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The Arctic Sets Yet Another Record Low Maximum Extent (nsidc.org)
Layzej writes: Arctic sea ice was at a record low maximum extent for the second straight year, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA. This year's maximum extent is 1.12 million square kilometers below the 1981 to 2010 average of 15.64 million square kilometers. Ice extent increases through autumn and winter, and the maximum typically occurs in mid-March. Sea ice then retreats through spring and summer and shrinks to its smallest or minimum extent typically by mid-September. Ice melt in the region is reducing the transport of warm southern waters brought north by the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). "Some studies suggest that decreased heat flux of warm Atlantic waters could lead to a recovery of all Arctic sea ice in the near future," said NSIDC senior research scientist Julienne Stroeve. "I think it will have more of a winter impact and could lead to a temporary recovery of winter ice extent in the Barents and Kara seas."
The way this is explained isn't entirely clear to your average folk. I suspect folks are going to think that the fact that arctic ice isn't decreasing is a sign that everything is alright and that global warming is not a problem but it is much bigger than that. Each year arctic ice the size of a country melts in a cycle that refreezes in the winter. The cold freshwater melt is heavier than the surrounding seawater and sinks straight to the bottom starting many of the worldwide ocean currents. If this cycle gets disrupted or changed in some way it has a massive effect on worldwide climate. These currents drive many weather patterns such as rain, hurricanes, dry spells and heatwaves and cold snaps. What this article is suggesting is that the warm currents from equator might not reach the arctic resulting in the arctic getting colder and the equator getting hotter which will inevitably change entirely how our regional climate works. When something like this happens it results in entire weather systems such as monsoon rains which we're use to moving to different places on the planet. This usually isn't a good thing.
Natural planetary and solar cycles. Read the NIPCC reports, the suppressed scientists. They went through the IPCC reports paragraph by paragraph and showed why their interpretation of scientific research is wrong from cover to cover. Instead of having an intelligent scientific debate, the left just ignores it and resorts to personal attacks. Before you dismiss NIPCC as being funded by big oil, note that big oil such as Exxon funds leftist green initiatives.
The problem isn't the science behind warming it's the ridiculous solutions that are being proposed.
Kill the ban on breeder reactors in the United States and license French reactor designs. Could be done in 10-15 years and cut our carbon output 50%. Unfortunately there is no political will to do what needs to be done.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Sure and Jesus very well may come back, and soon. But that's not exactly a strategy, is it?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem isn't the science behind warming it's the ridiculous solutions that are being proposed.
The problem is that half the people are denying the science, so we can't even start a proper discussion about any proposal.
"Billions is hyperbole".
Well, no.
a) where are most metropolitan areas located? On rivers or oceans. NYC's talking huge seawalls, Miami's trying to figure out if it will exist above water in a decade or two, and this is true around the world.
b) It all affects the climate. Note that a) Syria's several years into the worst draught in many, many years. A large part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over control of water. And then there's Phoenix and LA.... and the California Central Valley, that's drawing huge amounts of water, and the aquifers are running out, as they are in the midwest. You can't conceive of actual famine; too many in the world can.
mark
Most sane people agree that climate change is a thing. I certainly do. Ice core samples show it rather convincingly. I'm also mostly fine with our recent sample collection though I think the datasets aren't as good as some people believe. They rarely are for large scale projects, but still there's a natural bias towards thinking your collection methods are always better than they really are. Third party auditing to try to correct bias gets expensive and politics get involved as well.
On the other hand, there's legitimate issues. There's a very vocal component of climate change that are constant Apocalypse callers. You would be a good example. "Cries of the billions who will suffer." Folks have a hard time taking serious action based on this especially when we've been hearing "end of humanity within five years" for over a decade.
The other hand is that there's no good supplied solutions. I mean, concrete realistic options that have a full roadmap, reasonably accurate cost projections and acceptably accurate levels of risk and mitigation. If it costs $10B to fix 80% of the problem, but $10T to fix 99.99% of the problem, well... Maybe we should explore that 80% solution, as it's much more realistic to implement. Any solution that is too expensive or too restrictive simply won't be implemented, because human nature and common sense. Humans will simply not voluntarily remove 90% of earth's population or go back to living in yurts. I place myself in that bracket. I think it's an issue that is meaningful, if not overstated by some, that I'd be willing to pay if it could be mitigated in a meaningful but not ruinous process.
Think the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) ban. We paid an economic price for less efficient or more expensive alternatives, but it did the job well enough. That's not strictly a climate change thing. I've seen plenty of projects were people were shocked that a business or government unit didn't want to spend tens of millions of dollars for vague promises with absolutely no numbers backing them up.
"Billions who will suffer"? This sort of histrionic exaggeration is why no one takes you seriously.
It seems odd to me that anyone could believe that nobody would suffer if climate changes.
You can argue that climate isn't changing, although you'd be holding the short end of the evidence stick in that one. You could argue that some people will also benefit from climate change, and that'd even be unquestionably true. But you can't argue that rainfall can shift as much as climate models are predicting without billions of people suffering, both directly from bad harvests and indirectly from the destabilization of the countries they live in.
If you want to see what that hypothetical situation would look like, look at Syria. The Assads have been ruthlessly but effectively putting down Islamist uprisings for decades, so what was different in 2011 that allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to metastasize into ISIL? An internal climate refugee crisis touched off by four years of drought-ravaged harvests and a spike in international commodity prices. Across Syria 160 agricultural villages were depopulated, and in some provinces 85% of the livestock perished. This provided ISIL with an army of angry, hungry, unemployed young men ripe for radicalization.
So really your strongest argument here would be that climate is not changing at all -- that the Syrian was an anomalous weather event and that there won't be more of them in the future (as the models are predicting).
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...Antarctic ice has been setting maximums.
Even more curious (to me) are the different responses:
- Arctic ice is shrinking: CLEARLY THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING.
- Antarctic ice is growing: (shrug) we really don't have any idea why this is happening I guess we'll just have to figure it out (shrug, again)
http://www.nasa.gov/content/go...
When the "record" is only 35 years, 'record setting' really isn't that big a deal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
The opening of the Northeastern passage? A herald of climatological disaster? Well, not so much:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
-Styopa
And quite what are those people saying, for instance? Because there's shockingly little air-time ever given to that.
Let's say we tax all cars over a certain engine size, applicable to the US. Will that reduce emissions by any noticeable amount? Will that amount recede the ice-caps by anything significantly measurable? Because, pretty much, as far as I can tell the answer is no.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I'm also quite serious. As someone of scientific mind, "What's happening?" is a good question, but not one millionth as interesting as "What does that mean?" and "What are the alternatives?"
What, precisely, are the listed actions that - if we impose them immediately, world-wide, without anyone trying to find a way around them, would reduce the danger and NOT introduce more problems (e.g. if we taxed ALL cars, would that push people into poverty and/or would it mean that people instead started overcrowding the train systems?). And how feasible is that of ever happening?
Stop using oil?
Start taxing it heavily?
Start rolling, scheduled power-cuts to reduce usage (like the UK did in the 1970's?)?
Stop the sale of cars, appliances, etc. that are less than super-efficient?
And how long, if we do all that, do we have to do it for? Centuries? Permanently? Until we spot a difference?
And, playing absolute devil's advocate, what if we notice NO difference? What if we ban oil-use and nothing changes and we continue to flood the world? What did we gain by doing so? Could we have predicted that? What other mechanisms could be responsible.
Sorry, but it's really not as simple as "stop buying SUV's". The engine sizes in Europe are tiny compared to the US, so we're already effectively doing what a ban on SUV's in America would do. And it's always been that way. So do we spot differences in emissions? Not really, our scientists are still saying the same as the US scientists. And while China is just burning coal like there's no tomorrow, would/could anything we do actually make a difference if they don't also co-operate?
I'm being serious here, and have had this conversation many dozens of times online.
I believe you. NOW WHAT?
"Billions who will suffer"? This sort of histrionic exaggeration is why no one takes you seriously.
It seems odd to me that anyone could believe that nobody would suffer if climate changes.
The fact that you jump from "billions" to "nobody" is, essentially, what "histrionic exaggeration" means. There's a huge fucking amount of numbers between 0 and >2,000,000,000.
Just pull out your calculator, for god's sake. There are 7 billions people on the planet at the moment. The odds that at least 25% of them will die (i.e. "billions") because of a projected global increase of 4 Celsius in temperature over a century would require a lot more explanation and hard data than what has been provided so far to be considered anything than ludicrous. Just look at a fucking map and see where the bulk of those 7 billions people live, how the fuck is such a slow change supposed to kill them all?
This is the kind of bullshit number that people make up as a scare tactic, like"1/3 of women will be raped in their lifetime". It doesn't help take the climate change proponents seriously, it actually make them look like liars to those who are not convinced that there's a problem.
This kind of tactic is harmful to the cause. The more you try to scare people with end of the world scenarios, the less they listen because this has been tried many times before (acid rains, ozone layer, GMO, etc.) and the world did not end. Only people who respond well to that FUD approach is people who are already convinced, which means it's totally useless.
Here's the solution:
1) rebuild the credibility of climate scientists by providing clear, simple data that isn't presented in an alarmist way
2) stop saying "ample evidence" or "the science is there" or other generic label that may look like you don't know the fuck what the numbers are, otherwise the other side uses the same and nobody knows what the fuck is going on
3) crunch numbers to show the economical impact of climate change, not just the "billions of death and mayhem and suffering and crying babies" to make the dialogue more inclusive
4) vote for people who have a balanced, pro-environment agenda, as opposed to shallow rockstars, right/left extremists or obvious frauds
5) vote with your dollars when it comes to heavy polluters (computers, cars, etc)
It's not sexy, not cool, not spectacular, it's just fucking common sense, and that's probably why it's not happening. People want drama, so that's what you get.
lucm, indeed.
LOL. Your own source shows that CO2 follows temperature rise. They then go on to rationalize that the CO2 rise causes further temperature rise, which isn't any different than claiming that since you came after Jack the Ripper, you're here because of him.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
World bank projections in agricultural productivity in 2050 show reductions in productivity across the Middle East, Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Australia and large swaths of North America. This takes into account longer growing seasons and places where rainfall increases. Russia, for example, does extremely well under the warming scenario with longer growing seasons and increased rainfall in currently arid areas.
The US and Australia being rich countries with relatively low birth rates will be able to import food from places like Russia. But Africa, which current sports a population of 1.1 billion, will have a population of two billion and less food production to feed them. Large areas of India are expected to receive much less rainfall and to be less productive. India currently has a population of 1.2 billion, expected to grow to 1.5 billion.
Now everyone in these places won't be suffering. India currently boasts a middle class larger than the US middle class. They'll continue to be able to buy food. But they have an enormous underclass who are already living in conditions that are very precarious.
This is not an alarmist picture. Simple math gets us to the 10^9 benchmark in South Asia alone. That's should be alarming. But it's not hopeless. Even if we can't reduce the rate of the climate change we expect to take place, there are other things we can do, like develop drought-resistant crops, better agricultural technology, etc. The "billions suffering" isn't much of a stretch provided we assume we do nothing to avoid that happening.
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