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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."
Fuck all this Prius hippie shit. I'm buying a Hummer.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Chicken Little because it isn't going to happen in your lifetime?
I don't get it. This is happening.
Just kidding... the Antarctic ice has been melting for decades. More precisely, the mass of the old, thick land ice is decreasing due to rising temperatures, but the surface area of the short-lived, thin sea ice has been increasing, partly due to decreased salinity in the Southern Ocean because the land ice is melting. Overall, the Antarctic has been losing ice at an accelerating rate as temperatures have continued to increase.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.)
NYC, the new Venice!
California should build MASSIVE quantities of desalanization plants along the coast. So that we can keep the oceans properly salined. While extract massive amounts of water to turn the entire southwest into a lush green sub-tropic region, and keep sea levels in check. Start now!!!
99.9%+ of the people alive today will not live to see the crisis, or even live long enough to know whether or not the crisis will actually occur.
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.
You're probably trolling, but here goes:
Any continent will rise if the mass on top is reduced, because the mantle acts as a liquid on geological time scales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound)
However, it's not the loss of mass or height of the antartcic that is causing sea levels to rise, but the movement of water from "long term storage" on top of the antarctic continent into the ocean. What the container does after the contents have been released is immaterial.
(for the arctic ice it is different because it is all floating, so melting it won't do anything to sea levels (it will to salinity and hence ocean currents) - and greenland has a lot of land ice, of course)
It's not "waterfront property" that anybody is worried about. It's the fact that a very large number of the world's current cities happen to be located near the water for historical reasons (major trading hubs built around ports for oceangoing ships.) The utter annihilation of those cities is a huge economic problem.
And flooding Death Valley with seawater doesn't create a single acre of arable land. You can't farm jack $hit out of soil contaminated with salt. The shores of the Persian gulf (nor, for that matter the shores of southern CA) don't support much in the way of farms, despite the large body of water next door.
That's the surface area of ice, not the amount of ice, which is measured by volume or mass. If you look at the mass of ice in the Antarctic, you can see it's been melting for decades at an accelerating rate. Funny how the real facts get in the way of a good misinformation campaign.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Do some reading about base load power, then contemplate the fact that the United States consumed 3,866,000,000,000 kilowatt hours (that's 13,917,600,000,000,000,000 joules, if you were wondering) of electricity in 2012. Since nuclear fission is politically explosive, explain how you propose to generate a sizable fraction of that energy (never mind all of it) without relying on carbon based sources. Limit yourself to technologies that are actually here, not distant fantasies like nuclear fusion.
After you do that, you can further depress yourself with the realization that I'm only talking about electricity. The actual energy budget of the United States is far higher when you account for the transportation sector and other non-electrical needs. And we're only talking about the United States here, one country out of ~190, with 4.5% of the global population. The rest of the World aspires to our standard of living, and they're not going to abandon that goal because of a distant and hard to quantify threat.
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".
You mean like maybe north of Canada or in the Bering Sea where there is so much ice the last few years that boats can't follow their normal schedules and are shut down for months at a time because of the ice? But I never see an alarming article about MORE ice. Always less.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yeah! Just like we adapted when the dinosaurs died out and we could no longer ride them.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
*cough* *cough*
How hard can it be when the summary has but a single link:
"Scientists said the ice sheet was not melting because of warmer air temperatures, but rather because of the relatively warm water"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
we have no idea what might happen. Its possible that the ice may reform there or somewhere else
Actually, thanks to science we do have an idea!
"at this point, a decrease in the melt rate back to earlier levels would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new paper in Science. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.” The basic problem is that much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits below sea level in a kind of bowl-shaped depression the earth. As Dr. Mercer outlined in 1978, once the part of the ice sheet sitting on the rim of the bowl melts and the ice retreats into deeper water, it becomes unstable and highly vulnerable to further melting."
We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit.
Which won't change a damned thing, because the third world is not going to meekly sit back and accept their current level of development. The United States could literally cease to exist tomorrow and the freed energy wouldn't be enough to bring the billions in the third world out of poverty. You can't even convince Westerners to waste less, but you think you're going to convince those in the third world to meekly accept their current lot in life?
First we need less babies.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of freedom. That's literally the most personal decision you can make, it's not something that can be imposed from the top down in our societies. A civilization without our reverence for individual liberty tried it and arguably failed, or at the very least created all manner of unintended consequences with deleterious outcomes that still haven't been fully quantified.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Once again, everyone uses their own biased sources. You're both wrong. The only ice that matters is the ice that was ON LAND before and is now IN THE OCEAN and bellow the water line. Does melting ice in a glass of water raise the level of water in the glass? No. Put a new ice cube in, does the water level raise equivalent to the volume of ice? No. It raises equivalent to the volume of ice bellow the water line.
What volume of ice was their on the land 100 years ago? No one knows. There's no way to find out. Probably more than there is now. The truth is probably more on the side of people concerned about climate change and less on the side of the people who deny it. That said, things aren't nearly as bad as the alarmists would have you think. This is something we should address, but stupid knee jerk reactions based on made up science are what alienates people and gives the deniers an excuse to stall and do nothing. Lets have real facts, and common sense so we can address a growing problem that will hurt our great grandchildren.
I have never even seen Antarctica, and I don't recall anyone talking about it twenty years ago. If 97% of geographers say Antarctica exists, I'd just like to point out that I've driven 50 miles in every direction but up and haven't seen no sign at all. And I'm pretty sure that my brother's boss once heard that geographers are telling us about this mythical Antarctica to take money from people like me and give it to themselves.
No continent I've ever seen is going to make me worry about sea-level rise, so keep yer commeenistic plots off of Slashdot.
Right. Because the national debt is equivalent to climate change.
Also, as has been pointed out, your contention is completely unsupported by reality. But nice try. Maybe you should take your own advice about not being a "partisan pawn"?
Except the ice sheet is not at float eqilibrium.
If the ice was at float equilibrium its melting would then take up less space. But because the ice sheet is stacked so high above sea level the floor of the glacier is grounded there is much more ice there than the float equilibrium point. There is a lot more ice there than the water it displaces. Your argument does not cover that point.
You know this whole 'back in the seventies the scientists we're all about global cooling' has been debunked so many times that it makes you really look moronic to post it yet again.
There was no "global cooling" phenomenon being widely touted in the 1970's. That's a myth. The climate change report recently issued http://nca2014.globalchange.go... addresses that among other things. Global warming and this particular problem of glacier melting in Antarctica were both called out in the 1970's though. According to the NY Time reporting the second case - Antarctica is related to a variety of factors in addition to global warming. There are no big bucks to be made being an environmentalist. Provide some names of a few folks who became billionaires from pushing environmental protection. There are trillions being made producing fossil fuels.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
" but we'll survive it. "
based on..what? what happens at 500 ppm? 600 ppm? 1000 ppm?
What happen when the sea temperature is too warm to support the lowest part of the food chain?
250 - 350 ppm – background (normal) outdoor air level - OOPS past that
350- 1,000 ppm - typical level found in occupied spaces with good air exchange.
1,000 – 2,000 ppm - level associated with complaints of drowsiness and poor air.
2,000 – 5,000 ppm – level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.
Yeah, we kind of need an 'aggressive' plan to deal with this now.
We need to be build large solar furnace, re-engineering the electrical grid, get coastal cities on board with moving inward with time, we need thorium reactors, we need to put tough regulation and taxes on vehicles.
We need to get some sort of solar system on every house. Panels, some sort of shingle what ever. All this take time, so we need to start now. The longer we wait, the more we pay.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The national debt is a misnomer unlike climate change. Climate change involves real consequences. The national debt is a financial residual value that has no economic meaning in real terms. It's not the national debt that is important, it's inflation that we should be monitoring. As it stands we actually need more inflation today as well as more government spending.
For your information, "Clinton's surplus" was because of Republican Congress that didn't let him spend much money. It also was only possible because of the DotCom Bubble of the 1990s. Once that burst during Clinton's final year in office, the surplus vanished.
Now if your post had contained actual information, instead of made-up stuff.
CBO analysis shows that despite all the economic events that transpired after Bush's election, the U.S. Federal Budget would have remained in surplus (more than a trillion dollars) right up until the time of the Bush economic meltdown that began in 2007.
Legislative changes - the bills the Republicans passed and Bush signed - spent the entire surplus, and trillions more.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
In a place where the temperature is always well below freezing, "global warming" is not going to melt all the ice. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem elsewhere. Even if there were no net ice loss on earth, if we're losing ice in places we need it (such as mountain ranges that supply people with drinking water), and accumulate it in places that have no humans at all (Antarctica), that's an enormous problem.
But hey, let's confuse land ice and sea ice and create doubt about the actual science by cherry picking data, spreading half-truths and general misinformation.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
So it's an accurate model of policy making, then? Campaign contributions make for wonderful scalpels.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.