Slashdot Mirror
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"
This is an extremely confused response. This essentially says that the more scientists are concerned about a problem the less you are concerned. If you keep seeing a lot of different articles and ways something might be a problem, and one isn't personally a subject matter expert, deciding to then dismiss all of it is the opposite of good logic. That said, it is true that by nature of media coverage the less concerning predictions about climate change get less attention in the general media, so you might not see them as much, but that doesn't change the fact that the broad consensus is pretty severe. Studies like this are trying to figure out just how severe that is, and even the mild predictions are pretty serious. Honestly, your response comes across a little as someone who has decided that you aren't going to bother making any even small changes in your lifestyle and then found a justification for it.
Thank you for that well-reasoned screed on how we don't need to do anything about the problem we've created for ourselves and future generations. We should have a monument erected to chisel your words in granite: To future generations: piss off, we don't care about you.
So how would you recommend that new knowledge is shared with the public so that you would actually believe it ?
Fucking hell, slashdot, must every other article be about global warming or trump or full communism now???
FUCK OFF
Um, sorry. As a person of a younger generation that will need to deal with the accumulation from this shit storm, NO. So sorry that you need to be bothered with news stories about the mess that you have helped create. Yup, it was far easier when we pretended we could talk about effects to far off future generations. It was incredibly wrong AND some of these "far off future generations" are now old enough to be able to understand that we are getting screwed over.
Look, I don't want to hand our offspring a big shitburger after we're gone. I don't want them to hate us and look back on us with disgust. But there's no way things are as bad as they say.
[citation needed]
I would have given money, changed my lifestyle, my purchasing habits, whatever was required - and I did, for a time.
That's not how it works. What's needed is for you to vote for people who will do something about it, and convince others to do so as well. Nothing you can do on a personal level means jack diddly shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Once upon I time, I thought it was a legitimate concern. But they've Chicken Littled it way beyond anything I have patience for at this point.
You should improve your critical thinking skills. Whether it is a "legitimate concern" or not, is completely unrelated to whether "they" are Chicken Littling it.
Scientists have been making warnings, and of course the news reports the most extreme scenarios, distorting the picture.
But oceans are 30% more acidic than pre-Industrial levels, the area covered by arctic sea ice is trending downwards, and sea levels have a measurable rise.
It won't be the end of humanity, but it is already developing into an expensive problem to fix, as well a politically destabilizing problem as global climate change creates new winners and losers.
What I'd like is to -- someday -- see all these deniers, excuse seekers, carbon lobbyists, oil burners before a court, accused of crimes against humanity.
And then, the likes of Trump, the Kochs, most of the political class, Bannon, all that ugly bunch doing services in those places in the world where damage is highest (I'm not for jails, mind you).
Instead of a miniscule bad effect, why don't you work against serious degradations to the human condition, like dictatorships all over, who leave their citizens magnitudes worse off than the worst effects of global warming?
For that matter, lets see politicians who send out political favors for kickbacks, grinding industry to a halt worldwide in favor of their connected friends, be tried, if you're worried about bad effects on humanity.
It's fun to disasterbate because it makes us feel special and open to secret knowledge! What's that word? Tuned in? No, that's the 1960s. His eyes open; his sails unfurl? No, that's the 24th century.
Woke! That's the current term. You're woke!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"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.
And there it is in a nutshell. "Climate change" is only cared about as a tool for obtaining more political power.
You only use Slashdot as a means of demonstrating your lack of reading comprehension, and basic logic skills.
Climate change is a reason to obtain more political power, because that's necessary to prevent those who claim not to believe in it (like Trump, who's building a seawall specifically to protect his golf course from climate change-related sea level rise) from continuing to obliterate the biosphere upon which we all depend for survival.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have also been on the Earth a long time. Making measurements.
Ice is there, yes. A few hundred miles less ice on the glaciers. I assume that you can tell the difference between an ice cube and an ice sheet. Or is it all filed under ice?
Bloody hell.
Storms have always been there. In different places, with different moisure content.
Maybe the Khmer Empire thought the same as you, just before they died horribly. They'd moved the atmospheric rivers by several hundred miles. Sure, there was rain. Just not near them, because they were idiots.
Don't copy them.
The temperature has risen to levels that are higher than what they should be given prevailing conditions. But that's not as important as the gradient. The gradient has never occurred in historic times, or indeed any time since the last asteroid strike.
But you ignore that and assume all gradients are equal, all numbers are equal.
They are not.
The Khmer discovered this too late. This time, you're plsying not with millions of lives but billions. Ignorance isn't going to save even one of them. There is no plea bargain with physics.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
Any concern requiring a coordinated response is used to obtain political power, otherwise joint action will be confused. See also: the military, agricultural subsidies, transportation infrastructure. What remains to be seen is if we can affect action with less than a WWII style national mobilization, which would be preferable to avoid, or if we'll just continue to ignore the problem until even such an action would be ineffectual, build some protein farms, and live out Bladerunner 2049.
No. Climate change is a serious problem that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fix without giving political power to people who are concerned about it. Nice try casting a rational response into something sinister though.
Happy people make bad consumers.
It will never snow in DC again, then DC is crippled by snow that year.
It will never snow in UK again, then the UK is crippled by snow.
Whoever told you either of those two things is an idiot and no one in the mainstream scientific community believes that it will never snow again in those locations. What they probably said (or what the scientists said before twisted by someone somewhere) was, snow will be more rare- but also more extreme when it does occur in those locations.
Its the warmest year in the US by FAR, until you include Alaska that year then it was one of the coldest ever.
Yeah, and this coincides with the earlier point. As the global temperature rises, the cold polar air isn't staying put over the poles anymore- it drifts down one spot- that makes one part of the globe to get unseasonably cold and another part unseasonably warm. So yes- winter now is seeing both an increase in extreme heat AND extreme cold. It's also possible to have a highest global temperature on record whilst the US has a particularly cold season. Global climate change refers to the globe- not local weather conditions. Don't confuse local weather with global change.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
But we have a zero carbon alternative. Build nukes.
What I'd like to see is all the hippies and foot draggers who run around with their hair on fire about global warming, but then stall technical solutions, to be hauled before a court and accused of crimes against humanity.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
First of all, the US is one of the countries which is doing the least to help out with climate change. Note in contrast for example, that Sweden is reaching its 2030 goals for renewable energy by the end of the this year https://www.thelocal.se/20180716/sweden-to-reach-2030-renewable-energy-goal-in-2018. Moreover, the US per a capita CO2 production is over twice that of the EU and about three times the world average https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions. We're doing less than other countries, and have more that we can easily do. But many of the things that one can do, like eating less meat, getting a hybrid or electric car, getting home solar panels, will not just be good for the environment, but will save you money.
New flash - the entire history of the modern human species has occurred in a single ice age - the current Quaternary Ice Age started about 2.6 million years ago, about a half-million years before homo erectus evolved.
You may be thinking of the latest glacial period within that ice age, and yes, we were possibly coming out of that before our carbon-based economy gathered anything like its current momentum. However, we've accelerated the process considerably by adding major new forcing factors in the form of deforestation, desertification, and significantly boosting the heat retention of the atmosphere - and that's changing things considerably faster than normal, and there is a very real risk that on our current course we'll cause the ice age to end, and the Earth to transition to it's opposing quasi-stable hothouse state.
And while the Earth is always changing, it's the speed of that transition which can be a problem - most trees and other plants can't migrate very quickly, and if the climate lines move faster than they can, they likely go extinct, and take much of their associated ecosystems with them. And we're already in the midst of one of the larger extinction events the planet has seen thanks to pollution, over-hunting and ecosystem destruction. A second, independent extinction event on a similar scale may well reduce biodiversity to the point of ecosystem collapse. It's happened several times before, and it can take the planet many thousands of years to recover. Bad news for anyone who wants to eat regularly in the interim.
Perhaps even worse, at least for us, is that it's looking like such transitions don't happen smoothly. As the thermal engines driving weather destabilize, weather patterns become less predictable from year to year, and the rate of crop failure increases considerably as a result. And when people get hungry, wars break out.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What "full communism" means is a society without any government at all -- or classes or money for that matter. If you look at "communist states", they actually have all of these things: social classes, currency, and some degree of private ownership.
In fact, in a certain sense "communist state" is a contradiction in terms. Communist regimes knew this, and justified their existence as a vanguard revolution that would bring about communism in the long term. This really wasn't any better, since communist ideology see communism as a natural and historically inevitable outcome of capitalism.
If you look at how "communist states" actually arose, they didn't arise out of a popular adoption of communist ideology. That comes later. Indigenous communist revolutions never happened in functioning democracies; they came in societies dominated by wealthy oligarchs, dictators or warlords. I see a lot of parallels with the anti-elitism of Trumpists. They're not ideologues; they're just fed up with the elite and want the swamp drained.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.