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Scientists Marvel At 'Increasingly Non-Natural' Arctic Warmth (msn.com)
mmell writes: Recognizing that this is a dreadfully old story (at least by Slashdot standards), current developments make this once more a current story. Scientists studying the Arctic environment are used to seeing broad variations in average temperature readings, but recent results have been so far beyond the normal range that they are only able to conclude that they are being caused by human activity. The temperature data (which includes a great many days with readings above 0C) is bolstered by measurements showing that the Arctic ice shelf is both thinner and less extensive than has ever been previously recorded. I wonder if the Arctic ice cap will reform in the winter, or if it's possible that its absence will cause irreversible changes to the Earth's ocean currents (and by extension, Earth's climate)? "[A]fter studying the Arctic and its climate for three and a half decades, I have concluded that what has happened over the last year goes beyond even the extreme," wrote Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, in an essay for Earth magazine. According to The Washington Post, the scientists' simulations predict some places in the high Arctic will rise over 50 degrees above normal. One chart, embedded in the report and shared by several meteorologists online, shows a "jaw-dropping and emblematic display of the intensity and duration of the Arctic warmth. It illustrates the difference from normal in the number of 'freezing degree days,' a measure of the accumulated cold since September."
Homo sapiens, R.I.P late 21st century "they denied the truth of their actions to the very end"
Long story short. We're all fucked..despite what president Cheeto says.
In geological terms, the Earth normally doesn't have ice caps.
We're not fucked at all, overall. Some people will have to move. Just like they've had to due to changing conditions since, oh, forever.
Is accelerating the pace of climate change good? Almost certainly not. So we'd best be served by not making things worse.
But overreacting just kills credibility. Telling everyday people that they have to pay twice as much for electricity and $5/gal or more for gasoline to get to work because CARBON BAD!!! while China India, Brazil and Al Gore game the system to their benefit just pisses people off.
Long story short. We're all fucked..despite what president Cheeto says.
In geological terms, the Earth normally doesn't have ice caps.
In geologic terms humans don't exist.
And you've done what? So you're going to sling insults at the guy who hasn't been in power for a full month but forgive everything before?
I bet you're one of the same people who are outraged and terrified about a temporary stay in immigration but didn't blink when the US was actually bombing places like Syria and Libya.
But all that aside, Americans are naive in thinking that the scrawling of a presidential pen is going to fix this problem. Your lifestyle probably isn't helping and you likely have no intentions of changing it as long as you can keep laying the blame somewhere else. Clean up your own backyard first.
Of course it's all the fault of evil humans ('evil humans' = Western civilization) and could not possibly be due to undiscovered natural climate mechanisms. We thoroughly understand how planetary climates work, that's why scientists never announce new climate mechanism discoveries, because all is known that is knowable regarding the Earth's climate system.
Anyone who voices a different view or attempts to present conflicting data should be persecuted, ridiculed, prosecuted, and thrown in prison because they are evil. It is imperative that we cripple Western civilization as it alone is solely responsible for CAGW because Western CO2 is evil, but Chinese/Indian CO2 is climate-neutral due to not being generated by evil Western civilization.
So once again, even in the face of the clear destruction of our one and only habitat, human greed trumps common sense. THAT is why we're fucked...
I'm going to sling insults at the orange shithead who is dismantling the EPA, and who will most certainly approve the repeal of the Stream Protection Act soon. Take a look at China to see what happens when you expect capitalists to self-regulate. Once again, the Republicans shit where they eat for the love of money and expect future generations to deal with the fallout.
By slashdot. Winter is usually the off season for these nuts. Not hard to drum up a leftist hysteric whenever they need one.
It's weird to see the cultural difference between comments here and on Ars Technica. Ars seems to have a better educated and less politicised readership. Slashdot mostly doesn't accept climate change, apparently because they don't want to. The amazing power of motivated reasoning all over the comments on these articles. Weirdly, there is a dark matter denialism at work as well - but that one isn't going to fuck the planet up, so who cares.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
But overreacting just kills credibility. Telling everyday people that they have to pay twice as much for electricity and $5/gal or more for gasoline to get to work because CARBON BAD!!! while China India, Brazil and Al Gore game the system to their benefit just pisses people off.
Yep. Also, refusing to build zero emission nuclear plants to replace dirty coal plants, proves that the issue must not be that big of a deal.
Why is it that all climate change responses are about people giving up personal freedom and living under more restrictive laws and any change that really wouldn't be noticed by people is not really fought for...?
We can build the necessary nuclear plants, except the very same people saying "we're all gonna die unless we do something!!" are also out in force to protest against nuclear being one of the answers....
Oh and as for Gore and Leo and all the other celebs lecturing us on how much more control over our lives is needed to save the planet , they continue to fly around the world on charter jets. It is literally the worst thing you can do, carbon footprint wise. We should ban charter flights because of they uselessness and wastefulness. Fly commercial Al and Leo!! Or do you just not care about the environment..?
"Take a look at China to see what happens when you expect capitalists to self-regulate"
Or take a look at what many parts of the USA was like 40+ years ago. China has done it all on a larger scale but they haven't done anything new wrt pollution.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
On the other hand, were Greenland's ice sheet to totally melt, we get roughly 24 ft of sea level rise. So if only 10 % of it melts, we get 2.4 ft rise. There goes Miami and most of southern Florida, Louisiana is...reduced. Virginia can kiss Norfolk goodbye. And if that rise also causes a shift in ocean currents, we can expect more effects.
So please, let's gamble with the future. What do we have to lose, eh?
Ars is a sickening bastion of groupthink, though.
You must be new here, coward. (So go away. We have enough cowards already. More than enough, in fact. We're drowning in them. And they don't believe in climate change because it's scary.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but I find it interesting how Conservatives have started to use the term "Politically Correct" to mean "thing I disagree with." Here it means, "scientific." He disagrees with the scientific opinion on the matter, but since it's something he opposes politically, then it is - to him - the "politically correct" opinion that humans cause global warming.
Better a "coward" than an attention-whoring idiot with an embarrassing username.
In order for my username to be embarrassing, I would have to be embarrassed by other people's cultural ignorance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are incorrect. It is "politically correct" to fully support the global warming alarmism. But ACTUAL SCIENCE calculates only 1.2C of warming for every doubling of CO2. At our current level of 400ppm CO2, that means pumping it up to 1600ppm will only add an additional 2.4C. The "politically correct" version of global warming says that there are additional positive feedbacks that will cause much more than 2.4C of warming. But these positive feedbacks are NOT ACTUAL SCIENCE. They are theorized, disputed, and unproven. And logically, if our climate has positive feedbacks to increasing CO2, our planet should have been completely fried a long time ago.
When all of the scientists agree, either science has been destroyed or reality has asserted itself.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The problem is that the delay while we debate this issues is costly. The cost for new infrastructure is cheaper the sooner you start. The potential risk is to the tune of trillions of dollars, a major fraction of GDP, and extremely disruptive to business was and society. The threat of this problem, just fiscally, warrants attention at least equivalent to the other big US economic issues, eg military and social service spending.
It's also deteriorate US leadership in the world and doubling down on dead industries (fossils are dying for increasingly non agw reasons, eg coal is not competitive, EVs will diminish oil demand) in a world that is moving on. Economies like China are going to control the Industries of tomorrow, control that the US obviously takes for granted today
We are giving away if not out right destroying future prosperity and leadership. Add to this new policy of provoking allies, trade protectionism, ceding trade relationships, and threatening military invention, defying courts on immigration. What is the play here, to be come the isolated asshole no one likes?
It's not about the answers, it's about the process.
And the most important part of the process is not assuming the answer ahead of time.
Because you can follow the money. Our nutritional science was cocked up by those with money. There's not a "fat" industry, but there is a sugar industry. Sugar is literally the product. In the field of climate change, who is the one with nearly all of the money: the folks who deny climate change exists or the scientists who claim it does exist?
There's another thing going on with climate change that you don't see in nutrition. Sugar is making us fat. Take a 400 lb person. That's like the sugar industry coming in and saying "How do we know that scale works? Scales work with gravity and aren't an accurate representation of total real mass. How do we know this person's bone density and size isn't higher than normal?" Those who deny climate change is a legitimate phenomenon that is happening constantly assail obvious fact such as measurements. Climate scientists are becoming worried that the Trump Administration will shut off the stream of temperature data et al coming from the EPA and NOAA for these scientists to use. Why? If science is to be self-correcting and it turns out this whole climate change thing is overblown, it will be shown with data. It will never be shown without data.
People who have been hammering this point home for nearly 30 years are sick of it. Because to deny these data and to deny these trends, it takes willful ignorance, most likely due to financial incentive. And there is plenty of evidence for that. There is 99% certainty that a person who denies climate change is financially incentivized to do so.
Global warming is one of many results of man-made climate change. Both terms have been used interchangeably by the media since the mid 1970's and they are not the same thing. Man-made climate change is very real and is a proven fact. Not just because Al Gore created a documentary about 10 years ago. But, because thousands of climate scientists worldwide have come to the same conclusion. The only "hoax" is that so many conservative politicians, oil companies and conservative talk show hosts have tried to counter real science and unfortunately many people believe them and politicize it (which gets in the way of real scientific research).
Are you a an expert climatologist? or a geophysicist? or a oceanographer? Are you an expert in ANY field that covers climate change?
No?
Well... there are about 30,000+ scientists out there who wholeheartedly agree that global warming/man-made climate change is real.
I'll take their side instead of some random know-it-all on the internet who thinks he knows better than the scientific community.
I love how Slashdot champions every feat of engineering and scientific discovery, until it relates to climate.
The cognitive dissonance is deafening.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I think the greenhouse effect is a lot more straightforward - and well understood - than the effects of various foods on health. Even the 'massive scientific cockup' in the area of nutritional science validates the scientific method - in that if new evidence proves it wrong, that new evidence is accepted and added to the body of knowledge.
Nothing about the dynamics of climate change has been disproven. Yes, we don't know how fast it's happening and what the exact results will be, but to deny that it's happening is nonsense. There is such a thing as denialism. The most clear-cut cases are the ones where deep-pocketed interests have a stake in the denial - like the tobacco/lung cancer example. Certainly, corporate money pouring into unsuccessful attempts to counter scientific research would be a red flag, no?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...