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NASA Study Shows Net Gains For Antarctic Ice (google.com)
A widely circulated NASA study published in the Journal of Glaciology, and reported by UPI, says that Antarctic ice has measurably thickened in recent decades, a conclusion at odds with earlier findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "which in 2013 suggested gains were not keeping up with losses." The new study ... doesn't totally undermine the handful of studies showing significant glacier, ice sheet and sea ice shrinkage. Instead, if offers evidence of previously unaccounted gains. ... The new tallies reveal an annual net gain of 112 billion tons between 1992 and 2001. Annual gains of 82 billion tons were observed between 2003 and 2008.
Antarctic ice has measurably thickened in recent decades, a conclusion at odds with earlier findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
That sounds like an...
*sunglasses*
inconvenient truth.
Yeaaaaahh!
Really? Because you said, 'Ice loss in the Antarctic is causing sea level rise.' That was a big one, as far as why and how everybody is going to die.
Perhaps I exaggerate your position slightly, but is it really 'just news?' It changes nothing? I guess it wouldn't, if saving the planet from the deadly effects of AGW was never the goal in the first place.
That science is SETTLED my friend.
In science, the only things that are "settled" are things that have been unequivocally disproven. Things like Phlogiston, humors, etc.
Simply because a significant number (or even a majority (or even ALL)) of current scientists in the field agree that *this* is the One True Way, doesn't mean that they're correct.
Note: This is NOT the same thing as saying that they're wrong. Nor that the ideas they're espousing are worthless.
The basic message is "we should leave the planet better off than we found it". Which is a good and admirable thing.
The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it. And some of the options being put forth are fairly shady, dangerous, or just flat-out unacceptable. Sometimes two or three of those at once.
Sending everyone to live in caves, killing off a significant chunk of the world population, or destroying the world energy economy fall under the "all three" category.
The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.
Basically, I foresee nothing real being done about it for a long, LONG time while vast sums of money are spent uselessly and people wrangle over "The Right Way".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses
NASA seems to think it came from NASA. Maybe I should take their word over yours?
Could you expand on why "biodiversity" ought to be the goal? If I had to pick something, I'd have picked "comfort of humans" or, perhaps, the humans' longevity or something like that.
Why do you pick "biodiversity"?
Maximizing biodiversity is a decent goal to have high on your list. The more organisms there are, the more resistant a given system is likely to be. If you've got one species of tree in a forest and beetles come and wipe out that species, you're in trouble. If you've got high biodiversity, you're more likely to have less trees that will be affected, plus a better chance that there's somebody that calls the beetle dinner.
Why should humans care about resilience? We derive a lot of services from natural systems. Protection from extreme events (flood, fire, insects, etc); diverse food stocks; tourism; unique chemicals for pharmaceuticals; groundwater purification; local weather stabilization; and so on. Even if you don't "like" nature, you derive a tremendous number of services from it. The best way to maintain longterm comfort/longevity of humans is to make sure those systems continue to be able to perform those services.