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Darker Arctic Boosting Global Warming
The Grim Reefer sends this news from an Associated Press report:
"The Arctic isn't nearly as bright and white as it used to be because of more ice melting in the ocean, and that's turning out to be a global problem, a new study says. With more dark, open water in the summer, less of the sun's heat is reflected back into space. So the entire Earth is absorbing more heat than expected, according to a study (abstract) published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That extra absorbed energy is so big that it measures about one-quarter of the entire heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide, said the study's lead author, Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. The Arctic grew 8 per cent darker between 1979 and 2011, Eisenman found, measuring how much sunlight is reflected back into space."
The same decrease in ice contributes to the weather circumstances that led to extremely low temperatures across parts of the United States this winter.
Looking on the bright side - thanks to all our wanton climate changing industrial activity and glacial public acceptance of the situation, we are getting our first experiences with terraforming. Admittedly, these experiences are like one's first experiences with learning how to paint - finger painting and messy, but with much larger existential consequences and no actual paint.
Hopefully "soon" we get a good foothold on Mars, and hopefully, and this sounds weird I know, there is NO life on Mars. Because that would give us a nice "sterile planetary lab" on which to experiment as we find ways to control global climates without operating on the only global climate we have available - which we happen to depend on completely and utterly for our survival.
Better to start experimenting on another one as soon as possible, because even when we get a handle on our climate changing activities, nature is standing by with a much larger list of climate changing activities which we will have to confront.
Maybe Venus too - if we can fix that place we can fix anywhere! So Mars would be like our lab and Venus is like our final exam.
And I think we really need to pass this course.
The Earth isn't, but people are, and a good many are living in fairly marginal areas, and not just in terms of agriculture. Will humanity die out. Most certainly not. But there will be consequences, and they will ultimately be fair more expensive than if we had tried to curb emissions.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yet, when a specific locality talks about an unusually warm spot of weather, we have people screaming "CLIMATE CHANGE!"
The problem is, there's too damn much noise at BOTH edges of the issue and it's completely drowning out the center.
There's been WAY too much alarmist bullshit injected into the discussion, and it simply distorts said discussion away from the facts of the matter.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Arctic ice rebounded somewhat from the all-time record low of 2012.
However It was still the 6th lowest level on record.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
The problem is the lack of context in whatever warped source you are reading.
Earth ultimately doesn't care; it's older than we are and will outlive us.
We care because civilization as we know it is really shockingly dependent on climatic patterns like rainfall and seasonal temperature and parameters like sea level being what they are.
Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself
It did that by putting carbon into the ground as coal, peat and limestone, humans are doing their best to put it back in the atmosphere by burning the coal and peat, and releaseing the CO2 from limestone to turn it into concrete. The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
the year after a record year is usually not a record year. it's called 'regression to the mean'. it's an actual thing, look it up.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
north, north central, midwest, and eastern, and southern parts of the U.S.. How much global warming do you see?
i didn't know that the entire globe consisted merely of those portions of the US.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
No scientist is going to point to a specific event and go "That's caused by AGW". The theory cannot hope to explain every weather event. But what it can explain are trends.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I also think it is prudent to act as if climate change were real.
Not if it involves spending billions or trillions to simply reduce CO2 emissions, when it could have gone to medical or space research.
Or even in fact to reducing REAL pollution.
There's no sign anything like a runaway greenhouse effect is going to happen. CO2 levels have continued to increase even as global average temperatures have hit a lull. In the simplified glass jar experiments that is not what happens, so pretty obviously the earth is lots more complex than a glass jar with CO2 inside. The current rate of ocean level rise is less than foot over the next 100 years, not exactly a panic situation.
Lets get back to spending money on real issues instead of a bogeyman created to funnel large sums of government money in the hands of special interest groups or creating new things for financial moguls to get rich off of (looking at you carbon credits).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The sea ice extent is the surface area of ice that is floating in the sea. Unfortunately, there is more ice floating in the sea because it's calving off the land. The total volume or mass of ice in the Antarctic is decreasing.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic.
The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.
The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.
And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nowhere did I say the issue was one-dimensional.
That was you, putting words into my mouth and trying to skew the scope of the issue and maximize argument potential while minimally helpful in working towards a working, palatable solution.
Yes, the climate IS changing. Anyone denying that the climate is changing pretty much has blinders on.
NO, we're NOT going to render the planet uninhabitable tomorrow. Acting like we're going to wake up at the end of this month and it's going to be 150 in the shade and only get hotter is unwarranted.
Yes, we, as a species, need to live cleaner in a multitude of ways. Yeah, humans have been pretty frickin' nasty to the environment in the last thousand or so years, and in the last 2-300 years especially.
NO, we should NOT simply dump millions/billions into trying whatever harebrained "band-aid" idea happens to float into the public consciousness today without extensive study. We need to KNOW that any massive changes we try to impose are going to work how we want and NOT further damage the environment.
Yes, there are going to be changes in how people live. It's inevitable. But not ending human civilization in a heat crisis is probably worth it (depends on how I'm feeling about humanity on a given day).
NO, we should NOT be reverting to living in caves, eating grass and rooting for grubs. And we really need to start shooting dickheads who scream about how horrible others are to the environment, yet are first class environmental nightmares themselves.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This cuts both ways. Your rights to insist someone stop something must have fact, not fear behind them. The current state of our understanding of the climate doesn't support the claims being made. The fact that a number of those claims have fallen is further evidence that it needs further study not immediate action.
The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .
The problem is that while on the surface, your statement sounds quite reasonable, there are a lot of people who simply will not accept any evidence at all, either because of personal incredulity, or being paid for their opinion. In the grand process of Baksheesh, It will take more than the gradual uptick in temperature to change any of that.
Plus of course, with the tendency for people to determine that climate is what they see out their window, it's cold today, so climate change isn't happening. Which is to say, don't worry, Deniers have won.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
About 60% of that rise has been in only the past 30 years.
That history you're referring to had very few temp rises as quick as what we're seeing now although there were some.
One of the most important factors, which is not currently in play and won't be for thousands of years is an orbital forcing or Milankovitch cycle.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.
It's a 99.something% consensus, which is as solid as any consensus among a large population is ever going to get. Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed climate articles from 1991-2012, only 24 reject global warming. (source)
Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.
All the evidence we have for previous natural variations show them to be slow (or extremely rapid, as in catastrophically rapid - impact events or super-volcano eruptions); the changes we're seeing today is way too rapid to conform to any known natural cycle. The difference, of course, is that we're around and actively adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. In short, not a "natural variation".
Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?
We don't know; that's the problem. We don't have any crystal balls, so we don't know what the most effective strategy is, or exactly how severe the effects will be. What we do know is that large climate changes historically have been responsible for some of the most drastic extinction events we know of. And it's pretty easy to speculate about what a massive dying-off of e.g. marine life would do to coastal communities - as is the effect on the same communities of rising sea levels.
These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.
No, these are not minor issues, and the ramifications of the decisions are huge. In the end though, doing nothing is probably the worst decision; there is a tipping point somewhere (the edge of the cliff, so to speak) which going past that there is no turning back. More research and discussion is always welcome, but that should not and cannot stop us from starting to act - if nothing else to slow down the rate at which we're approaching that tipping point.
The analogy with the earth-centric cosmic models and burning of a few heretics is really stretching it when we're talking about the possibility of mass extinctions of not only humans but a lot of other species as well.
The earth will survive, and life itself will survive. The question is, will we? And even if we do, in what kind of society? One that has planned for such an eventuality, or one that has had to just react to it. One is liveable, the other is a post-apocalypse society; I know which one I'd rather (have my kids) live in.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley