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Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans As Antarctic Ice Melts
mdsolar (1045926) writes "The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday. The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis."
Chicken Little because it isn't going to happen in your lifetime?
I don't get it. This is happening.
Well, let's find out if that's actually true. Here's a math problem: The salinity of the ocean is 3.5%, and the ocean has an average depth of 3700 meters. If enough fresh water is added to the ocean to increase its depth by 3 meters, what is the new salinity of the ocean?
(Answer: 3.5%, i.e. not significantly different from before.)
So what do you want to do about it? We live in the real world, most of us in elective democracies where any politician that purposes a reduction in the standard of living will quickly find himself out of a job. Green energy doesn't scale and nuclear is a bad word, so where do you propose we get the gigajoules needed to both run Western civilization and bring the third world out of poverty?
The climate change crowd never has a good answer for this question. Thankfully we're an adaptable species, arguably the most adaptable ever to live on the blue marble. I think we'll manage just fine.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
comments like these.
Well yes, that's how it works. Flamebait gets modded as flamebait. If you find that all the posts like this one are being modded similarly, it just means that the modding isn't some statistical outlier and that the masses have a consensus for what they consider "flamebait".
*cough* *cough*
I didn't know global warming only affected air temps...?
Do you have any problem with the fact that some time in the distant future, the sun will stop shining? Maybe 5 billion years from now? No problem?
Okay, how about the fact that rivers change course? The Mississippi might have already switched to the Atchafalaya, if not for our meddling. We don't want New Orleans made useless. No problem with that either?
Then, what of the fact that large and powerful corporations lie, and engage in propaganda campaigns? You know, like Big Tobacco did? And like Wall Street did not too long ago with home mortgages? And like Big Oil does now? Big Oil lies about a lot of things, like the safety of offshore oil drilling. An accident like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill wasn't supposed to happen. When it did, they kept right on lying, about the rate of the leak and the amount of damage it was doing. Are we still okay here? Corporations routinely tell self serving lies, agreed? And surely you see that, whether or not Climate Disruption is real, Big Oil is highly motivated to be dismissive of warnings about it. If Climate Disruption is real and a huge problem, and Big Oil knows it, would they attempt to distract and deceive the public with propaganda campaigns? Yes, yes, they would. Still with me, I hope?
Now let's look at the other side. Either a) scientists are right and Climate Disruption is real, happening right now, and will cause huge problems. Or b) scientists are united in a big conspiracy to lie about Climate Disruption because it gets them more grant money, or c) scientists are morons and are getting it all wrong. The trouble with b) and c) is that they are not at all credible. I hope no one seriously credits c), it's just too implausible. As for b), you do realize that the flow of grant money does not much depend on the subject matter. If anything, being forced to study and restudy the climate takes away money that could have been used for other science. The public has turned negative and cut back funding for all science, so I'd have to say the Great Conspiracy, if it exists, is not working and if anything is backfiring. And do you suppose smarties like scientists wouldn't see that? And if their main interest was grant money, wouldn't they change their tune to the nicey nicey good news the public seems to want? Why haven't they done so then? Why haven't they dropped this story of Climate Disruption like a radioactive spud, given the damage it's doing to scientific funding? Could it be because it's real, and scientists are honestly worried about it?
Also, don't you understand how competitive science can be? For the time being we're stuck with anti-competitive oligopolies in oil and banking and several other industries. But not in science. If a few scientists had good evidence that Climate Disruption was wrong, do you suppose they would keep quiet and maintain the front? No way! They'd all be scrambling to publish first. It'd be a bombshell, like figuring out how to build a usable quantum computer and breaking many and perhaps all of our public key encryption schemes.
As for the evidence you demand, the "large scale changes", you have only to open your eyes and admit that what's right in front of your nose is indeed exactly that. Just 180 years ago, atmospheric CO2 was about 280 ppm. Now it's 400ppm, certainly higher than it has been in nearly 1 million years, and probably higher than any level in the last 20 million years. That is a very fast change. We're seeing ocean acidification. And we are indeed seeing higher average temperatures. In recent years, we've had far more record highs than record lows. The Arctic Ice Cap is smaller than it has ever been in recorded history. Antarctic ice shelves such as Larson A and B have collapsed. How can you hear of such events and not think they are significant?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"