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Greenland Is Getting Darker
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Greenland's white snow is getting darker. Scientists have generally attributed that darkening to larger, slightly less white snow grains caused by warmer temperatures. But researchers have found a new source of darkening taking hold: impurities in the snow. The new darkening effect could easily add 2 centimeters to the projections of 20 cm sea level rise by 2100—and perhaps more if impurity levels grow with time."
And Leon's Getting Larrrrrrrrrrrrger
Of course they will grow. As snow melts the impurities at the top get added to the impurities deeper in the snow.
The only thing that can reduce it is if the melt water floats/washes the impurities way.
As long as China insists on NOT using their pollution controls (they built them on new plants per the treaty with japan, but japan forgot to require china to turn them on; besides as we have seen with their money, they really do not care about treaties; only winning a cold war ), this pollution will continue.
And yes, the pollution really carries that far. 10-15% of the western America's pollution is from China.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
yeah, I hate science too. They try to force evolution, vaccines and all kinds of crap on us, but it is clear to me that we two understands this much better than they do.
I am 200m above sea level.
Are you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... when do we rename it Dark Greenland?
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
As an Ohioan, allow me to say, fuck you.
Scientists have generally attributed that darkening to larger, slightly less white snow grains caused by warmer temperatures.
Actually I cannot believe that scientists are that stupid. Maybe they should visit here in Winnipeg Canada where we see this every year from the tonnes of sand they put on our streets in the winter. As warmer temps rise the snow banks go from white piles to brown/grey mud piles and as more snow melts the darker it gets and the faster it melts.
No wonder people doubt climate change when scientists say things like this.
The only thing that can reduce it is if the melt water floats/washes the impurities way.
Actual in 90% of the time this is not the case, we get rain in the spring with the piles of mud and all it does is causes the snow pack to compress more (unless the snow pack is already compressed).
Try looking up albedo, then performing some calculations to figure out how changes in the albedo changes changes the local temperature. Finally use that change in temperature to figure out how much ice will melt. While your results won't be as good as those produced by experienced research scientists, the basics are well within the grasp of someone with a high school education. Indeed, it is a common exercise for first year students in the physical sciences.
Once you've done that, you'll be better equipped to assess whether or not this is a climate lie.
So basically Americans are self-entitled douchebags who don't give a rats ass about the rest of the world.
And since the prevailing opinion in the US is that as long as some greedy asshole is making a profit, it's all good, and since Americans are making sure profits are entrenched in international law ...
American ideology is pretty much destroying the environment, and every economy in the world.
From this, we conclude Americans are either imbeciles, or the actual enemy of the entire world.
Fuck America.
would get an extremely prolonged growing season
Except for the part in the middle of the summer where the heat kills off all your corn, so you get two short growing seasons, and shorter fall/winter growing seasons. Enjoy your stunted corn and tomato-sized jack-o-lanterns.
The chronically uninformed and uninformable* will find some way to deny this is happening.
* - people who feel that their ignorance outweighs the knowledge of any scientist and so nobody with an IQ over 125 has anything to tell them.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Cannot figure out if you're being serious or not ..
Am fairly sure no-one is spreading sand across Greenland, in the same way they do on the streets of Winnipeg Canada [sic].
Cool.
Problem is, the jury is still out on whether I may shoot the coast dwellers when they come crawling upwards.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The measured rate of rise has been averaged out at 1.1 millimeters per year, so who in their right mind with the credentials to back it up would predict 20cm by 2100? Desperate people trying to keep the funding going and con people in to dumping billions on the study and "solution" to it. With all the money that has been spent on global warming/climate change with little to no results do they think the American public will keep pushing billions their way with no results? The whole thing reminds me of a gambler that has "a sure thing" bet on some team or something.
Let's do a little math shall we? Maybe we should start by pointing out that in the metric system, you only have to multiply by 10 to change units. So ~100 years of 1.1mm = 11cm. Guess what? This is the correct order of magnitude. Now add in that the increase is accelerating somewhat and voila: 20cm! Now was that hard?
Perhaps if you were more desperate to get funding for your local school system to actually teach science and arithmetic instead of to take a few pennies away from researchers who are trying to save your butt, you could have worked this out for yourself instead of having to suck the wrong answer out of the Koch brothers' um...bodies.
Well China is number one in CO2 emissions but per capita you're correct the US is higher per capita than China in CO2 emissions. Now, GHG is one variable in the multidimensional entity you reference but also look at PM10 concentrations which really can screw up your health and surprisingly, Mongolia is the worst at 284, China 82, the US 18. But there are worse offenders such as Saudi Arabia 108, Botswana 199 and I was surprised to see the UAE at 132. Living in those places will definitely shorten your lifespan.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The Kamchatka peninsula in the far eastern Russia is a very active volcanic place. more interesting the dominant wind direction goes directly towards Greenland.
Nasa article with pictures of 4 Kamchatka volcanos erupting at the same time in 2013.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=80226
This article doesn't actually say when they started erupting. I'm having problems finding historic activity for those volcanos, but I know they were somewhat active during the Icelandic eruption in 2011 meaning they have been on and off for a noteworthy part of the 2009-2013 period where Greenland's reflection was studied, possibly more or less the entire time.
For some reason the article only mentions volcanic activity in Iceland.
Well, if you had RTFA instead of being a dork, you would have noted that they're blaming volcanic activity in Iceland as a contributing factor.
Or are you too dumb to read?
With all the money that has been spent on global warming/climate change with little to no results do they think the American public will keep pushing billions their way with no results
All that moneyspent on climate change? The fossil fuel industry receives more subsidies than renewables by a wide margin (70% of US energy subsidies goes to fossil fuels).
Maybe if we didn't give the fossil fuel industry hundreds of billions of dollars every year it would be easier to meet emission targets?
Enjoy your life, keep consuming faster and faster. Consume toxic plastic products that go in the landfill 6 months to a year after you buy them. Continue to consume as inefficiently as possible the last of the oil that makes everything in our modern society run including mechanical farm equipment, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizer. Buy a giant unsustainable house and fill it with crap that doesn't make you happy. Maybe someday you will burn that house and the crap in it to stay warm.
Global warming is just one of our problems. If we run out of coal and oil without a suitable replacement for most of us what happens next won't matter...
Oops, forgot to quote the figures
Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.
Mmmmmm stunted corn....
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Particulates from coal-burning, wildfires, dust storms, volcanoes, Etc all contribute to the darkening of the snow. This is true thruout the northern temperate and arctic areas, not just Greenland.
Did you actually read the wiki article to which you linked? As stated in TFA, "...many of the "subsidies" available to the oil and gas industries are general business opportunity credits, available to all US businesses." The value of subsidies specifically targeting fossil fuels is only a small fraction of the total subsidies received. If you take away the subsidies available to all businesses we can just lower emissions by crushing the economy at large. I'm sure Silicon Valley would love to see the R&D expense credit go away in the name of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies.
Right? Doesn't the moisture initially form around ash or a dust mote like with sand and a pearl?
As I said in a follow-up comment as I forgot to quote it first time:
Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.
Whatever the source of that money, we are currently spending over 5x more on fossil fuel than on renewables which makes the argument that we're spending a lot of money on renewables and not seeing much in return pretty moot.
Considering that the vast majority of this pollution comes from China, it shows that you are just a general idiot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...under "Even MORE of the sky is falling!"
News at 11.
-Styopa
Will they have to rename the country Dark-Greenland?
Melting snow freezes at night making a shiny reflective surface. Have they factored this into their estimates?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Well, since the last ice age it's something like 450 feet higher but since the Great Melt its been rising at a pretty steady rate. Certainly over the last several centuries it's been a fairly constant rise. Nothing to do with "AGW". It's just natural variation.
The primary cause of glaciers shrinking is particulates in the atmosphere. This has been reported many times, but it doesn't fit with the whole Global Warming sound bite so it's generally ignored.
And Florida would totally disappear! Anyone else feel like going out right now and lighting off a coal seam?
That's because you're a creationist
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I am 200m above sea level.
Are you?
The Dead Sea, yes.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Groucho
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Gives new meaning to the term "Stand Your Ground Law"
No. You can only shoot the ones that voted for AGW deniers, or didn't vote at all.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...IQ over 125 has anything to tell them.
IQ doesnt impress me - accident of birth like big tits. Just because someone scores well on a test that was designed to find deficiencies and was NEVER inteded as a measuring stick doesn't mean they are automatically correct.
What impresses me is years of study and data. And the cliimate scientists impress me.
Says the dude with a low IQ.
qatar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
china(nearly twice as much as the US)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's as if the earth never has experienced higher temperatures before and survived.
I don't think any scientist, or thoughtful person for that matter, questions whether the Earth will survive. Of course it will. Their real question is whether the changes will cause a great die off in humans and animals. Some animals will undoubtedly thrive in the new environment but humans, probably not so much.
people who understand the the amount of captured energy is going up?
and where do you get the 1.1 mm from?
http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...
"From 1950 to 2009, measurements show an average annual rise in sea level of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm per year, with satellite data showing a rise of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm per year from 1993 to 2009,[6] a faster rate of increase than previously estimated"
" With all the money that has been spent on global "
what do you mean all the money? hardly any has been spent dealing with the issue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But less than 0.3m in the last 3K years.
> Try looking up albedo
Sorry that's too sciency. Don't you have anything at the hurr-durr level?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
No wonder people doubt climate change when scientists say things like this..
I'm just guessing here based on nothing but a few decades of involvement in the scientific community, but I'd say it's pretty likely that a) the scientists in question have thought of your objection already and b) they have quantified the relative contributions from increased grain size vs increased dark pollutants.
What would be incredibly stupid is assuming that people who study this stuff professionally can be out-thought by a random Internet commenter who has just encountered the question for the first time.
But just in case, let me ask you: what is the quantitative relationship between grain size and reflectivity of snow? Please respond with a graph or formula. You must have access to this information to judge the relative importance of grain size vs pollutant cover, and it would be a positive contribution to this discussion to share it.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Well, If someone can't admit there's a trend at all, they certainly can't admit it's accellerating, even at a very conservative rate that only leads to converting 11 cm. to 20 cm. in a hundred years. There's actually nothing likely about such a slow exponential growth. Positive feedback processes that tend to such low growth rates are usually inhibited by some transient factor, which eventually stops restraining them:
Mandatory Car Analogy: For example, a company trying to ramp up production of new cars sees a low growth rate when they have to make a design change during the model year, but they learn to stop making design changes too often. If positive feedback loops are larger than such negatives, longer term predictions are always underpredictions, that is, they assume the existing feedbacks won't change much, but a better prediction would take into account we have reasons to think some things will change. In this analogy, human ability means that the process controllers will very likely learn to not make changes during a model year, because it slows desired increases in production. Fixing one such problem counts as applying positive feedback and if the car maker's production people keep learning more about how to make more cars faster, this counts as a positive feedback loop for as long as it lasts. Here, the positive feedback loop is still limited by total demand for cars - there's no point in being able to make more cars than you can sell.
More direct example: For AGW, plant growth from increased CO2 is a negative feedback loop that tends to restrain CO2 buildup by sequestering it in living plants, but the increase in O2 levels that also goes with plant growth increases forest fire risk and damage, and puts a cap on how much forests can grow, so the negative feedback loop may be eventually overwhelmed by a positive feedback that in theory can dwarf its effects. The total area for plants to live, world wide, also puts a cap on the growth of the negative feedback process, as does the total available (for each) of free Nitrogen, Phosporus, and other materials needed for plant growth. Notice we should treat space available as an area and not a volume - plants grow only in the top 100 meters or so of the sea and on land surfaces, and get their energy by the surface area they present to the sun, and so people tend to mislead themselves if they think of the oceans as a volume that can absorb Carbon by this method instead, or that trees can just grow taller or denser without limits. When the ocean as a whole volume directly absorbs Carbon, that's called becoming seltzer water, which has its own limits, and wouldn't be goof for us if it did happen - it's hardly a fix for our problems.,
From what I've seen, just about all the proposed positive and negative feedbacks on CO2 levels are such that the negative ones have relatively low caps, by which I mean they will either only work for a historically short time or just so long as the world remains below certain concentrations of CO2. The only negative loops anybody, seems to think are real*, that endure, are the mechanisms nature now uses, such as sequestering carbon in plant matter, or in calcium carbonate made by diatoms, and similar, and these all have limits, and to make things worse, are all being negatively impacted by human action. The new Cosmos video series, for example, shows just how much calcium carbonate sequestration would have to grow to keep up with human trends, and just how unlikely that is. At this point, you either need to have the opinion that the whole thing is a fake, or admit that 20 cm. is a very optimistic lowball estimate. Climatologists are probably trying to avoid appearing sensationalistic.
* To be fair, some people actually think God will just step in and work a miracle somehow, every time it's needed, which certainly counts as a negative feedback loop large and enduring enough to fix the problem. But if they aren't relying on that, what's their excuse?
Who is John Cabal?
I was just picturing jets spraying out heavy metals and nanochips and radioactive compounds, and then the HAARP broadcasts frying all those nanochips, and so on, and thinking "That's the stupidest conspiracy evah!"
Who is John Cabal?
That's because you're a creationist
Nuh-uh! The Earth was hotter and had more CO2 when the dinosaurs were around, literally thousands of years ago. The climate change didn't kill off the dinosaurs (hello, Sparrow!), so why should it kill off us?
I'm tired of seeing all these BS claims of satellite data from 1960 or so on. Show us the data from the 1920s! Why do they always cut off satellite data before 1957? It's a conspiracy funded by big science and their unlimited funds, grad students living the high life on "Top" Ramen and other exotic imported foods. Buy American at Walmart, ya commies! :p
If you believe in global warming, you should start moving upwards already anyway... Who's left at sea level when the water comes clearly doesn't believe in GW.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And yet if we don't control our CO2 emissions the end result will be an increased strain on our civilization which is likely to cause more wars anyway. For instance one factor in the Syrian conflict is the drought that Syria has been going through for the last 3 years. The chances are good that global warming is part of the Syrian drought. The effects of global warming won't always be directly visible as a cause of things like this but it's likely to be a factor and it's likely to get worse as global warming marches on.
Keep in mind the article is talking about Greenland only. The 20cm figure doesn't include expected melt from Antarctica and other glacial sources or the expected rise from thermal expansion.
Well, if you had RTFA instead of being a dork, you would have noted that they're blaming volcanic activity in Iceland as a contributing factor. Or are you too dumb to read?
According to the AC above, apparently he is. I will miss Slashdot when it goes to the dark side (ie beta).
IQ doesnt impress me - accident of birth like big tits.
Even if it does not impress you. it should not convince you that the holder of that IQ has nothing to say.
As for the other accident of birth you referred to, some owners of those are extremely smart too.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
And yet if we don't control our CO2 emissions the end result will be an increased strain on our civilization which is likely to cause more wars anyway.
Pure rampant speculation without even any historical evidence to back it up.
For instance one factor in the Syrian conflict is the drought that Syria has been going through for the last 3 years. The chances are good that global warming is part of the Syrian drought.
Droughts have occurred since before mankind existed. More rampant speculation with NO evidence.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Depends on who you make plow it.
As someone who lives in an OH border state, let me say fuck everybody in OH. If you would just stay in your state everyone would be much happier.
Most wars are ultimately about resources. The changes caused by global warming are subtle enough that someone like you can easily argue they are natural occurrences in the short run but as time marches on they will become more and more obvious. Expansion of the Hadley Cells and more desertification in the descending legs (where Syria is located) is an expected result of global warming.
Most wars are ultimately about resources. The changes caused by global warming are subtle enough that someone like you can easily argue they are natural occurrences in the short run but as time marches on they will become more and more obvious. Expansion of the Hadley Cells and more desertification in the descending legs (where Syria is located) is an expected result of global warming.
And most people killed by governments are killed BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT, not by war. There are plenty of reasons for war, and, frankly, many of the large ones were NOT about resources, but caused by nationalism or religious intolerance.
But, hey, keep on preaching the global warming alarmism. It's most likely to lead to either war, or some country deciding the need to eliminate a chunk of their own population. That's the path "you're not allowed to use fossil fuels or nuclear" will lead to, as it reduces resources for EVERYONE.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Nationalism or religious intolerance is the excuse you hear but more often that's a cover for resource competition. It's a lot easier for demagogues to whip up the population when resources are short.
Energy is a fungible resource. It's not necessary to produce it with fossil fuels or nuclear power (and I'm not anti-nuke but it is one of the more expensive ways to produce power). Getting off fossil fuels may necessitate some changes to our lifestyle but I don't believe it has to be any worse than we have now, just different.
Most economic analyses I've see show it will be much more expensive in the long run to not do something about global warming than it will be to do something about it.
I think we can factor in the cost of the Iraq war as an Oil subsidy, and the cost of the Afghanistan war as a subsidy to a gas company. The day after the Production Sharing Agreements were signed in Iraq with the same deal the oil companies had before Saddam kicked them out was the day we agreed to "stand down when they stood up."
If we look at more of our wars of choice as methods of reducing the costs of resources, the subsidy to energy companies would be in the trillions. Nobody is invading nations to steal their sunlight yet.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Call me when it starts to increase the amount of Magenta
-- 29A the number of the Beast