with known and reasonable impacts on global GDP and quality of life. The real problem has been purely political for at least a decade.

A site with a list of wedges

The real emergency is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real emergency is...

[Rosy At Random]

Clearly the ice has a liberal agenda.

Re:The real emergency is...

[GameboyRMH]

If this is legitimate global warming, the planet has ways of shutting the whole thing down, no need to worry.

Re:The real emergency is...

[gman003]

Citation:
"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Colbert, Stephen. 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (speech, 2006).

Re:And I am willing to bet

[Howitzer86]

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.

The Planet is fine

[Stirling Newberry]

many of us dependent on a rather thin surface of the hydrosphere, however, are not going to like what happens next.

meanwhile....

[Anonymous Coward]

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)."

50 Meter Rise in Sea Level...Oh God

[BoRegardless]

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.

Re:Make Alternatives Cheaper - Economics

[dkleinsc]

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.

Seriously, what can we do?

[yog]

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.

Re:Some things I know - or have come to understand

[UdoKeir]

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?

Re:Some things I know - or have come to understand

[barakn]

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.