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Drones Over Greenland Give Insight To Pollution's Effects On Melting
merbs writes Thank glaciologist Jason Box for the Arctic bird's-eye view of one of the most serene, alien landscapes on the planet. Box spends much of his time in Greenland, where he uses drones to measure 'dark snow'—snow that has accumulated soot and dust, thanks to human activity—which absorbs more sunlight and melts faster. Drone photography, then, may hold the key to understanding just how fast Greenland is melting.
And you conveniently forgot to mention the 2% dimmer sun, the potential influence of different geography, the fact the Jurassic biodiversity was in fact much, much lower than the recent maximum until we started meddling with it, etc. etc.
Ezekiel 23:20
Makes me wonder if we can try to control the damage by shielding the drainage areas. Covering the whole ice sheet with mylar is obviously planetary engineering, but on a smaller scale, can you cover the lakes and get them to re-freeze? The lake has a lower albedo even than dirty snow, presumably. If you could re-freeze the water before it percolates down through the glacier, what would that do to the whole process?
I like to monitor the brown snow in the forest near my house. I have noticed that the deer and rabbit turds tend to collect more sunlight and cause the snow to melt around them. Porcupine turds tend to fall out of trees and usually embed themselves in the snow at a sufficient depth to prevent the sunlight from reaching them. Bird turds are generally whitish in color and do not attract sunlight and are therefore "turd neutral". Basically porcupines are good rabbits are bad and the leading cause of Turd Made Global Warming.If Exon or Bp will give me money I am sure I can prove rabbit turds are the leading cause of global warming not fossil fuels. In fact i am the leading Turd warming scientist in the universe.
And you conveniently forgot to mention that at current solar output and with current geography, we are in one of the coldest periods in the planet's history.
Surely you don't mean it would beat the Proterozoic glaciations? Unfortunately, our species didn't develop during those really hot periods, and I'm not sure I'm adventurous enough to wish for seven billion people to find out how we'd cope with that, even just biologically, much less economically.
Even if we could get CO2 concentrations up to 2000 ppm, we likely wouldn't be warming the planet to anywhere near where it used to be
That may not be necessary, even halfway towards how hot it used to be would be bad enough. No need to have polar temperatures of twenty degrees again - mostly because there'd only be one pole for people to live on, and most of the natural resources we need is still around the equator where few people would venture. (I wonder if there'd still be katabatic winds in Antarctica. That could get really interesting with higher energy levels in the system...)
Ezekiel 23:20
If you read the words of the actual scientists, rather than just the journalist headlines, you'll get a more balanced view. The whole point of the black snow project is to figure out how much albedo change there is, and what the different contributions from various causes are.
Where is your evidence that volcanic activity plays a major role ? And which active volcano is actually capable of spewing rocks and lava anywhere near Greenland ?
That's fascinating
Because oddly enough Greenland's albedo is pretty well measured by satellite
http://www.meltfactor.org/blog...
Interesting observation that black snow is 'thanks to human activity',
There are several potential explanations for what’s going on here. The most likely is that some combination of increasingly infrequent summer snowstorms, wind-blown dust, microbial activity, and forest fire soot led to this year’s exceptionally dark ice. A more ominous possibility is that what we’re seeing is the start of a cascading feedback loop tied to global warming.
This year, Greenland’s ice sheet was the darkest Box (or anyone else) has ever measured. Box gives the stunning stats: 'In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.' Perhaps coincidentally, 2014 will also be the year with the highest number of forest fires ever measured in Arctic.
Box’s findings are in line with recent research that shows the Arctic is in the midst of dramatic change.
A recent study has found that, as the Arctic warms, forests there are turning to flame at rates unprecedented in the last 10,000 years. This year, those fires produced volumes of smoke and soot that Box says drifted over to Greenland.
In total, more than 3.3 million hectares burned in Canada’s Northwest Territories alone this year—nearly 9 times the long term average—resulting in a charred area bigger than the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. That figure includes the massive Birch Creek Complex, which could end up being the biggest wildfire in modern Canadian history. In July, it spread a smoke plume all the way to Portugal. — http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
Whenever someone posts "did they think of [fill in some random thing] eh?" you're seeing the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
Watch this Heartland Institute video