Slashdot Mirror
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"
Pettit's Ice Volume Death Spiral graphs are somewhat more understandable, but no less depressing.
https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-volume
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Here's your broom. Now push back that ocean.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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...
How exactly does combating climate change "cripple Western civilization"? I think what you really mean is that it inconveniences you and threatens your greedy opulent lifestyle as a privileged species. How can you possibly live without hamburgers and your Ford F350?
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.
Hey, is that you Donald?
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..?
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.'"
You are not taking into account any changes between then and now, but even worse, you have no data on the depth of the ice, only on the area. The square kilometers says nothing about the volume, this however, does: https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/q...
Just because one model (and your BBC article was about ONE model which contradicted other model) didn't accurately predict when all the ice will be gone, doesn't mean that you should throw all models in the bin. Right now, most models say that the ice will be mostly gone somewhere between 2040 - 2100.
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.'"
Which part of that means it's perfectly OK to dump billions of tons of CO2 into the air now?
No sig today...
Yes, it may be shrinking a little, but the sampling period is extremely short, compared to our planet's age. This can or cannot be caused by humans
This is very true. However, in this case we are certain that it is, in fact, being caused by human activity. The Keeling curve leaves very little room for interpretation.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You're entitled to that opinion. And, if so many people can suffer denialism, how do you or I know that we aren't also suffering from some sort of political bias? I mean it is funny isn't it, that it is always the other people who are the stupid deluded ones. I am, for example, reading a book at the moment that goes into the massive scientific cockup that was nutritional science over the last fifty years. The book got a review in the BMJ to the effect that, admitting indeed that, we all thought science was this clear headed thing and actually, there can be screw ups that ruin an entire field for decades and decades. If you want a fact, people are fallible and whole fields of enquiry can fail spectacularly whilst lots of intelligent smart and skilled people in the field confidently cock it up. That is just a fact of life, that it sometimes happens. So rather than just blast other views as denialists, why not be a little less certain? For me, once a field starts calling others "denialists" then it has become closed minded and loses the self-correcting nature that is supposed to be the reason why we trust science in the first place. It *might* have got the answer right, but once you start blasting others as denialists, we can no longer know whether it can be trusted, because the self-correciton has been replaced with dogma. As I say, we KNOW, empirically, from experience, that whole fields can and do screw up. I will still go to the doctor when I get ill, but I won't blindly trust anything he or she says about nutrition.
I always find this funny that so many studies say "The Arctic is warming and there should be no more ice cap by 2050". I remember some US scientists said there would be no ice in the Arctic by 2013, and look at this graph. The arctic ice cap is currently a little over 13 million square km.
Yes, it may be shrinking a little, but the sampling period is extremely short, compared to our planet's age. This can or cannot be caused by humans. But hey, anyway humans won't survive Earth, which is scheduled to disappear anyway in the next 5 billion years... Unless we disseminate elsewhere in our universe, we're doomed.
How can you link to a text that says "could be ice-free in summers" and claim it says "there would be no ice (full stop). The ice cap is not "shrinking a little", it's shrinking massively. "Currently" it's the middle of winter, when the sea ice is always expanding to nearly the same level (basically, it covers the arctic until it runs out of ocean). In the arctic ocean, the summer minimum is the most important measurement. That said, the arctic ice has been at or near record low for the entire winter, and for good measure in this year antarctic sea ice also is unusually low. The newly formed first-year ice is so thin that it melts very quickly in the summer, probably giving us another record low, and leading to more heating, as the sunlight is absorbed by the water, not reflected by the ice.
You have a point about the 5 billion years, but most of us have a somewhat shorter perspective - and even those with the long perspective may want to give us enough time to escape this doomed planet before things get really ugly.
Stephan
It's not "this weather is climate", it's "this weather could not possibly have happened without climate change".
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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?
Yeah, Ironically, the worry is global warming will make Europe colder (it is at the same latitude as Canada but is saved the brutal cold because of warming ocean currents).
If the ice melts, especially if it melts quickly, the relative lower salinity that results in the Northern Atlantic could screw up the ocean currents. That warm water that makes Europe warmer than say, Mongolia and Siberia no longer warms Europe. Europe freezes over like much of Canada.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Historically, the artic, has, Been ice free.
Nice try, Mr. Shatner.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
So you're assuming that everything the EPA is good?
It sounds like you're arguing that if something isn't perfect then it isn't worth having. I think that mindset of no nuance stems from the puritanical influence. Sex outside of marriage? Yeah you're going to hell. Genocide? Also going to hell.
In reality, nothing is perfect and so perfect is the enemy of good. If you strive for perfection and discard anything falling short, then you will never get anything.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Greenland has been losing about 270 gigatons of ice per year lately, but the pace is likely to accelerate as the warming continues.
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.
The objection is that it oversteps its role; that it's acting as an unaccountable agency and therefore it needs to be reigned in.
Based on your claim, I had a look around. As far as I can see, just about all of it is whining that the EPA rules will cost big companies money. Well, yes, that is true. It is much cheaper to operate if you can offload the true cost of operation onto other people.
Reigning in the EPA is not the same as eliminating the EPA or not wanting clean air and water.
I disagree. It's generally action from people who want to keep the profits private, but nationalise the costs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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...