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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.
Contrary to what many American believe, the total surface area of world is much larger than the USA. So the 4 ft of water are just distributed a lot more across the many oceans.
You better hope it's warming. If we returned to an ice age so many far leftists would die. So would real people.
You tell'em Bill Joe! Why when sea levels rise and swamp the coasts, all them coastal elites are gonna get flooded - just like in the Bible!! And when their multi-million dollar beach house gets flooded, it'll be declared a disaster area, they'll get some big gubberment checks all paid for by the lower classed - especially all them hard working people in the fly-over states!
And that's the way it should be. Because rich people deserve it!
And as the temperatures rise and destroy fisheries, why the coastal elitist fishermen will have to get gubberment subsidies to help them - all paid for the the US taxpayer.
See, the leftists want to raise taxes because leftists love paying taxes - it's kind of kink with them. But the conservatives have a better plan. The one they've used since President Saint Reagan: borrow and spend.
I tell you this leftist fanaticism with Global Warming and wanting to raise taxes because of this "crisis" is just so lefty. Cleaning up the environment! PFFT!
Why can't they just enjoy the pollution like a good American! And look at this propagranda from this Aye-Rab site! Come on! Everyone knows that Diesel fumes and exhaust makes one a man!
Lefties!! Always bitching and moaning about nonsense. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm go'in to the border in my tricked out F-250 and AR-15 and head off the invasion from the Aye-Rabs and Mexi-canns trying to come here to go on welfare, Medicaid, and to mow our lawns.
No, it isn't because, as you know, the US isn't under 4 feet of water.
Your comment is hard to follow. The "lower 48" U.S. states comprise about 3 million square kilometers. The surface area of the Earth is a little over 500 million square kilometers. The meltwater from melting glaciers doesn't only go to the lower 48 US states; it equilibrates all around the world.
This is a visualization analogy intended to give the public a quantitative feel for what 10.6 trillion tons of water is. Sort of like expressing data in terms of libraries of congress. It is not anywhere a statement that the melted water did cover the lower 48 U.S. states, and no other part of the world.
Or maybe they mean "lost" like they can't find it, but given the rest of the summary they seem to mean it's melted.
Most native English speakers can understand the different uses of the word "lost". Especially when the very next sentence uses the word "melted". In this case "lost" means lost by melting, the way your ice water loses its ice when it sits on the table. Gone, in the form of ice, but the water comprising the ice is still here.
Nope, the warming from the last ice age peaked about 8000 years ago, and turned into (very slow) cooling, until last century when global warming accelerated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You better hope it's warming. If we returned to an ice age so many far leftists would die. So would real people.
The greatest part of climate science, of course, has been the study of the causes of the ice ages. Even the understanding of the greenhouse effect was started, initially, from atmospheric scientists trying to understand the role that atmospheric gasses play in the cycle of glaciation (a significant role, as it happens).
The understanding of the causes of ice ages, and the glacial advances and retreats within an ice a, is getting pretty good now. We've understood that Milankovich variations are the trigger for decades now, but the models are now good enough that we are beginning to understand the details, including the feedback effects that amplify the relatively small Milankovich variations into hemispheric and global climate patterns.
Ice ages are a bit harder to model than current climate, of course, because we directly measure the inputs to current climate-- we know exactly the amount of energy put out by the sun, for example-- while we have to calculate historical forcing factors from proxy measurements. But nevertheless, the work is being done.
That does not contradict it. It just shows that in some places is gains and in others it loses. It's about net loss of gain, whichever you prefer. The summary is not clear on that though.
Sig?
Depending on who you believe, the average sea level is rising somewhere around 2mm per year. Around 1mm per year is attributable to thermal expansion of the oceans. The rest must be melt water from glaciers and snow on land.
So, check my math: The surface area of the oceans is 3.4 * 10^8 square kilometers, or 3.4 * 10^14 square meters. Each millimeter of sea level rise then corresponds to 3.4 * 10^11 cubic meters, which happens to be 340 billion tons of water. Pretty close to their 390 billion tons.
So their figure makes sense. I suppose it's useful as confirmation, but it's hardly anything new or unexpected. But the big numbers impress clueless journalists...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
300 trillions of water molecules are thrown in the air when I sneeze. "390 billion tons of ice and snow", what's that compared to the oceans weight? What's that compared to 50 years ago? Big numbers are impressive, but need to be relative, to be credible.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That this post was voted 'interesting' is a sad indictment on our public education system (and slashdot posters in general.)
I guess nothing sounds impressive if you compare it to something else that's much bigger.
Check out the brains on this one!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Did you link the wrong page? That only goes a thousand years back, not eight thousand..
Correct. I wanted to show the sudden recent change (i.e. the "hockey stick"), and the 1000 year graph shows that more clearly.
There's no way that "coming out of an ice age" can cause a sudden increase in warming, like that graph shows.
Your study is about Antarctica, the study in the article is about the entire world.
The ongoing rise in sea level confirms that there's a net loss of ice in the world.
Everyone knows the hockey stick is bogus manipulation of data
Nope, the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies. You can find plenty of references in the wikipedia page above. And if you dismiss all of the data, then what are you going to use to show that "we are still coming out of an ice age" as GP tried to claim?
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.
global warming is no more leftist than Team Trump building gas chambers for Muslims.
If you've got it relative to psychokinetic energy I can do the conversion myself.
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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.)