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One-Degree Rise In Temperature Causes Ripple Effect In World's Largest High Arctic Lake (folio.ca)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from FOLIO Magazine: A 1 C increase in temperature has set off a chain of events disrupting the entire ecology of the world's largest High Arctic lake. "The amount of glacial meltwater going into the lake has dramatically increased," said Martin Sharp, a University of Alberta glaciologist who was part of a team of scientists that documented the rapid changes in Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island over a series of warm summers in the last decade. "Because it's glacial meltwater, the amount of fine sediment going into the lake has dramatically increased as well. That in turn affects how much light can get into the water column, which may affect biological productivity in the lake." The changes resulted in algal blooms and detrimental changes to the Arctic char fish population, and point to a near certain future of summer ice-free conditions. The findings document an unprecedented shift from the previous three centuries, challenging scientists' expectations of how such a large system could respond so rapidly to a one-degree rise. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
The world is not a static system. Of course it will warm up. And cool off. And some things will die and others will flourish. Stop micromanaging it you elitist liberal nitwits.
Well, how about looking at a few actual facts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFwie-kC8uc
But no, lets just live on headlines, funding funding funding! Sad, really.
Well, aren't you a fucking idiot.
Or maybe we can construct a giant shade to dim the sun a bit?
If it always remained constant - THAT would be a problem.
Even without humans there would easily have been that 1C upward swing at some point. While a bit tragic that kind of thing is going on all over the face of the earth, all the time, where animals and people find some nice place to live, but in geologic terms there are NO nice places to live. Eventually Mother Nature *will* kick you out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is enough methane in the Arctic to destroy life on Earth many times over. It's calculated that if 1% of it escapes it will be effectively game over. There were two earlier methane "burps" that caused a mass extinction. The most notable was the end-Permian "great dying" when something like 96% of all marine species disappeared.
As the Arctic melts and warmer sea water flows in (and remember the Arctic is warming MUCH faster than the rest of the planet) there is the potential to release huge volumes of methane that was securely trapped under ice. It will be a rapid warming too - a decade or two of rapidly rising temps as human civilization descends into chaos.
For those who think we'll geo-engineer a solution, we won't. That's already been studied, there's no viable way to extract CO2 at the scale needed much less CH4 which is orders of magnitude less prevalent in the atmosphere. Even if we did a rapid global dimming the ocean has enough heat already stored in it to likely keep the process going.
Ah I see you're using the "I don't understand it therefore it's wrong" line of reasoning. I like how you've been modded up for that. Way to go slashdot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In my country the temperature varies from -30 C in winter, and +30 C in summer. If the themperatures chang in the future to -29 C in winter, and +31 C in summer. Why should this change the climate so much as it is claimed, when there is already a 60 C change year around?? I call BS on the climatechange.
This lake is almost always covered in ice year round and, from 2007 to 2012 had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C. The increase in temperature is warming and melting the surrounding permafrost, which drains into the lake, raising both its level and temperature ... This affects the algae and fish in the lake, which affects the people that fish the lake -- as well as everything downstream.
From: Lake Hazen
Although air temperatures in this area often rise above 10C in July and August, Lake Hazen remains ice covered in most years.
From the actual study in Nature The world’s largest High Arctic lake responds rapidly to climate warming. (linked in the TFA):
A decrease in seasonal ice cover resulted in warming of surface waters and, more importantly, allowed planktonic algae to fill a niche which was previously climatically inaccessible, re-organizing the ecology of the lake at the base of the foodweb.
Collectively, rising air temperatures, increasing glacial melt and runoff, decreasing summer lake ice cover, shifts in primary producer communities and declining fish condition demonstrate the coupling between watershed changes and in-lake conditions and processes.
This vast, deep lake, the High Arctic’s largest freshwater ecosystem, has experienced drastic changes in the last decade, despite its volume, thermal inertia and hypothesized resilience to climate change.
Such changes, and their consequences, are certain to increase further as warming of northern latitudes continues into the future, undoubtedly jeopardizing the security of traditional freshwater foods and other ecosystem services for northern Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
As long as you do not pollute the air with carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, you can do whatever you want. This means no burning fossil fuels, no eating meat and diary products. The climate change is affecting us all and the higher forms of animals as well. This is not a personal matter to decide. That is why I urge the politics to do something about it. People normally follow the stream. If fossil fuel gets much more expensive, people start to think using it more consciously. If the price of meat reflects the real cost of production, it would not be consumed every day anymore. People are not responsable usually, but can be motivated to act responsably. Donald Trump is a poor choice for acting on this crucial matter. But Hillary Clinton wanted to pulverize the Middle East, and I understand why people were concerned about this. This is not a game. In the north of Russia there is methane bound in ice (permafrost), and melting would release a tremendous amount of this greenhouse gas. We cannot wait, because the process will accelerate and stopping all emissions would not stop the global warming anymore (point of no return), and it is better to avoid the worst scenarios with responsable actions. Not pointing to other people, but reflect on what everyone for himself can do, if only a little. Of course, the sheer number of human population leads to this global change. So it would be sensible to do whatever possible to reduce the reproduction rate of humans all over the world. Because it is not easy to do it, it is important to reduce the greenhouse emission by everyone with no exception. Let us talk about it and arrange for it. We all are family and have the power to survive.
This lake is almost always covered in ice year round and, from 2007 to 2012 had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C.
The "watershed" had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C. Sorry for the cut/paste error.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No, he's probably in the Trump cabinet.
Oh. Wait.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
1 degree C can be the difference between just being cold and getting frostbite that causes permanent damage. It's huge.
Articles like this always make it to be like "pre-human induced climate change" temperatures were the absolute ideal and somehow must be maintained forever and ever, otherwise it's death and disaster for all.
they're already here
...I would think one of the first things biosystem scientists would accept as axiomatic is that no ecosystem is completely stable or permanent. (shrug).
-Styopa
But steel's heavier than feathers.
So, theorists were wrong in the past and have been surprised by their predictions being wrong. Of course, still reasoning from unchanged assumptions, we are now supposed to trust them? Come on.
Probably should not believe and predictive models of climate that doesn't also have an accurate, predictive model of the Sun. Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
You do know that we measure the sun's output, right? And have been doing so for many decades?
We know that the observed warming is not due to changes in the solar output because we measure the solar output.
Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
Which is why climate models account for many things.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun.
True enough. But we measure the output of the sun, and have been measuring it for many decades. We know that in fact that it is not changing. So we can discard that as a source of the current warming.
If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun.
Indeed; this is the Milankovitch cycles, which are currently believed to account for ice ages. The main orbital perturbations have a cycle time on the order of 100,000 years. So they are definitely not responsible for changes in temperature on time scales of less than millennia.
It's worth noting, however, that the effort involved in understanding Milankovitch variations and the feedback mechanisms that cause the cycle of ice ages was a very large part of what brought climate science to its present level.
Neither one should be considered constant,
To the contrary, both of them can be considered constant on the time scale of interest here. One because we measure it to be constant, and the second because actually, orbits are well understood.
and the former is certainly not easily modeled.
Although the second one certainly can be.
Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
And climate scientists have been working for over a century at the effects of these variables. So far, other than greenhouse warming (which is a well substantiated theory), the alternate hypothesis to explain the data is... nothing. There are no alternate hypotheses that fit the known data.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Uh, why shouldn't we understand (you use the word "predict") climate, exactly?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If they did they would be after ALL nations to clean up. Instead, we have idiots on here trolling claiming that either this is not happening, OR that China does not have to cut back their emissions OR that none of the rest of the 3rd world nations have to cut back.
And yet, the ONLY ones dropping are the majority of western nations.
Until we accept that ALL nations have to drop their emissions down to similar levels of Sweden and iceland, AND remove the soot out of their coal plants (IOW, if your skies are polluted, it means you are not removing the soot), AND must really push for AE, along with other baseload generators such as hydro, geo-thermal and/or nuclear.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yep, the climate change denialist troll army is out in force in this thread. You would think that this global conspiracy of evil climate scientists, with all the might of your tax money, would be powerful enough to wipe them off the face or The Interwebs. Apparently not.
Guess your tax money is no match for the obscene mountain of cash the oil and gas industry lobby is sitting on.
But steel's heavier than feathers.
Everyone knows 1 kg of feathers is much heavier than 1 kg of steel, or is it the other way round?
Sorry, that got posted to quickly.
OTOH, it wasn't methane or warming that killed off everything the end-Permian extinction, it was the release of H2S into the atmosphere at the same time. It's not clear that a simple warming would do that. I don't remember the mechanism that was supposed to have caused the H2S release, but I think it has happened more than once.
Still, please note that it didn't kill off all life in the previous occurrences. There's no reason to believe it would kill off all life this time. Possibly all mammals, but there's reason to doubt even that much. E.g. mole rats might survive, or other small mammals with uncommon lifestyles that have unusual metabolic features. (Mole rats do much better than most mammals in low oxygen environments...but I don't know how well they do if those are continued over a long period of time.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just like an economy with productive and non-productive members, forcing new boundary conditions strengthens the living by killing off the weak. Kinda like smash-facing gaffot progressive sluts and seeing them run for momaz tit. Raise temps ... muddy the ozone ... whirl in a few hurricanoz ... whatever self-reliant yeomanry lives thru it will be more gun-proficient & stronger than the dead Demorat lusrz weeded out. Nature hates lib'ruls.
If the temperature of a glacier rises from -0.5C to 0.5C, glacial lakes can disappear within weeks! Who would have thought!
Well, Duh. 1deg C is 1% from freezing to boiling. Try saying that same summary with 1deg F and you'll get my undivided attention.
The sensors around the world are not really an issue, because I was swimming near one of them when I pee'd. The warmer water must have hit the sensor.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right?
Because as the temperature increases, the permafrost will release it's carbon near bodies of water, very rapidly.
It's science.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't worry, he'll be fired soon.
Yeah, pretty much. It's kinda how science works. It's not that they're right or wrong, it's HOW MUCH are they wrong. I guarantee you that every scientific theory out there today about physics, chemistry, cosmology, whatehaveyou, is wrong. To a degree. The goal is to be LESS WRONG. Newton was wrong, but he was less wrong then the people that came before him. His theories completely break down at reletivistic speeds and very tiny things. But that doesn't mean you can't use his equations to put a satellite in orbit. Einstein was wrong when it came to tiny things (for a long time before relenting), but that doesn't mean GPS satellites can't use his equations to account for the time dilation they experience.
Sometimes the scientists get shit really REALLY wrong. Like hypothesis about aether, phrenology, most early psychology, lamarckian evolution (although epigenetics is weird). A lot of times, minor flaws are blown up into something they aren't, like global cooling, because news reporting on science really sucks donkey balls. The system isn't perfect by far, but it's far better than any alternative. And you have this system to thank for practically every modern convenience you are currently enjoying.
What little change is happening is overwhelingly non-anthropogenic.
Let it happen.
1 once of gold is heavier than 1 once of feathers although:
1 once of gold = 31.103 grams
https://www.gold-traders.co.uk...
1 once of feather = 28.3495 grams
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So, the temperature in the lake increased by 1 Coulomb. Whoa nelly, that's ... actually not a lot. Or anything really.
That said, it is curious that Slashdot (and probably also "folio.ca" from the article links) support Ç and Ç — (and even the emdash!) but not the humble degree symbol.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But I guess it's at least still a bit better than the lake rising by 1c. That would end ugly.
- https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
"...the amount of fine sediment going into the lake has dramatically increased as well. That in turn affects how much light can get into the water column, which may affect biological productivity in the lake." The changes resulted in algal blooms ..."
I'd have thought something in the sediment was providing food for algal rather than less light being the cause. Or is it implying that creatures that eat the algal are reduced thus leaving more algal around?
Also, so all the other changes in temperature before this last 1C change don't matter? That's like saying only the last basket in basketball matters; except without all the other baskets thru the whole game we wouldn't be here. Just a bit of simplification and sensationalism that detracts from geological long term time scale processes.
One huge issue is due to the permafrost, a huge amount of methanes is locked up in the soils. If that permafrost happens to melt it will release countless tonnes of Methane which is an even stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. If that happens it could potentially spike temperatures rapidly leading to a worse situation.
I'd be concerned.
However the OP specifies a "Ripple Effect", and if this means a "Raspberry Ripple Effect", and I think it does, then sign me up!
Gotta have me some of that Raspberry Ripple Effect.
It's physics. Call it what you like. What's your point?
It's physics. Call it what you like. What's your point?
I'm not convinced most of you have studied enough math nor physics to understand the problem beyond the politics of it. Freeman Dyson on the Global Warming Hysteria April, 2015 - Effect of Sun on Climate http://bit.ly/2uuO2lf
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Even your made up nonsense measurement puts America far worse than all the other first world countries. And your currency has fallen between 10-15% in the last year. Did your CO2 also fall by the same amount to keep your GDP/CO2 the same...
We are looking at incredibly cold year in Northamerica, with huuuge costs for its agricultural production. And there still are people imagining unprecendental warming shifts. Come on. It's all bs to introduce more Green taxes on the population.
There is no data to make conclusions about 300years, and the existing measurements are all within statistical errors. We need to wait and measure till about2050 for this climate science to become a science.
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Dyson is absolutely right. Solar output has an impact on global temperatures. That's not controversial. What you are failing to grasp is this: To the extent that solar output affects global temperatures, it has had a negative (cooling) impact over the last several decades. Solar output has been dropping .
If you argue that solar variability has a very large impact on global temperatures, then we need to conclude that the warming caused by increased CO2 is much larger than we expect. CO2 has not only caused the observed warming, but also compensated for the cooling effect of the waning sun.
Yes the changes "... which _may_ affect biological productivity in the lake".
What they did was observe something and then made a WAG speculation about a worst case scenario. Is there a detailed map of the biological network of the lake with ground-truthed models? Is there a detailed map of the lake's chemistry and thermodynamics again with ground-truthed models? Is there even data from prior occurrences of this nature (yes the area was warmer in the distant past) so that they can validly speculate about the ramifications (not to mention the _fact_ that the lake has to have seen this cycle before and yet here it still is doing fine)? The answer to all three questions is: no.
Biology is 'science' with no first principles, continuously surprised by what it finds ("... bacteria found living in !!", "puffin beaks glow in UV", etc), and no meaningful way of predicting anything. Biologists are collectors and observers. Any prediction by them should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Just not everyone. Stop letting the noisy idiots who *appear* numerous own the "majority" label, when they're a fruitcake nutbar minority.
Moderating a public forum is like cleaning up a horse show of horseshit. Without the efforts at removing from public view the crap, people can't get anywhere without being smothered by the shit all around.
It isn't about only getting right of the "badly formed" shit.
I get the sense that you recently picked up the words "non-linear" and "coupled" and feel like they probably mean something important. You've used them quite a bit. Mostly to imply that no one else groks it. But you have demonstrated no particular understanding of what it means or how it applies to climate science.
I didn't use that site for data obviously, just to show the downward trend in the measure you claim is best (it's most definitely not).
If you think any of the 2017 numbers are wrong feel free to show where...
No idea why you claim it's PPP numbers when 6.8% GDP growth for China is the nominal number you will find at any site you care to look at.
And the only sane way to compare GDP in relation to economic activity between countries is PPP.
No. The reason for going with emissions/$, is that neither you nor I decide the co2. Gov and businesses do.
Really? The government forces you to eat steak, drive an SUV, Turn your heating and cooling way up high? Don't make me laugh.
Look until tesla, how many EVs were there in.the world? None of consequences. Heck Prius started after Tesla started their r&D to build out EVs. GM built EV1 to appease California, but Exon killed it. Had it not been for Tesla, we would have no EVs.
China has more electric cars than the US, and also has double the market share % of new electric car sales, and also faster growth of that market share %..
Likewise, it has taken businesses and gov to push solar and wind. You and I did not create the market.
China is massively into solar and wind. Everyone knows this.
So, it comes down to decisions by businesses and gov, not ppl.
Complete bullshit. People choose what they want to do, what they want to consume. How they want to live. What lifestyle they lead.
The only way to push them is via emissions /GDP. They only care about the almighty buck. So, by normalizing on gdp and dropping emissions limit yearly, this forces all gov/businesses to change.
You live in a democracy and are free to spend your money how you like. If you want government to force people and businesses to use less CO2, vote for a government that will make those changes. Have a carbon tax if you like. Seems like a sensible way to put a price on polluting. But people will have to want it, America isn't a dictatorship. People choose not governments. Similarly businesses only do what the government allows them to do (again people) or what will sell in the marketplace, again people choosing to purchase/participate.
As it is, China's emissions are disastrous and America's sux as well. In POF, most of Europe sux as well.
All 3 regions are higher than the world average so I kind of agree here. More needs to be done. But it's unfair to place all of the burden on China where they are a much bigger country and are still climbing up the development ladder. You are still giving rich countries a free pass just because they got rich first. I will still argue only per capita makes sense, as all the things people do add up to the total. More people will do more things, travel, spend, waste, live.
But even if you think per GDP is a useful measure, China is already improving, and improving faster than America or the EU because their economy is growing much faster than the CO2 is increasing. Also America is much worse than Europe even on a per GDP measure. Why is that? Governments, businesses, or people making the difference? Even with America's tiny improvements it will take decades to reach European levels. China may even race you there by then.
Europe's and America's are headed in.the right direction, but we need to get all nations on the same track.
America is too slow to be meaningful over any relevant timeframe, China is predicted to be leveling off and decreasing soon too.
New coal plants need to be stopped, except to replace an old one. For example, china replacing an old one, with a new one that has full pollution controls AND will only burn the same amount of coal, or less, is great. But that is not what china is doing, and therein lies the problems.
This is exactly what China is doing. China's coal plants are the most efficient in the world. China's capacity is going up but a lot of that capacity will ne