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Sea Levels May Rise More Rapidly Due To Greenland Ice Melt
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising sea levels could become overwhelming sooner than previously believed, according to the authors of the most comprehensive study yet of the accelerating ice melt in Greenland. Run-off from this vast northern ice sheet -- currently the biggest single source of meltwater adding to the volume of the world's oceans -- is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels and increasing exponentially as a result of manmade global warming, says the paper, published in Nature on Wednesday. Almost all of the increase has occurred in the past two decades -- a jolt upwards after several centuries of relative stability. This suggests the ice sheet becomes more sensitive as temperatures go up.
The researchers used ice core data from three locations to build the first multi-century record of temperature, surface melt and run-off in Greenland. Going back 339 years, they found the first sign of meltwater increase began along with the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s. The trend remained within the natural variation until the 1990s, since when it has spiked far outside of the usual nine- to 13-year cycles.
The researchers used ice core data from three locations to build the first multi-century record of temperature, surface melt and run-off in Greenland. Going back 339 years, they found the first sign of meltwater increase began along with the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s. The trend remained within the natural variation until the 1990s, since when it has spiked far outside of the usual nine- to 13-year cycles.
Washington D.C. is very near sea-level, isn't it?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
not enough actual effect to be bothered about.
By the time you, individually, feel any effects, it'll be too late. Personally, I don't care because I believe it's already too late.
So how would you recommend that new knowledge is shared with the public so that you would actually believe it ?
"As a young person", you're more part of the problem then us older folk - in the US anyway. If you would actually get out and vote, get people in office who would do something, then we could change it. Sitting back, blaming previous generations is rather pointless when you refuse to exercise your rights and the tools within the system itself, is really the root cause in the US, namely elected owned assholes.
The worse it gets the more fields of research start seeing trends. For example, in microbiology/epidemiology we're seeing that climate change has changed where various disease vectors can live. The entomologists are noting vastly decreased biomass of insects, and so on. So, as things continue to get worse, you will see more impacts from a greater variety of scientists discussed, with increasingly dire predictions of a worse case scenario. So it goes from "it is getting warmer" from the climatologists, to "the ocean is acidifying" from the marine biologists, "diseases are spreading" from the microbiologists. In between, any armchair guy can correlate these things and decide that the earth will snowball into Venus. He may be wrong about the scale, but something less like desertification of the equatorial regions wouldn't exactly be a good thing. Also, if you're familiar with chemical titration, you'll be aware that systems can buffer changes to a degree, and then further inputs will affect change in the system linearly instead. As various buffer systems get overwhelmed, the pace of change will increase.
Denialists would often ask, "what if these imperfect estimates are too high?" and scientifically-minded people would counter with "what if these imperfect estimates are too low?" In the last few years it's been obvious that they were mostly too low (as in conservative) across the board. Oddly enough the constant unfounded accusations of bias toward climate science has created a real bias toward conservative estimates, as scientists all fear overestimating and becoming the deniosphere's celebrated Chicken Little.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel