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Alaska's Permafrost Is Thawing (cnbc.com)
Henry Fountain reports via The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages. But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state. Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter -- plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities. In Alaska, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state's biggest rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.
Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
And on the same day, he pardoned convicted ex-Sherriff Joe Arpaio, and banned transgendered people from serving in the military.
At least Bush managed to show up at a press conference for Katrina with his jacket taken off.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Good try, but Trump hasn't even nominated anyone for the posts I listed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.
So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?
It would only take a degree or two of variation to trigger the runaway event, but that's never happened due to variations in sun activity?
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every morning I read Breitbart first, then MSM (via Google News). Breitbart to find out what happened, and MSM to find out why it was Trump's fault.
No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE. Democrats can neither approve nor deny a nomination that hasn't been made. Democrats fought against some of Trump's nominees - and lost every battle. But the vast majority of posts he has never nominated anybody for at all. Because Don the Con has zero interest in doing the president's actual job. He occupies the job for one purpose only: to take a lot of taxpayer money for himself.
Already the secret service is bankrupt from bills they have to pay to properties owned by Trump on his constant vacations. The man they are protecting is actually billing them for the privilege of protecting him - to the extent that they are now broke.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE.
You mean like Brock Long, head of FEMA?
The Brock Long that isn't incompetent?
The Brock Long that was confirmed in June?
Also, Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process
Conservatives sure do like being hypocritical little twats.
Republicans engaged in similar procedural combat after Democrats made the 2013 change, tying up the Senate to slow President Barack Obama’s push to fill judicial vacancies.
Here's some light reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with highlights:
The Washington Post has identified 587 key positions requiring U.S. Senate confirmation. Of those key positions, As of August 17, 2017, 117 of Trump's nominees have been confirmed, 106 are awaiting confirmation, and 0 have been announced but not yet formally nominated.
So.... of the 587 key positions, Trump has nominated 223 as of a week ago. Then, there's this other side of things:
http://www.politico.com/story/...
At least 17 of Trump’s nominees took more than a month to be officially sent to the Senate, at which point the vetting by senators and aides can begin in earnest, according to a POLITICO analysis. (One of the 17 nominations, Jim Donovan to be Trump’s deputy Treasury secretary, has since been withdrawn).
I get it... i really do understand; you conservatives are fucking hypocrites who have to play the victim all the time because you can't govern worth a shit. When you do get in power, the only fucking thing you do is to try to stay in power, instead of help the country.... oh... and whine, a lot.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process so that at the current rate, congress will get through all of Trump's nominations in 11 years (!).
That's the blowback from refusing to even hold hearings on a replacement for Scalia until "the right person" could make that appointment. Now that they've armed this loose cannon, they're going to be repeatedly shot with it -- and it serves them right. Always assume that your opponents will eventually get possession of the ball, and craft your rule changes accordingly. They didn't, this is what happens.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Good try, but Trump hasn't even nominated anyone for the posts I listed.
Look: you still don't get it. Trump hasn't nominated them and for the nominated ones the republicans control both houses, but it's still the democrat's fault.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As usual, you are either uninformed or simply lying:
Long was confirmed as FEMA administrator by the Senate in June, just a few months ago, but he is not exactly a stranger to the agency. He was a regional manager there during the George W. Bush administration, and he went on to serve as Alabama's emergency management director.
As for DHS, Trump got both Kelly and Duke confirmed; Kelly has taken on a new role and Duke is acting director until a new nomination. You know, as it should be.
Short memory Kiddo, The republicans learned this stunt from us 16 years ago.
I like how you talk shit but provide no citation. Classy! Thanks for helping make Slashdot grate! Lazy fuckhead.
Here you go: courtesy of then-Senator Joe Biden
It was rather aggressively reported by quite a number of media outlets, though I suppose the particular media outlets from which you consume news helpfully decided that this particular bit of information was not at all newsworthy.
So, this carbon was captured only "centuries ago",
Things captured millenia ago were also captured centuries ago, only more of them. But most importantly, more people know what a century is than a millenium.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AGW was first proposed in 1896, and discredited for the next five decades. During the period 1950-1970 the growing body of evidence was sufficient to reverse the consensus, and since then all of the evidence is pointing towards, "Yes, this phenomenon is real and behaves as we expect." Denying this has become a symbol of ideological purity for a current political party, but there's only so far one can take that tactic.
The science is really pretty simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Originally, we did not think that it could build up in the atmosphere, and we thought that it could not contribute any more to warming than [a] what it was already doing, and [b] what water vapor was doing. After we became better able to observe the upper atmosphere, it was realized that, yes, there was a bit of a gap for CO2 in the H2O spectrum, but more importantly, the CO2-dense part of the atmosphere extends quite a bit higher than the tropopause. But what does that matter if it's already completely opaque at lower CO2 concentrations?
The effect of a higher partial pressure of CO2 is to push the CO2-dense region of the atmosphere further out into space, increasing the effective 'top-of-atmosphere'. This means that outgoing radiation must take a longer path out of the atmosphere, which effectively traps heat in the lower atmosphere. The "no-feedback forcing" can be relatively straightforwardly calculated to be ~3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which is equivalent to about 1 degree C of global temperature change.
Now, that in itself is not a huge deal. The issue is that H2O is a strong greenhouse gas and you may have noticed that there happens to be some rather large reservoirs of that stuff lying around just itching to be part of the atmosphere. We've spent quite a bit of time looking for ways that the H2O feedback won't end up being a huge issue. And I think that I'm maligning anyone to suggest that Dr. Lindzen has had the most credible alternate hypothesis in decades, which sadly he has not been able to find credible evidence for. Some major flaw in the physics of H2O is about all that would save us at this point.
AGW is a theory that we've been trying to disprove for more than a century. We've known for about 150 years that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that many human activities release large amounts of this substance, but the initial assumption was that climate was cyclical and that warm years would balance out cold ones. The theories of AGW and climate change have at every step had to fight for acceptance among people who (reasonably enough) were not prepared to believe in them.
And then in more recent history there is a crowd of conservative voices who have -- being generous -- rejected empiricism in favor of a more rationalist epistemology. Truth is not what you measure -- measurements can be biased, measurers can lie -- truth is what you can prove with logic and reason. It's not like science can measure God, and those scientists are all leftist eggheads anyway. Those elitists don't have a monopoly on truth. Which is all well and good, and certainly an internally consistent philosophy, but if the tragedy of empiricism is never being sure of anything, the problem with non-empirical philosophies is that they are under no obligation to be consistent with observable reality. Politicians at the moment find it useful to take up an anti-empirical position, and rather sensibly they've picked a topic which to date has yet to make much meaningful impact on the lives of most Americans. (I'm from Alaska; the glaciers and permafrost melting has been fairly readily apparent there, since the bulk of these effects has been at the lower alpine/tidewater icefields and the edges of the permafrost fields -- the most visible and accessible areas.)
At this point the Republicans seem a bit screwed. Their constituency won't allow them to walk this one back -- supporting climate science has been a great way to lose Republican primaries in recent years. Symptoms of warming are (consistent with other conspiracy the
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.
It's also worth noting that those "solutions":
Sure, there are lots of insane and ridiculously expensive things we can do to bring down global average temperatures... but how in the hell can that be a better idea than building cleaner new power sources, increasing energy efficiency, and improving our transportation story?
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling