Slashdot Mirror
390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today, highlighting the key findings from a new study published in the journal Nature: Thanks to global warming, our planet's glaciers continue to melt away, losing up to 390 billion tons of ice and snow per year, a new study suggests. The largest losses were glaciers in Alaska, followed by the melting ice fields in southern South America and glaciers in the Arctic. Glaciers could almost disappear in some mountain ranges by the end of the century, including those in the U.S. The world's seas have risen about an inch in the past 50 years just due to glacier melt alone, according to the study. Since 1961, the world has lost 10.6 trillion tons of ice and snow, the study reported. Melted, that's enough to cover the lower 48 U.S. states in about 4 feet of water.
That this post was voted 'interesting' is a sad indictment on our public education system (and slashdot posters in general.)
AKA BS Headline by a lazy reporter.
First, data useless without comparison data.
Second, even the original study itself is almost ridiculously vague - https://www.nature.com/article... : "...glaciers contributed 27 ± 22 millimetres to global mean sea-level rise from 1961 to 2016..." 27 plus/minus 22? LOL the errorbar is nearly the size of the datum. What does that say about the data?
Third, I'd say it's at least somewhat relevant to check historical data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level#/media/File:Phanerozoic_Sea_Level.png ) which shows that we are currently at a sea-level low that is HISTORIC - our sea levels haven't been this low for 200+ MILLION YEARS. The 'average' sea level for earth is easily 100m higher than today. If the curve is at all predictive, it shows that sea levels were low 230ish MYa and again 550ish MYa, both low points were followed by relatively sudden increase in sea level. So what's happening now ... is predictable.
Essentially, humanity evolved at low tide, now we're bitching that the tide's coming in and is giong to knock over our sandcastles.
But then I guess that makes me a 'denier'?
-Styopa
Because a few hundred years is going to provide reliable trend information about a hundred thousand year trend
Why not ? When the sun goes down at night, it only takes hours for noticeable cooling to happen. It's a fallacy to think we need to wait hundred thousand years for the Earth to respond to changes in inputs. The reason that ice ages take thousands of years is because they are triggered by equally slow changes in orbital characteristics. CO2 changes happened in the last century, and the atmospheric warming responds right away (although equilibrium will take a bit longer due to longer time constant of ocean heat)
You are like the guy who sells all his shit because the stock market goes down on Monday.
If somebody claims that nothing special happened because "the stock market has been going down since the last ice age", and we can show that it actually has been going up this whole time, but suddenly crashed on Monday, then his claim is invalid, and we know something new must have happened.
Oceans rise and fall, old cities are abandoned and new ones are built. Humanity survived Meltwater Pulses 1a and b, and it will survive this one too.
I don't think there is any doubt that humanity will survive global warming but that is an incredibly low bar to set. Humanity also survives earthquakes, air disasters etc. but that does not mean that we don't try to reduce and/or protect ourselves from them. Improving the safety of planes costs money and increases ticket prices but, overall, is far better than having planes fall out of the sky and people die.
Global warming is the same. We will survive but there are likely to be significant famines, droughts, floods and huge migrations caused by it if we do not act to reduce the effects. Even ignoring the humanitarian aspect of this, purely economically we are going to be better off developing new technology to reduce and mitigate the effects than we are just dealing with the full impact of a significant temperature increase.
Sooo, is this your leftist fantasy of what people on the right believe?
And by demonizing and alienating the "other half" you expect to win some sort of moral victory... prove yourself intellectually superior? Prove you're more capable of critical thinking. Some of my conservative friends who are scientists and technologies would disagree with you.
The irony in your assumption-laden post is you're postulating that "righties" hate rich people, but isn't that the stance of the left? (Of course, unless said rich people agree with your politics.)