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Iceberg the Size of Delaware, Among Biggest Ever Recorded, Snaps Off Antarctica (marketwatch.com)
A giant iceberg about the size of Delaware that had been under scientists' watch has broken off from an ice shelf on the Antarctica Peninsula and is now adrift in the Weddell Sea. From a report: The 2,200 square-mile, trillion metric-ton section of the Larsen C ice shelf "calved" off sometime between Monday and Wednesday, a team of researchers at Swansea University's Project MIDAS has reported, citing imaging from NASA's Aqua MODIS satellite instrument. Scientists have tracked the crack for more than a decade and they warned in June that the section was "hanging by a thread." Its break, from Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf, changes the border shape of the peninsula forever even though the remaining ice shelf will continue to grow. "The iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict," said professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University, lead investigator of the MIDAS project. "It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters."
Wow... First post is a global warming, the world is going to die, the sky if falling, Trump is killing us, "WOLF!" post...
Mr. Little, is that you? Chicken?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
To build a new, unsinkable, super cruise liner ship. At least four chimneys will be required.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I firstly read about this in a Spanish newspaper claiming that it was bigger than Madrid. Afterwards, I found out in Twitter that it was bigger than London. And now I know that it is as big as Delaware! And the worst part is that I don't even have a reasonably accurate idea about how big it is! LOL.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
It isn't settled.
The logic is, if it can be tied to AGW, it is and is "Climate Change". If it doesn't fit AGW, it is "weather".
And if it is something we humans haven't seen before in recorded history, it is AGW, but only if it fits the narrative. Record Snow falls, never before seen before ... not so much. And Recorded history being ... about 200 years or so.
This is why it is hard to have rational discussions on the merits of AGW, causes and effects. The Greening Of Africa is another great example ignored. http://news.nationalgeographic...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
TRUMP travelled to this very same ice nothing burger just yesterday and said it all was fine to him - china is a hoax and the birds are flying! #FAKENNNEWSTRUMPZ!
they've always wanted one.
Don't forget about Antarctica - it will become an earthly paradise as global warming takes effect. Of course, we'll probably have to fight a few wars over who gets to control it, but when that's done we can start building condos and strip malls. Bottom line? Global Warming will be GOOD for the human race.
The Greening Of Africa is another great example ignored. http://news.nationalgeographic...
Whereas, if the greening has continued over the decade since that article was published, that is a great thing for people of the Sahara. Redeployment of water resources around the globe is in general a bad thing. Population centers have grown where water is available. To take water from places where people rely on it and redistribute it to areas where population is sparse will result in a net negative impact for humanity.
It would be great if what was happening in the Sahara was completely separate to all the droughts and flooding that have increased worldwide .
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
And this is further evidence of the wisdom of AGW terraforming to push back further the most recent ice age, which actually will kill people, not mildly inconvenience their robots in 100-300 years.
This partial sarcasm awaits inevitable downmod.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Can't really blame it. It is awefully cold down there. I'd be looking for a place with better weather, too.
it could be towed to a location where water is scarce and just start hauling truck sized hunks of ice to where people can use it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
But the most honest Trump claims there is no global warming. Here we are with a major emergency and a total idiot at the helm.
Hey look! The latest outrageous tweet. Keep chasing that like a dog chases the laser pointer dot.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Guess what, humans move when climate changes. See ... "Great Land Bridge" for example. Because we have built huge cities on coasts to house large populations is OUR human problem. We'll pick up and move when the time comes. And LA and Miami will become great coral reefs teeming with life. You can see bad or good in just about everything ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Do you know how many billions of tons of methane hydrate & greenhouse gasses are trapped in that ice?
Better hope those 'benefits' go to Africa too
Worst drought in Africa since 1945.
http://www.africanews.com/2017...
Worst among the countries are Somalia, South Sudan, and Nigeria in West Africa who are part of the more than 20 million people estimated by the United Nations to be facing severe famine and starvation in the world.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Guess what, humans move when climate changes. See ... "Great Land Bridge" for example. Because we have built huge cities on coasts to house large populations is OUR human problem. We'll pick up and move when the time comes. And LA and Miami will become great coral reefs teeming with life. You can see bad or good in just about everything ;)
I've no doubt humans WILL move. How many die first though before the people move? Stubborn folk stay behind in Eritrea and Ethiopia where there is little food. Places where crops will grow will change too... but how many lost harvests in Nebraska before people realize British Columbia is a better bread basket now
I will concur that LA and Miami becoming reefs will be a step forwards however. Perhaps we can start public works to push them in the ocean now, instead of relying on mother nature?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If slashdot was here during the last ice age, I'm sure there would be a post with a thousand comments about how this long treasured and historic path to the Americas has now disappeared due to global warming.
with a Britannic accent.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why use Delaware? It's less taxing than other states!
(add your own rimshot noise)
I'll fetch my scissors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"The 2,200 square-mile trillion metric-ton section".
Please post these things in units that can be universally understood.
How big is it in football fields?
No, it's hard to have a have rational discussions on the merits of AGW when politicians toss snowballs around the senate as proof that climate change isn't happening.
The 5 hottest years on record have all been since 2010. 11 of the 12 hottest years have been since 2000.
Local cold snaps don't disprove that, can you point to any researchers who have claimed that climate change will prevent local cold snaps? The average temperatures speak for themselves, expect to boneheads and oil shills.
Don't want to hear it? Then you'll have to prove the work of a vast number of scientists working for a vast number institutes in a vast number of countries all wrong.
Oh and in case anyone feels the need to claim scientists are just protecting their research grants, the only reason this research is needed is because politicians are pushing back on the findings. If the world had acted on carbon emissions in the 80s like it did on CFCs then there wouldn't be the need for this research would there?
But ice actually takes up LESS space when it melts. Mind. Blown.
Wow... First post is a global warming, the world is going to die, the sky if falling, Trump is killing us, "WOLF!" post...
Mr. Little, is that you? Chicken?
No, it isn't Mister Whoosh. Nothing more amusing than making your science denying, Trump loving FoxNews points on someone who is being sarcastic and agrees with your worldview. But thanks for playing, tovarish.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The logic is, if it can be tied to AGW, it is and is "Climate Change". If it doesn't fit AGW, it is "weather".
The difference between weather and climate is time. What we know is the oceans are getting warmer and that's a change in climate. However, one of the outcomes of climate change is more extreme weather patterns. It's climate change regardless if it's good weather or bad weather because weather is a local phenomenon.
This is why it is hard to have rational discussions on the merits of AGW, causes and effects. The Greening Of Africa is another great example ignored.
Getting particular predictions incorrect does not diminish the point that the climate is changing. What we do know for sure is that the oceans are getting warmer at an alarming rate.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
http://maddox.xmission.com/clu... relevant. probably.
This is good news for ice miners! :-)
No but the US military will tell you that.
The vast majority of posts are either comments about how the units should be different, because memes, or denier trolidiots screaming at there DARING to be something about the climate and possibly AGW on slashdot or just the internets, 'cos WHERE ARE THEIR SAFE SPACES!!!!
Just arseholes and dicks. Fucking each other because they prefer that over actually trying (and failing, because trying is the first step on the path to failure) anything themselves.
So, let's tow the iceberg to the Sahara, and use it to irrigate and cool the desert, and in the process bind up much of the water in an extension of water cycle to lots of surface area that currently does not participate. No? Just because it will cost a trillion dollars or so? When did costs become an important part of the climate narrative?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Unfortunately we have seen this happen before, so don't get your knickers in a knot. Everywhere, locked ice calfs. From gerrnland to the South Pole. So, an ice shelf calfed? World ended? The seas didn't rise! California didn't submerge, why? It was floating on the southern seas. Now it may present a hazard to shipping, but it should be studied as to now what happens. What does it create? What happens to the now uncovered space, that sounds cooler then inciting fear. Learning.
"Is that Delaware...or did Pennsylvania take a shit?" ~Jon Stewart
corpse-strewn hellscape
AKA every major American sanctuary city run by Democrats for decades.
(and now we can add the State of Illinois to that list)
Technically, we're still in "the Ice Age". There's still a continent on top of the South Pole, and continents surrounding the North Pole.
What you probably meant was "since the last (previous) glaciation".
Note that is possible that the "next glaciation" started with the Year Without a Summer (1815), but was aborted by the increased use of coal since then. Apparently, glaciations start, not with extremely cold winters, but with summers that are cold enough to prevent the previous winter's snowfall from entirely melting....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As the glaciers melt and sea levels rise, coastal cities around the world will be flooded, and arctic wastelands will spring to life.Russia is an arctic nation, which will benefit greatly from global sea levels. Most of America's business and culture is near the sea, and will be devastated by sea level rise.
Not sure why this is rated "troll". Actually, global warming probably will be good for Russia. At least, will be good for large parts of Russia.
Global warming isn't bad for everybody. It will be bad for places close to the equator, and places with cities on or near the ocean. But that's not true of most of Russia.
The comment seem rather accurate.
(the second part, sarcasm about Putin and Trump, is not, however.)
Poor folk stay behind in Eritrea and Ethiopia where there is little food.
FTFY.
</truth>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wasn't that an episode of the Andy Griffith space junkman series "Salvage 1"?
Libertarians should go to this iceberg and plant a flag on it as their own country! Sure it'll melt eventually, but they would've turned the place into a corpse-strewn hellscape by then anyhow.
And isn't that really the Libertarian dream? A corpse-strewn hellscape to call their own, with no rules and complete freedom for every survivor!
Fanatically anti-fanatical
But the periodicity for glacial advance and retreat is 100,000 years-- the hundred year time scale you mention is a bit fast. A new glaciation isn't coming that soon.
Don't forget about Antarctica - it will become an earthly paradise as global warming takes effect.
Probably not. Average temperature of Antarctica is -70F. Average high is -49.
It will take more than the few degrees of warming we can produce with greenhouse effect gasses to make that "an earthly paradise."
So Libertarians are more violent than socialists?
For example
Stalin,
Mao
Pol Pot
and those nice itty-bitty tin pot dictators in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Venezuela
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
That occurrence was due to natural, and relatively slow processes. Our modern climate change is at a breakneck pace (geologically speaking) and caused by a bunch of mostly hairless apes marveling at their ability to "do stuff" by lighting massive amounts of ancient plant/animal remains on fire in semi-controlled ways.
Guess what, humans move when climate changes
No. Humans will move when wars fought over resource redistribution finally pushes them into moving.
For all those people wondering what we're comparing the iceberg to. Apparently it's bigger than:
Madrid: 604km^2
London: 1572km^2
Luxembourg: 2586km^2
Twice the size of the Australian Capitol Territory: 4716km^2
*
Delaware: 6452km^2
Four times** the size of the Australian Capitol Territory: 9432km^2
* Size of iceberg actually slots in here.
** The twice the size and four times the size were both in the same article.
The logic is, if it can be tied to AGW, it is and is "Climate Change". If it doesn't fit AGW, it is "weather".
Well, yeah. Not certain the point that you are trying to make. These scientists you hate have said they can't tie this to global warming.
And if it is something we humans haven't seen before in recorded history, it is AGW, but only if it fits the narrative.
As noted before, the narrative here is a strawman made up in your head, so that you can slay it with your alternate facts.
Here is what a team member spokesman had to say
“Although this is a natural event, and we’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change, this puts the ice shelf in a very vulnerable position. This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history. We’re going to be watching very carefully for signs that the rest of the shelf is becoming unstable.”
And that is the narrative directly from the horses mouth. No awareness of any link.
Which in no way shape or form fits with your strawman narrative.
Record Snow falls, never before seen before ... not so much. And Recorded history being ... about 200 years or so.
Snowfalls can be indicative of warming. There is an area in the US known as the "Snow Belt" It egts a lot of snow every year. And it is further south than where I live. Snow requires moisture and freezing temperatures, but not too cold. In the Antarctic there really isn't that much snowfall. Too cold. What falls doesn't melt much, os it seems like a lot. But warm moist air from the gulf heading north and hitting cold air form the arctic can make for some yuge snowstorms. And the Snow Belt has crept northward. Philadelphis and Washington have been hammered in recent years. The idea that many science deniers have that GW is going to be tropical teas everywhere with no snow is simply wrong. Seasons still happen, and most places that got cold and snnow before still will. Thewarmer areas will just move north some - or south some depending on which side of the equator they are on. Moving on - So you believe that we can only make climate and temperature data for about 200 years or so? This is another illustration of exactly why science deniers are not getting the picture, it is possible you are ignorant of all of the dating methods that allow us to develop climate data.
Ice cores, land features, geological records - chemistry comes into play here as well, certain minerals form only under certain conditions. These are correlated with other measurements.
Think of it this way. If you do not believe in the data that shows what climate was like before 200 years ago, you cannot believe in global cooling or warming ever happened either. Many of the situations that determined the climate of ages past is linked to atmospheric composition, solar activity, and mineral composition It is not possible to believe that any ice ages or warm ages ever occurred because you reject the data that also shows that warming happened. You don't get to pick and choose. Back to the iceberg. Icebergs calve all the time. Any one is only linked to itself. It is a function of ice and gravity as snow accumulates and compacts itself into ice, it will move if it can. Downhill, just like an extremely slow motion avalanche. Eventually it will break off after enough of it extends out into the ocean. Trying to tie that to AGW is very difficult.
But that being true, it does not negate the so called energy retention effects of the greenhouse gases, or the energy rejection effects of the anti-greenhouse gases. 800 some Terawatts of energy retention via radiative forcing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There were relatively easy alternatives to CFCs. Not so much for carbon emissions. Other than just not existing.
...I would send ships to that Iceberg and mine ice cube sized chunks and sell them as novelty items.
Host a party with Million Year Old Ice!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They might need less fuel for heating .... and that was it.
Vegetation, harvest etc. ist mostly bound by the shortness of the summer, not by temperature.
Plenty of roads are perma frost crushed rock roads. In muddy times they are hard to use. So the longer they stay muddy instead of freezing over again, the longer transportation is more difficult/slow.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Z9UnWOJNY
Democrats greatly enjoy staking out territory on an issue that utterly melts from underneath them when meeting the ocean of reality, so I'm sure they would enjoy an iceberg as their next platform...
Certainly more stable and heart-warming than Hillary, and longer lasting than Trump-Russia connections.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The 5 hottest years on record have all been since 2010. 11 of the 12 hottest years have been since 2000.
Only if you accept adjusted temperature readings..
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Sea level rise due to climate change is 1-2 ft per century, and there are physical limits to how much faster ice masses can melt. It would take many centuries for cities to get flooded. Of course, advanced and wealthy places like the Netherlands function perfectly fine even below sea level. Fossil fuels will be replaced for economic reasons within a few decades without any government intervention or carbon taxes or Paris accords. So, no risk of flooding.
Humans migrate all the time, for reasons other than war. Resources become scarce, humans will war until the demand changes. The rich and powerful will always control the weak and poor, and it doesn't matter what political philosophy you embrace, this is true of all of them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It might be great if you are in Chad, but rainfall has fallen in Ethiopia.
Somalia's drought doesn't seem unusual: http://blog.chg.ucsb.edu/?p=14...
It isn't so much being stubborn as not being allowed to move to another country as the residents of the other country don't want them moving in. Talking about a land bridge from a time when population density was incredibly low and villages, let alone nation states, did not exist is nonsensical.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The Sahara, for example, started out as mostly fertile and gradually turned to desert, and as it did, populations declined, people became poorer, wars were fought, and people tried to move away. Marginal and poor populations live in marginal and poor areas. And over time, those marginal and poor areas shift around. It seems like hubris to think that all of a sudden, we can stop this from happening.
The corpses piled up in a society based on libertarian ideals would be infinitesimal compared to the mass slaughters perpetrated by governments. Even if you exclude wars, the governments of the 20th century murdered 170 million people, mostly their own citizens.
If there is no institutional power structure in place to confiscate wealth and coerce behavior, it's extremely difficult to fight a large scale war, engage in mass murder or even mass incarceration. Can you imagine a war of aggression in which all of the soldiers were unpaid volunteers furnishing their own weapons and equipment? How far would they be willing to travel and how long would they be willing to be away from their homes? Without a government, you wouldn't get people to travel from North America to Iraq or Vietnam to fight a war. Most people would rather maintain a peaceful existence and fight only in self defense.
Libertarianism does not mean "no rules", it just means "no ruleRs".
I'll have to look back, but I think I read somewhere the Iceberg weighs a trillion tons. You're not moving a lump of ice that big. You can perhaps harvest some of the water by breaking it into chunks and transporting it back in tankers, but there's no ship on earth that could tow a lump of ice that big.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The fissure took several years to reach from water to water and break off the iceberg.
However, one of the possible outcomes of climate change is more extreme weather patterns.
I don't mean to come across as pedantic, but the issue with "climate change" is that we don't know what will happen.
Will we see more powerful storms? Will we see storms where we don't normally? Will we see more storms that are less powerful? Will we see fewer storms that are more powerful? Will we see stronger winds? More moisture?
And what does that mean to businesses? I want to build a factory near this river. I build it based on the local building codes which are based on the climate. Now, the snow that used to fall further north now falls as a mixture of snow and rain, meaning that the river is seeing more flood conditions than it used to. Suddenly, my factory is getting flooded every year.
Things that used to be somewhat predictable suddenly aren't. That makes things like insurance companies nervous--If I'm going to paying to clean up your factory after a flood, I'm basing your premiums on how often the area has flooded in the past. Now those numbers don't mean anything.
Its break, from Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf, changes the border shape of the peninsula forever even though the remaining ice shelf will continue to grow.
It is the use of words like this that make me wonder about the sanity of the people writing this shit.
The headline should be: Unfathomably large chunk of ice just broke off of an ice shelf in Antarctica.
Why would anyone care if the fucking coastline has changed? Forever. The universe is not a static place, coasts even less static than most. Why is the coastline changing forever even a part of this story?
I am sure such insanity is being promulgated for a reason. I have no idea if it is to drive me away from, or to, whatever mouthbreathing thing they are trying to push but I am weary of it.
Just provide facts. A VERY light touch of speculation of what it could mean is okay as long the writer specifically mentions it is speculation. It is almost as if we can't think for ourselves or something... or actively being prevented from thinking?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
No one said it wasn't a hard problem.
The 5 hottest years on record have all been since 2010. 11 of the 12 hottest years have been since 2000.
Only if you accept adjusted temperature readings..
Temperature readings have to be adjusted.
In my home town, the main weather station originally was built north of the city, in open field. As the city grew, it reached that area, and that old weather station now is surrounded by buildings, including an industrial zone. I.e., it got warmer there because it no longer is outside of the city.
Then, they moved main weather station to an open field south of the city. Temperature readings thus dropped by a few degrees. No, my home town did not suddenly get colder. The weather station was moved.
Vegetation, harvest etc. ist mostly bound by the shortness of the summer, not by temperature.
No. The "shortness of summer" is bounded by temperature, not sunlight-- basically, when the thaws occurs, and temperatures are above freezing overnight. This will happen earlier, and it will stay thawed later.
As for sunlight, after the spring equinox Russia gets more sunlight than more equatorial places, not less.
This Glacier was over the water so there will not be any water rise from this. Actually there should be a very minute contraction of sea level from this glacier (Greenland and other glacier losses will probably offset this anyways so there will most likely be no noticeable sea level change).
Also next winter and probably the one after that in Antarctica, there will be more sea ice than normal because this amount of water melting will lower the salinity of the water and allow it to freeze at a slightly higher temperature. But of course people will point at this and say that it is proof that there is no global warming.
The next question is how long it will take for the next section of the Larsen ice shelf to fall.
Duct tape it back on
Double it and add thirty. So that's thirty-two metric Delawares.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I WAS kidding, right? Although SF (e.g. Oath of Fealty, Niven and Pournelle) speculates on towing medium sized icebergs for just this purpose (providing fresh water in a water-scarce zone). But yeah, an iceberg the size of Delaware, or whatever metaphor for a 50x40 mile chunk of area many meters thick you would prefer to use, would be rather expensive to move.
What will be interesting will be if it floats north. It's big enough to significantly cool a good sized chunk of sea surface as it melts, at a guess. This, in turn, might affect many things in good and/or bad ways. For example, interrupting or diverting the thermohaline circulation would be "interesting"...
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
People will move, and then they'll discover that where they want to move to already has people, and those people won't make way. Now what?
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
seriously they need 2 C5 Galaxy to evcuate 86 scientists ? talk about leg room perk here , and it still doesnt explain why US Army special ops are required , penguins are laying IED ? , and then there's the rusian baltic battle group on their way to antartica also , the one that's been kept in combat mode since the '50 ...... nah its just a crack in the ic e
Don't want to hear it? Then you'll have to prove the work of a vast number of scientists working for a vast number institutes in a vast number of countries all wrong.
Not really because those people are largely powerless. So the "boneheads and oil shills" can keep moving right along.
The problem with the "Meh God! Teh Wayters is RISING!!!!" movement is that it consistently depends on reporting worse case scenarios of bad climate models to push their agenda. What does this, in turn, does is that it leaves Joe Sixpack to scoff because the flood waters that were predicted decades ago still haven't been produced. The leaves the AGW crowd looking like the crazy street preacher who shouts about the end of the world happening this Saturday night.
Instead of cleaning up their own back yards and going for the low hanging fruit they instead insist on beating Joe and his family upside the head with his copy of The Inconvenient Truth. Every try to get a 90 year old bible thumping grandmother to go your way on science? It's kind of like that. Totally pointless.
People who really believe this must move the world in their green direction by actually buying and living green. Stop breeding, stop eating meat, buy a smaller home. buy local, buy green energy, stop taking cruises and jetting off on family vacations. The businesses that support this model will grow and more people will catch on. Waiting for everyone to get on board is like waiting for everyone to get on the lifeboats of the Titanic.
hahahah
oh you're serious
HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
1950's: Humanity is having its first true global impact: we might double the C02 content in the atmosphere. We are starting to completely conquer nature!
1960's: What will the extra C02 have? It will probably get warmer due to C02, but not for many years. In the meantime, Nuclear will solve all of our energy problems, so we won't have to burn coal anyway. We don't have to worry so much.
1970s: We now know more about the greenhouse effect, and the extremes possible for instance with Venus. Know what is cool? We could probably terraform Mars if we really tried to get greenhouse gases working there. Science is awesome!
1980s: The C02 keeps rising. After looking at the possible changes higher global temperatures would have, we're starting to worry here. Maybe we should do something. The ozone layer and acid rain might be more pressing things though.
1990s: Ozone Layer, Acid Rain, and Species Extinction: we've left it too long! Greenhouse gases can wait.
2000s: Time to tackle C02 levels.... What? Vested interests have spent $10M on promoting misinformation and corrupting scientists, and the "BOTH SIDES!" media have given an average of an hour of media time per denier for every minute per climate scientist? We're scientists not media experts, dammit, how are we to compete with that? (Al Gore?)
2010s: Why are we still debating climate change? Didn't everybody know about greenhouse gases 40 years ago? We can finally measure actual warming trends consistently and concretely now, and don't have to rely on greenhouse gas theory, yet more people than ever are denying science. Did half the planet suddenly become stupid? When did it become so exhausting to be a scientist?
Human recorded history is statistically meaningless to the climate history of the Earth. Go wave your silly protest signs somewhere else.
So Libertarians are more violent than socialists?
On average no, Libertarians are pretty peaceful people.
That's what makes the majority of them easy prey for the minority who are quite violent. They won't see it coming because they wouldn't think of it themselves and they've been spoiled by the safety afforded them by the restrictions they want to remove from people's behavior.
This fits in with the recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences:
Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
Humans will be part of this sixth mass extinction. (At least some of them.)
News report here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Please stop measuring area size in US state "units". Try international units, you know, square kilometers and such.
How dare you say things using logic?!
Climate change denier!
Population centers have grown where water is available.
Los Angeles county has a population of 10 million. (Plus all the undocumented residents, since the census merely asks households to report them and no one is dumb enough to report themselves or their family.)
How many die first though before the people move?
Who cares? / Not enough.
Not just SF: also UAE.
Humans migrate all the time, for reasons other than war. Resources become scarce, humans will war until the demand changes. The rich and powerful will always control the weak and poor, and it doesn't matter what political philosophy you embrace, this is true of all of them.
People migrate in small groups. Humans don't mass migrate without the shit really hitting the fan, and even if they did who would welcome them?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're not sure at what I'm getting at and then provided a perfect example of how immobile we actually are in large groups?
We aren't talking about the Jones family from Cardiff moving to Australia. We're talking about the entire population of a country upping sticks and walking into another country.
On that sort of scale it generally doesn't end well.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
New Zealand is having its coldest winter in 5 years. Greenland just recorded the lowest summertime temperature ever of -33C.
Only if you accept adjusted temperature readings..
I believe in AGW. I believe in science. I understand why dataset corrections need to be done occasionally. Sometimes a location was wooded and is no longer. Sometimes the measuring equipment type was changed decades ago and the data needs to be calibrated.
However, there has been eight major revisions and countless smaller ones. All but one I have studied academically has pushed past temperatures down and current temperatures up. All but one has adjusted the data to match predictions of what the data was and is supposed to be based on math that did not exist before the late 1990's and has been continually refined since.
This gives me pause.
The odds of this happening naturally is incredibly slim. Impossibly so. If we did not have a number of AGW models predicting temperatures to be a certain way those data adjustments would not have happened. No one was doing them broadly before the hockeystick paper and the adjusted data just so happens to fit the current model revision.
Under any other circumstance, would you trust numbers that were adjusted seven out of eight times in a way that matched a theoretical model only after the model was created? Why would anyone believe that?
Happen I'd best put another jumper on, then. Last time it were proper parky.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The 5 hottest years on record have all been since 2010. 11 of the 12 hottest years have been since 2000.
Only if you accept adjusted temperature readings..
That would explain why some skeptics at Berkeley didn't accept them, made their own measurements and got the same results.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Lol
so why isn't it being harvested for drinking water?
Where did I say people were "immobile"? My point is exactly the opposite: people are highly mobile. When a neighborhood or region deteriorates, the well-off people move out and the poor people move in. You misinterpret that as "people are immobile, and the deterioration is hurting them", when the correct interpretation is "people are highly mobile, and populations rapidly move to places that correspond to their socioeconomic status".
Paul Ehrlich has been predicting doom since the 1960's, based on faulty assumptions, faulty data, and bad science. This is no different. Here, he is starting from faulty assumptions about "mass extinctions". A mass extinction requires an extinction of 75% of all species; even if all vertebrates disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, it wouldn't even be close to a "mass extinction".
However, one of the possible outcomes of climate change is more extreme weather patterns.
I don't mean to come across as pedantic, but the issue with "climate change" is that we don't know what will happen.
Regardless of how it changes, what we do know is that a rapid change in the climate will have devastating ecological consequences. These changes are happening over the period of decades instead of thousands of years meaning that organisms have a much lower probability of adapting through evolution. What this means is that mass extinctions are going to take places and it will have a serious impact on humanity.
Will we see more powerful storms? Will we see storms where we don't normally? Will we see more storms that are less powerful? Will we see fewer storms that are more powerful? Will we see stronger winds? More moisture?
Those all sound more extreme to me, so...
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
But that's not true of most of Russia.
Siberia is so warm frozen viruses are thawing and infecting people
Slow-motion wrecks: how thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities
Sure, not many people live up north, but anthrax isn't really something you want to play around with.
What libertarians wants is a power vacuum. You know, the situation that gives us cuddly things like ISIS instead.
The reason most civilized nations are partly socialist is because it works.
Anyone who have tried to give that up for idealism have perished.
Go libertarian if you want, but don't expect anyone to come help you when the next crazy person with an army kills you.
is that global warming will never cause a single sensational news story that will cause people to wake up.
At least not until it's far too late...
Sweden.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Spoken like someone who assumes they will be in the LAST 25% to die/be killed.
Guess what, when the end times come, we won't have rocks and knives vs your rifle. We'll just set fire to the grass and trees when the wind is blowing towards you. Peppers tend to have a lot of canned goods, and those are viable even after the fire.
Oh, and we'll have guns too. And be prepared and able to pick you off as you exit the burning building. Now reply with a good proper "Christian" value of turning the other cheek...
You can't have rational discussions with idiots who aren't willing to at least consider the idea that the scientific consensus has some basis. Talking quantum computing to a giraffe, might make you feel good, but nothing will come of it.
Imagine big bucket of water. Imagine freezing that bucket. It expands a bit, so the ice is now above the rim. Now pile on a few trays of ice cubes on top of that expanded ice.
We are not worried about the rim breaking off and falling over the edge. We are worried that without the rim, the ice cubes on top of it will go over the edge.
The rim in this case is the glacier over the water, which floats and is neutral to current water depths. If it breaks off, all the other ice on land, not in water, not currently contributing to sea level rise which is currently held behind that glacier, can not fall in to the sea and raise the water levels.
Basically, if you are old, buy that beach house. If you are young, maybe buy inland a bit at about 20' up.
The south pole gets 24 hours a day of sunlight in summer. We should grow corn, wheat and rice there by your logic.
More from the paper:
"The strong focus on species extinctions, a critical aspect of the contemporary pulse of biological extinction, leads to a common misimpression that Earth’s biota is not immediately threatened, just slowly entering an episode of major biodiversity loss. This view overlooks the current trends of population declines and extinctions. Using a sample of 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate species, and a more detailed analysis of 177 mammal species, we show the extremely high degree of population decay in vertebrates, even in common “species of low concern.” Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This “biological annihilation” underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth’s ongoing sixth mass extinction event."
"The population extinction pulse we describe here shows, from a quantitative viewpoint, that Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions. Therefore, humanity needs to address anthropogenic population extirpation and decimation immediately. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction (indicative of population shrinkage and/or population extinctions according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature) using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species. We find that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is extremely high—even in “species of low concern.” In our sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851/27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which we have detailed data, all have lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species have experienced severe population declines (>80% range shrinkage). Our data indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
At the end of the video we get "It was a natural event that had been anticipated for months and was not directly caused by climate change."
Putting this 'insignificant' piece of information at the end speaks volumes as to why people are tuning out MSM.
Let's say Mr. Frosty heads north, and bumps into, say South Jamaica and grounds there. What type of environmental impact will there be, temperature wise say, from a trillion tons of ice slowly melting there, and what impact to the aquatic wildlife from a trillion tons of fresh water slowly being added to the ocean...
Wherever this thing goes, it's going to melt. How many fish are ready to deal with changes in the water as a result?
Different numbers but the same results?
No wonder everything is evidence for Global Warming.
It's unfalsifiable.
Why would I be a prepper? I am saying there is no mass extinction and no problem. You are the Ehrlich-worshiping loony who thinks the world is coming to an end and has violent fantasies about burning people up alive or shooting them.
Don't forget that another main component of sea level rise is the expansion of the oceans as they get warmer. The water rising makes things like storm surges and periodic flooding much worse, so the economic impact can become relevant sooner than some people may expect.
Do you have reading comprehension problems?
All of which were communist, not socialist.
Different numbers but the same results?
No. Their own measurements, their own (presumably) methodology, and the same results. Big difference. Doesn't fit your agenda, of course, but there you have it.
No wonder everything is evidence for Global Warming.
Not everything is evidence for Global Warming. Your straw-man is showing.
It's unfalsifiable.
No, it isn't. You, however, appear to be a moron with an agenda.
As I said, "Local cold snaps don't disprove that, can you point to any researchers who have claimed that climate change will prevent local cold snaps? The average temperatures speak for themselves, expect to boneheads and oil shills."
So different data sets show the same trend, yet somehow that casts doubt on global warming? No evidence that it is false != unfalsifiable.
I've actually made a semi-formal study of this subject. I did so mostly because I wanted to understand the models. I modeled traffic. I'm a mathematician and not a climate scientist.
However...
Some of the models put us into a feedback loop and we may already be beyond the tipping point. That point could even be within the next few decades, if not already behind us. I am unqualified to say much more than the science is more rigorous than many claim. It appears sound, given my understanding. I hold no opinions, or offer none, on the quality of the specific model outputs.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Reaching a tipping point doesn't make the ice caps melt a lot faster. But given that the world was 15C / 27F warmer at the PETM than today and managed to cool by 20C / 36F all on its own, I find any such talk of tipping points to be implausible. The feedback loops in those models are largely based on hypothetical effects; I trust actual, observed climate history more. Even if there were a tipping point and it would return the world permanently to something like Eocene conditions, obsrved climate history would suggest that there would be far more arable and habitable land than today.
Your very quote days that they looked at vertebrates. You can't say anything about mass extinctions by looking at vertebrates species because vertebrates are such a small fraction of all species. The paper is bogus.
Glaciation cycles are rapid by geologic standards. Or climate warmed by 6C in 10000 years.
The impact of fossil fuels is still minor compared to that. And the maximum possible impact of fossil fuels is no more than to return us to the Eocene, hardly a bad place to be at.
So youre offering your children then to be culled to solve the issue?
In trying to find an insult suitable, the only thing that comes to mind is: You're a bad person.
Do you happen to be aware of the issues regarding permafrost in the Arctic?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
OMG, OMG, we're going to boil to death.... Except that Antarctica has been cooling since 1998/9. OMG, OMG, we're going to freeze to death....!
The "shortness of summer" is bounded by temperature, not sunlight
Wrong.
This will happen earlier, and it will stay thawed later. ... )
How many days? 1or 2? Before there is not enough sun, it won't thaw. Plain and simple. And that is depending on the length of the day, not on a magic temperature that comes from somewhere. (where should it come from? Hu? Polar night is polar night and everything is frozen
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ironically you're probably a useless web dev or similar that will the first to go if shit hits the fan.
The "shortness of summer" is bounded by temperature, not sunlight
Wrong.
This will happen earlier, and it will stay thawed later.
How many days? 1or 2?
The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Before there is not enough sun, it won't thaw. Plain and simple. And that is depending on the length of the day, not on a magic temperature that comes from somewhere. (where should it come from? Hu? Polar night is polar night and everything is frozen ... )
Tell you what, why don't you do some research here and get back to me when you've learned enough to form an opinion
They aare largely hypothetical and I've taken a look at the methods - they appear sound, assuming the hypotheses' are correct. (Which is, I admit, a large assumption.) The idea of a tipping point is that it will mean that the effects are going to happen and that there's no longer anything we can do to stop them. That doesn't, of course, mean that they'll continue forever - not at all. The planet is pretty good at finding an equilibrium, given enough time.
I hold no (or ofter no) opinion on the validity of their output - but their modeling methods appear sound. The science appears very sound. Curiously enough, I also learned that the vast majority of papers aren't projecting anything close to what the doomsayers are claiming. Not long ago, I had someone trying to tel me that the scientific consensus was that the oceans were going to rise 53' by 2050...
No, no they aren't. It's just not gonna happen. I was bemused when they decided that I was a Trump supporter, AGW denier, and were happy that I was retired.To deserve those invectives, I told them they were wrong (politely) and showed them a bunch of citations. I even offered to run models for them, though they're pretty slow here. I don't have access to big iron anymore.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There is one hypothesis that is very unlikely to be correct, namely that they have accounted for all positive and negative feedback loops. If they have missed just one significant negative feedback loop, none of their predictions are correct. A second problem with the talk of tipping points is that it depends on time scales. We just might be able to emit enough carbon to take us back to the Pliocene, that is, no polar ice caps, within a few thousand years. That new state might last a few million years before the ice caps reappear and we return to the current climate. Is that a "tipping point"? (To be sure, I consider that unlikely. Also, I suspect that a Pliocene climate would be preferable to our current climate.)
You can buy a 10 TFLOP desktop machine for less than a thousand dollars. That's the speed of a top-end supercomputer of 10 years ago, when a lot of that climate modeling was done.
... conversion for non USians:
As big as Delaware (5,061 sq km): Brunei, Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, West Bank
[http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2015/02/20/put-size-countries-perspective-comparing-us-states/]
Specifically, 2200 square miles = 5700 square km (a bit bigger than Delaware).
... conversion for non USians:
As big as Delaware (5,061 sq km): Brunei, Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, West Bank
http://www.decisionsciencenews...
Specifically, 2200 square miles = 5700 square km (a bit bigger than Delaware).
They almost never adjust downward....
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Libertarians do not want a power vacuum. What we don't want is a continued usurpation of individual rights by governments.
If you decide whether or not to have relations with a person of the same gender does that lead to a power vacuum?
How about if you decide whether or not to ingest an intoxicating substance?
Or how about it you decide whether or not wear seat belts?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
The 5 hottest years on record have all been since 2010. 11 of the 12 hottest years have been since 2000.
Only if you accept adjusted temperature readings..
The key here is "on record". How log have we actually been keeping good records of temperatures world wide? Not even 100 years. Oh some places we have good records for hundreds of years, but other places we don't have good records going back just 50 years. How can you figure the climate is changing with only 100 years of "recorded" history? We cannot even figure out how fast the climate changes from that record with any assurance, unless the natural cycles are under 50 years (1/2 the time domain) and then it's really an educated guess based on the assumption that the natural cycles don't have components which are more than 1/2 the observed time domain.
Then there is all the "normalization" of the data you must do to factor out observation errors, urban sprawl, equipment changes and station location changes. This involves a pile of statistics, number crunching involving taking averages, looking at standard deviations and a pile of assumptions that are used to "clean up" the data to remove all the various errors that might or might not be there. Finally, once you have combed though the data set and corrected any anomalies you think exist in it, you can do your climate "study", write your report and earn your grant money.
I have two old sayings for you...
Figures never lie, but liars do figure....
Lies, dam lies, and Statistics...
Which do you think applies here?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The northern hemisphere spring thaw has been advancing by about one day per year since 1988:
- https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
- http://www.foodnutritionscienc...
- http://climatechange.lta.org/c...
- http://flatheadcore.org/featur...
- https://earthobservatory.nasa....
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Perhaps you should read the links you post. Spring thaw of 'snow' and 'ice' in mountains or far south of the arctic circle are completely irrelevant for what is going north of the arctic circle.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. The first link I posted, for example was not about "snow and ice in mountains," it was about "boreal forests and tundra". ("Boreal" means "northern", but in context it's almost always used to mean the far north, Arctic and subarctic. By the way, your post says "north of the arctic circle," but I was talking about Russia. Much of Russia is subarctic, but very little is "north of the Arctic circle".)
Here is a quote from that first link, saying specifically what it was covering:
"Research scientists have been studying freeze/thaw dynamics in North America and Eurasia's boreal forests and tundra to decipher effects on the timing and length of the growing season. These regions encompass almost 30 percent of global land area. ... Large expanses of boreal forest and tundra are underlain by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen soil found underneath the active, seasonally thawed soil.
Are you really such an idiot? None of you links has on the first glance ANYTHING to do with what we where talking about before. Who cars that land that already is farmland is thawing a week or two more early? You claimed that climate change would create new farmland in Russia, which it won't.
Are we talking about the same thing?
If there is no institutional power structure in place to confiscate wealth and coerce behavior, it's extremely difficult to fight a large scale war, engage in mass murder or even mass incarceration.
It's cute that you believe that. You should go tell ISIS that it doesn't have the power to wage war, murder, enslave, or imprison people since it's not a legitimate government. Then maybe you could travel through some African nations and tell the vigilante gangs there that orchestrated ethnic cleansing campaigns that they really didn't kill anyone at all, because they weren't the government and thus incapable of mass murder.
Can you imagine a war of aggression in which all of the soldiers were unpaid volunteers furnishing their own weapons and equipment?
Yes. I take it you've never heard of militias?
How far would they be willing to travel and how long would they be willing to be away from their homes?
That depends on what they expect to get from their expedition.
Without a government, you wouldn't get people to travel from North America to Iraq or Vietnam to fight a war. Most people would rather maintain a peaceful existence and fight only in self defense.
And yet there are people who are travelling to Syria to fight without any support or direction from their home government. In Africa (and other places), groups which are not the government frequently kidnap young boys are force them to serve as soldiers and they go where ever their captors send them.
Libertarianism does not mean "no rules", it just means "no ruleRs".
Since he who makes the rules, is by definition, the ruler, "no rulers" means "no rules". The problem is as soon as anyone or any group can enforce a set of rules, they become the government. The only way to have no rulers is to have no rules. And, of course, "no rules" is a situation that never lasts longer than the first person who survives being wronged because as soon as that happens, then they start with the "there aughta be rules against that" and then you either get a government or a lot of dead people and then a government.
Not everything that libertarians say is wrong, but their philosophies work about as well as communism does. Which is to say they have never once worked at any reasonable scale in the entire history of humanity.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Isn't someone in Saudi Arabia supposed to lasso a suitably-sized iceberg and drag it home, to be melted for its fresh water?
He's probably waiting for it to break up into more manageable chunks, and tow one of them.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
That's not much an apology Alvaro. Have you no honour?
PS: are you seriously believing that I (or any other person with a bit of knowledge) will be accepting swimming pools as a valid unit of measurement?!
I'm not askling you to accept it as a "valid" unit of measurement. I'm asking you to admit it is commonly used by the media to describe volume, and I'm asking you to accept your theory that "none of these wacky units of measurement refers to 3D/volume" because 3D is too difficult for ordinary people to grasp, is demonstrably false.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke