Slashdot Mirror
NASA: Arctic Sea Ice 2nd-Lowest On Record (earthsky.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from EarthSky: NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said on September 15, 2016 that summertime Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum on September 10. With fall approaching and temperatures in the Arctic dropping, it's unlikely more ice will melt, and so the 2016 Arctic sea ice minimum extent will likely be tied with 2007 for the second-lowest yearly minimum in the satellite record. Satellite data showed this year's minimum at 1.60 million square miles (4.14 million square km). NASA said in a statement: "Since satellites began monitoring sea ice in 1978, researchers have observed a steep decline in the average extent of Arctic sea ice for every month of the year [...] The sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas helps regulate the planet's temperature, influences the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, and impacts Arctic communities and ecosystems. Arctic sea ice shrinks every year during the spring and summer until it reaches its minimum yearly extent. Sea ice regrows during the frigid fall and winter months, when the sun is below the horizon in the Arctic." The NASA/NSIDC statement explained why the melt of Arctic sea ice surprised scientists in 2016. For one thing, it changed pace several times: "The melt season began with a record low yearly maximum extent in March and a rapid ice loss through May. But in June and July, low atmospheric pressures and cloudy skies slowed down the melt. Then, after two large storms went across the Arctic basin in August, sea ice melt picked up speed through early September." NASA posted an animation on YouTube that "shows the evolution of the Arctic sea ice cover from its wintertime maximum extent, which was reached on Mar. 24, 2016, and was the lowest on record for the second year in a row, to its apparent yearly minimum, which occurred on Sept. 10, 2016, and is the second lowest in the satellite era."
The GOP, the oil industry, and The Donald ALL agree!
Stories from Nature Magazine suggesting permanent droughts in California http://www.nature.com/articles... are just fear mongering to distract you from your civic obligation to consume conspicuously and excessively!
Industry must continue to grow eternally, or the financial Apocalypse will happen!
remember, Jesus will come and fix everything, so its all good!
Reality doesn't give a fuck about you or anyone else. You are not being presented with an option where you get out of the consequences of conspicuous consumption. That is the point idiot.
When I'm president we're going to have massive ice, all right? Strong, powerful ice that grabs you by the shoulders and pushes you down on your stomach and shows you what real ice is all about. Barack Obama let the ice get all thin and runny, which is really really sad. I'm going to make sure the ice is thick and hard and respected everywhere, all right? Respected everywhere. And it will be white, American ice, not muddy ice.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The second law of thermodynamics will not be wished away any time soon. Human activity requires energy. Used energy becomes heat. Human use of energy sources currently outstrips the rate that energy is sequestered in the earth's crust.
That's not the main source of increasing global temperatures. Particular means of generating energy release greenhouse gases, and with greater amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect causes increased temperatures.
Despite this trend, sea ice as a whole is decreasing on a global scale.
Hey, fuck ass. PROPOSE YOUR SOLUTION.
AGW is not some immediate problem that needs to be solved tomorrow. It will unfold over decades, and the solution will also take decades. Here is what we need to do:
1. Slow population growth, especially in Africa. Make sure everyone that wants contraception has it. Promote female literacy (literate women have fewer and healthier babies than illiterate women). Promote clean water, vaccines and peacekeeping. Families have fewer children when they are more confident they will survive.
2. Invest in alternative energy technology.
3. Invest in energy storage technology.
4. Stop building new coal power plants.
5. Stop shutting down working nuclear plants. It may or may not be economical to build new news, but to shut down working plants is absolutely idiotic. Fortunately, only Germans are dumb enough to do this.
6. Continue to research possible global engineering solutions, like oceanic iron fertilization, sulfate aerosols, etc. It would be foolish to deploy these now, but we need to better understand the consequences so we can make informed decisions in the future.
7. Use market pricing and "smart meters" to shift demand to fit intermittent supplies of alternative energy.
8. Invest in fusion research, and thorium reactors.
9. Figure out how to do carbon sequestration economically.
10. Shift to a transportation infrastructure that is not based on oil.
11. Conservation: LED bulbs, variable speed DC motors, solid state magnetic cooling for refrigerators and ACs.
12. Stop doing stupid crap that wastes resources for mainly political reasons: Ethanol subsidies in America, wood pellet subsidies in Britain, etc.
We are already making significant progress on most of these. None of them require us to live like the Amish.
We can't do 10. We don't know how.
We can't do 10. We don't know how.
In Norway, 25% of all new cars sold are electric. Imagine how many people will buy them once they actually make sense. By current trends, that is only 5 to 10 years out.
We know how to replace most of it with electric vehicles, and the more intractible problems (Notably trucks) can be mitigated with tighter emission standards and hybridized designs.
Thats the thing, we dont need to completely convert to zero carbon emissions, we just need to get it to a point where we have brought us a century or two to find a *complete* solution.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Its always amused me, RWNJ the denialist nuke fans have this amazing cognitive dissonance, where they claim climate scientists are corrupt, and make up climate change data, then believe the paid nuke industry shills who try to tell us nuke is safe., I would believe an independant academic any day over an industry employee.
No form of energy that can sustain our current daily energy needs is safe. Coal, oil, natural gas all come with a price. In fact, over a long period, all of these kill more people each year than nuclear. And that's based mostly on 1970s reactor technology (due to the hurdles in building new ones).
The argument that Nuclear is completely unsafe when looking at the plants in operation today is kind of like arguing that cars are horribly unsafe because the study only looked at vehicles in Cuba (i.e. mostly all from the 50's). Much like car design, Nuclear reactor design has advanced. For example, molten salt reactors can be designed to eliminate the possibility of a meltdown, even in the conditions that happened in Japan.
For every arctic, there's an antarctic.
It was just two years ago that there was record ice in the antarctic area.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/an...
That certainly justifies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on bird-frying solar reflectors, or bird chopping windmills for a guestimated 0.2 degree reduction in the planet's temperature
There was record sea ice in the Antarctic a couple of years ago but the Antarctic Ice Sheet (that's the land based ice) continues to lose ice. Part of the reason for the record sea ice is that the melting of the ice sheet puts more fresh water in the ocean around Antarctica making it easier for the sea to freeze.
Actually, we don't. The most expensive cars are simply good for "in this region." The less expensive cars are only good for "around town." The batteries run down far too quickly, and take too long to recharge. No electric car today can perform as well as a 1989 Yugo. In 1989, some friends of mine drove a 1989 Yugo in the 1 Lap of America rally, 9000 miles in 10 days of circumnavigating the USA. No electric car could do that today. Then there's the trucks, locomotives, ships, boats, and airplanes. We absolutely do need to leave the oil in the ground, because the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to take 100,000 years to be scrubbed clean as it is. We're just adding to it every day.
And there's not a lot of hope in sight. People currently working the battery problem are not having a lot of success. See:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...
This scientists are currently coming up with just one answer on batteries, it is Lithium, and Lithium is inadequate. And we can't simply say that Lithium batteries are expensive and we'll just spend what it takes because that hammers the poor, driving those that are in poverty deeper into it and casting those that are just making it now into poverty. Poverty is more deadly than smoking, as it will take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only "good" for 7. Converting to batteries now would be a cruel, elitist thing to do.
We're either going to have to solve the battery problem, or solve some way to operate our vehicles on grid electricity done with nukes and geo. Wind and solar are too intermittent - the wind stops blowing at night and your iron lung becomes your coffin.... Not many iron lungs left, but there's the emergency room operation that goes dark, the backup generators fail to start, and the patient dies for lack of electricity in the ER. Dunno how to get grid electricity even to cars, let alone airplanes and boats in rivers and ships at sea.
Right now, we're really screwed. Will the brave scientists find the magic battery and save us like they did when they invented nuclear weapons and ended WW2? Stay tuned.
You seem to be incapable of understanding your parent post, which explaining why increasing Antarctic sea ice is a very bad thing.
This space intentionally left blank
"denialist nuke fans"? I think you'll have a hard time finding examples of that. AGW minimization is a reason FOR building more nukes.
You would believe a person who has no experience in the industry over someone who does? That speaks volumes. Where else would you apply that logic. Lets see, would you believe academics over doctors? academics over climate scientists? academics over bridge engineers? You don't think academics are agenda driven?
Your blind dismissal of anyone who actually works with and fully understands the technology is simply your decision to remain ignorant and live within your entrenched belief system. What makes it worse is you don't even have to listen to industry employees because there is plenty of credible information available. But you choose to ONLY listen to the fear mongers.
Right now global warming isn't due to entropy from our energy being converted to heat. It is from increased amount of Carbon Dioxide and other gasses which are preventing the heat (mostly from the Sun) from getting reflected back into Space.
The fix is simple, but it will take effort from the population.
1. Use less CO2 for energy production. Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric, Nuclear...
2. Increase the growth and spread of CO2 absorbing life such as trees.
Now this won't fix all our environmental problems, but we can slow down global warming, to a rate where we and other life forms can adapt to the new normal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"The time window to turn this around has ended. Climate change is inevitable now. "
Excellent! It must therefore be easy to give 100%-probability predictions about terrifying climate conditions in the not-too-far future! Come, let us have some.
A few quick points to ponder:
1) Norway is a tiny country.
2) Car ownership is a luxury few Norwegians can afford.
3) 25% of a small number of new cars purchased in a small country is meaningless.
4) The vast majority of those electric cars are being bought by Norwegians that derive their income from the oil industry.
Ken
That was clearly and precisely what I was referring to. If you understood...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Climate change has always been inevitable. I wish we'd stop conflating climate change with AGW Climate Change. Nobody denies the climate changes. I'm not sure that anybody actually still denies humankind has at least had an impact anymore, either, just the extent and what's the likelihood of actually being able to stop or slow it. We can't have a meaningful conversation about it when either "side" falls back to name-calling and yelling.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
anti-nuke hysteria, fanned by the cold war and the Chernobyl disaster, and promoted in the press by pro-oil interests, resulted in the US putting a moratorium on the construction of additional nuclear power stations, and the increased buildout of coal and petroleum fired power plants.
How is acknowledging that the NIMBY movement that was so easily motivated by these factors were instrumental in the reaching of that policy decision, in any way credibility deflating?
To this very day, this group is STILL vocal against nuclear power, even demanding that funding for fusion not go forward, erroneously believing fusion energy to be polluting with long lived radioactive waste.
I was simply acknowledging the point made.
Bullshit. This is the same USG that is happy to tell both the citizen and the consumer to go fuck themselves if it means some corporation can get a buck. Or have you paid no attention to coal ash spills, oil train fires, pipelines that leak hundreds of thousands of gallons of petroleum tinto the surrounding land? The real reason you haven't had new nuclear plants built is they are completely unjustifiable, and cannot exist without massive subsidies from the taxpayer.
Safety: even assuming there will never be another Chernobyl or Fukishima, you still have to store that waste for thousands of years.
Cost: the real achilles heel for nuclear power. You simply cannot justify building nuclear power plants when other sources of energy (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, sugar cane ethanol) can be rolled out far more quickly, far more safely, for a fraction of the cost.
Disagree? Then feel free to name the nuclear plants that roll the full cost of mining, refinement, security, safety, and storing it's waste for thousands of years into the rates charged to customers.