In I think it's best not to rely on our intuitions formed through our experience with small scale phenomena to anything this enormous. Best to leave that to the geophysicists.
I'm just responding to the poster's apparent belief that the fact that the volume of missing ice proves that sea level rise due to ice sheet collapse is implausible.
This by itself does not mean we'll have a 2m sea level rise. Predicting sea level rise depends on predicting our future behavior. There's a big difference between RCP 2.6 (we do everything possible to reduce greenhouse emissions) and RCP 8.5 (we do nothing).
It is my understanding that the middle-of-the road projections assume that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will remain mostly stable, and that most of the sea level projection is due to thermal expansion. This individual finding does not *necessarily* mean that that assumption is bad.
Like most scientfiic findings, it raises more questions than it answers. It means we need to take a closer look at other major ice bodies. If it's just this one that looks more unstable than we expected, then current middle-of-the-road projections of ice response to warming are still good. If we look and find this sort of thing happening all over the place, then we have to assume substantially higher sea level rise under the less optimistic scenarios like RCP 8.5.
I understand it's hard to grasp the scale of what we're talking about here. Just to give you a sense, the glacier in question has an area of 166,500 km^2 or roughly the same size as the country of Tunisia, and is about 300 meters thick. The area covered by Manhattan is only about 3/100 of 1% of that.
The volume of missing ice represents probably less than 1/500th of the ice in the glacier. It's not the volume lost already that's the concern, it's what the void says about the vastly larger volume of ice in that glacier. Internal melting means that there is some kind of water flow occurring, which could destabilize the entire glacier. That's over 45 gigatons of ice, enough to raise global sea level by over 1/10 of a cm.
Of course that's not very much. If this is the *only* land-based ice sheet or glacier that were unstable, it's not a sea level rise issue; it's equivalent to about one year's contribution of ocean thermal expansion to sea level rise.
This is kind of like finding a crack in an individual Airbus A380 wing; it's not very big compared to the wing's 420 m^2 area, and this is just one wing on one out of hundreds of A380 in service. That doesn't make it a small deal.
Actually, the temperature swings *are exactly* what the models were predicting even some twenty years ago: not just uniformly warmer *weather* but extreme local weather events.
If you look at maps of *global* temperature anomaly you can see why. Globally most places are warmer, but the greater energy in the atmosphere is causing warm air to intrude northward. Since air (or ocean for that matter) mixes *very* slowly on a global scale, that means the cold Arctic air doesn't just disappear, it gets displaced southward.
Sitting on one spot on the planet, you get *extreme* swings of temperature. I plotted the temperature swing at my house; it went down thirty five degrees C in *five hours*. Then after a couple days it rocketed up forty degrees overnight. Over in Chicago they had a *seventy degree* temperature swing over four days. If you're just thinking about your *local* weather, it seems mysterious. If you look at what's happening *globally* it's quite simple and straightforward.
I've been hearing this a lot more frequently recently, and I wonder what you think scientific "proof" is, and what happens when something is scientifically "proven"?
The reason I ask is that I'm married to a scientist (as it turns out a geophysicist), and as a technologist I've spent decades of my life dealing with scientists and scientific data, and I do not believe I have ever heard a scientist utter the word "proof" in connection to any scientific question. I've heard lawyers, politicians and other laymen do so... even science teachers. I've seen movie scientists talking about proving things. But never actual scientists, at least not when they're talking among themselves.
I think this is because "proof" presupposes something that's outside the scientific paradigm -- establishing a kind of unassailable truth.
It is simply factually false to say there are no findings that there has been warming, but I think you are using "finding" in a way that a scientists would not. There have been findings that contradict the warming hypothesis all along, as well as findings that support it. But when you look at systematic reviews, they have for decades now concluded that the bulk of the evidence is overwhelming in favor of anthropogenic climate change. But I have a feeling that isn't really "proof", which seems to mean "beyond any possible doubt".
I have managed cross-cultural teams, and the idea that there is some kind of cultural determinism in innovation is nonsense. Put people under enough pressure and they will innovate, if their leadership is effective. Give a team ineffective leadership, and it will fail, no matter what the culture. The only difference is the failure mode.
An American team with weak leadership will devolve into a pack of passive aggressive prima donnas . A team of Indians (note qualification: India is a big place with many distinct cultures) might devolve into a pack of yes-men who do what they're told and no more. These are both failures of leadership, the only difference stems from one peculiarly American cultural quirk: it's not considered disrespectful to publicly challenge the boss.
This doesn't make Americans better engineers; it makes them different to manage, and easier for an American to manage. Either way, you don't just rely on meetings to make great things happen; you have to cultivate a working relationship with each employee so you get the most out of him. You just use that relationship a little differently. Some people you have to cajole to get on board; other people you have to draw out. It's not necessarily always the ones you think either; people aren't cultural robots.
Eventually the Earth will be obliterated as the sun transforms into a red giant and engulfs it. So by the "destruction is eventually inevitable" standard I suppose you're right.
Well, it'd be more correct to say that there is no long-term nuclear disposal problem for most of us, because it's relatively simple to dispose of nuclear wastes in such a way that it won't pose problems for decades with near perfect confidence.
While I do think nuclear has a place in slowing the pace of climate change, we need to consider the impact on proliferation of nuclear being the only possible option for having a modern industrial economy. If we were to wave a wand and replace all the fossil fuel plants in the world with nuclear plants, that means, for example, Iran would have a nuclear program 10x its current size -- even larger if you want to replace ALL fossil fuel use. It would certainly be processing uranium ore on a vaster scale, and probably have a nuclear research program that could produce plutonium.
There's also the unspoken assumption that we must have a single, simple basket to put all our eggs in. The problem with putting all your eggs in one basket is you run into rising marginal environmental costs as you rapidly scale one thing, like nuclear power, in some kind of crash program. If we did that with nuclear today, we'd face a huge decommissioning problem in fifty years as a crisis rather than a gradually developing problem.
One of the big keys is electrifying more stuff, because electricity isn't a *source*, it's a distribution medium. It allows you to have multiple energy baskets to serve your demand eggs.
This is called appeal to the stone. I can turn it around on you: no YOU are the one who is being religious here.
Or I can take a more scientific approach and ask you this: how would you falsify your belief that climate isn't changing due to human activities?
There are, do doubt, some people on both sides who take their position on AGW in a pseudo-religious way; that has nothing to do with where the bulk of the evidence points.
"Uselessly credentialed" would include just about everyone.
In most US state, people aren't educated to think for themselves, they are educated to be capable of efficiently carrying out the orders of superiors. People who uncritically accept opinions from people they trust aren't some kind of accident.
I think we can get have a credible Mars program in place in ten years, if for some reason the public wanted that.
I think it would be physically possible -- although just barely -- to land a human on Mars in that timeframe, if cost and risk to that person are no object, which they will be.
Remember, half of all Mars missions have failed. Mars is hard; much harder than the Moon. The trip is long, requiring years of consumables to be packed and large quantities of fuel to be tankered. There are considerable health problems that a trip to Mars in an Apollo style vehicle would entail. You will likely need a vehicle of unprecedented size to provide radiation protection, supplies storage, and weight simulation.
After which they halted production, even though they had customers who wanted to buy.
The point is not to take anything away from Toyota or GM, but what they built in the 90s weren't intended to become production vehicles; they were more like large-run prototypes used to obtain real-world data on EVs. These vehicles were historically significant, but they didn't shake up the market and force other manufacturers to get into EVs.
That's partly a matter of timing. It couldn't be done prior to 2000; ten years in technology makes a big difference. But Tesla invested to get out in front of the curve, which is why Toyota turned to them for the 2nd gen RAV4 design.
Tesla makes cars for the rich, sure. But it has also revolutionized the industry by creating the first production electric car that wasn't a glorified golf cart.
As for launching satellites to LEO, most *nations* can't do that yet.
I have a younger relative who's an anti-vaxxer, and she has a master's degree in school counseling. She's not a bad person, in fact she's a good person but with overblown, romantic disposition that blinds her to her own folly on the issue.
Here's what I think happened. After Vietnam, and revelations about cigarette companies lying about lung cancer, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, we've done a good job teaching people to be wary of authority and corporate power. We haven't, however, done such a great job in giving them something *other* than trust in authority to fall back on. We haven't taught them to be skeptical.
Disbelieving a traditional authority figure and then putting your faith in an alternative authority is not skepticism. Treating every question of fact as if it were a matter of opinion isn't skepticism either. Both these things kinds of weak-tea skepticism are just alternative forms of credulity.
Will I need an umbrella tomorrow? I'm going to be in either New York or Denver.
As we demand forecasts become more *accurate* and *temporally* precise, we also need them to become more *geographically precise*. If you want to know whether you'll get rained on at exactly 10AM tomorrow morning, you have to use the forecast for the exact place you will be, not some place twenty miles away. If you look at high precision radar map it could be pouring in one place and completely dry ten miles away. As you integrate rainfall over the entire day, the variation smooths out, but not completely.
So for off-road motorsports, unless you are going around some kind of track it's probably impossible to predict exactly what weather you'll encounter, not without an exact itinerary that you follow strictly. Even if you stay in one area, the forecast for a nearby town probably isn't going to be that accurate on an hour by hour basis.
Oh, yes, which is why Marvel went from being rich back in 1996 to being bankrupt now... No wait, I have that backwards.
Not every business has to cater to *you*. If there are enough people like you, then businesses will find you. There are comic publishers who cater to libertarian, right-wing, even white supremacist tastes. Patronize the comic artists and publishers who produce what you want to see.
As Thoreau noted, a man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one. If Marvel and DC think it's profitable to cater to a gay feminist agenda, then wash your hands of them and stick with Vox Day.
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In I think it's best not to rely on our intuitions formed through our experience with small scale phenomena to anything this enormous. Best to leave that to the geophysicists.
I'm just responding to the poster's apparent belief that the fact that the volume of missing ice proves that sea level rise due to ice sheet collapse is implausible.
This by itself does not mean we'll have a 2m sea level rise. Predicting sea level rise depends on predicting our future behavior. There's a big difference between RCP 2.6 (we do everything possible to reduce greenhouse emissions) and RCP 8.5 (we do nothing).
It is my understanding that the middle-of-the road projections assume that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will remain mostly stable, and that most of the sea level projection is due to thermal expansion. This individual finding does not *necessarily* mean that that assumption is bad.
Like most scientfiic findings, it raises more questions than it answers. It means we need to take a closer look at other major ice bodies. If it's just this one that looks more unstable than we expected, then current middle-of-the-road projections of ice response to warming are still good. If we look and find this sort of thing happening all over the place, then we have to assume substantially higher sea level rise under the less optimistic scenarios like RCP 8.5.
I understand it's hard to grasp the scale of what we're talking about here. Just to give you a sense, the glacier in question has an area of 166,500 km^2 or roughly the same size as the country of Tunisia, and is about 300 meters thick. The area covered by Manhattan is only about 3/100 of 1% of that.
The volume of missing ice represents probably less than 1/500th of the ice in the glacier. It's not the volume lost already that's the concern, it's what the void says about the vastly larger volume of ice in that glacier. Internal melting means that there is some kind of water flow occurring, which could destabilize the entire glacier. That's over 45 gigatons of ice, enough to raise global sea level by over 1/10 of a cm.
Of course that's not very much. If this is the *only* land-based ice sheet or glacier that were unstable, it's not a sea level rise issue; it's equivalent to about one year's contribution of ocean thermal expansion to sea level rise.
This is kind of like finding a crack in an individual Airbus A380 wing; it's not very big compared to the wing's 420 m^2 area, and this is just one wing on one out of hundreds of A380 in service. That doesn't make it a small deal.
Good job on that straw man.
PLENTY of available land in Colorado!
If you don't mind the alternating droughts, floods, wildfires and plagues of insects.
Actually, the temperature swings *are exactly* what the models were predicting even some twenty years ago: not just uniformly warmer *weather* but extreme local weather events.
If you look at maps of *global* temperature anomaly you can see why. Globally most places are warmer, but the greater energy in the atmosphere is causing warm air to intrude northward. Since air (or ocean for that matter) mixes *very* slowly on a global scale, that means the cold Arctic air doesn't just disappear, it gets displaced southward.
Sitting on one spot on the planet, you get *extreme* swings of temperature. I plotted the temperature swing at my house; it went down thirty five degrees C in *five hours*. Then after a couple days it rocketed up forty degrees overnight. Over in Chicago they had a *seventy degree* temperature swing over four days. If you're just thinking about your *local* weather, it seems mysterious. If you look at what's happening *globally* it's quite simple and straightforward.
I've been hearing this a lot more frequently recently, and I wonder what you think scientific "proof" is, and what happens when something is scientifically "proven"?
The reason I ask is that I'm married to a scientist (as it turns out a geophysicist), and as a technologist I've spent decades of my life dealing with scientists and scientific data, and I do not believe I have ever heard a scientist utter the word "proof" in connection to any scientific question. I've heard lawyers, politicians and other laymen do so... even science teachers. I've seen movie scientists talking about proving things. But never actual scientists, at least not when they're talking among themselves.
I think this is because "proof" presupposes something that's outside the scientific paradigm -- establishing a kind of unassailable truth.
It is simply factually false to say there are no findings that there has been warming, but I think you are using "finding" in a way that a scientists would not. There have been findings that contradict the warming hypothesis all along, as well as findings that support it. But when you look at systematic reviews, they have for decades now concluded that the bulk of the evidence is overwhelming in favor of anthropogenic climate change. But I have a feeling that isn't really "proof", which seems to mean "beyond any possible doubt".
Satellite data, last I heard, has 2018 ranked sixth hottest of all time, so technically you're correct if you're talking about the RSS dataset.
I have managed cross-cultural teams, and the idea that there is some kind of cultural determinism in innovation is nonsense. Put people under enough pressure and they will innovate, if their leadership is effective. Give a team ineffective leadership, and it will fail, no matter what the culture. The only difference is the failure mode.
An American team with weak leadership will devolve into a pack of passive aggressive prima donnas . A team of Indians (note qualification: India is a big place with many distinct cultures) might devolve into a pack of yes-men who do what they're told and no more. These are both failures of leadership, the only difference stems from one peculiarly American cultural quirk: it's not considered disrespectful to publicly challenge the boss.
This doesn't make Americans better engineers; it makes them different to manage, and easier for an American to manage. Either way, you don't just rely on meetings to make great things happen; you have to cultivate a working relationship with each employee so you get the most out of him. You just use that relationship a little differently. Some people you have to cajole to get on board; other people you have to draw out. It's not necessarily always the ones you think either; people aren't cultural robots.
Eventually the Earth will be obliterated as the sun transforms into a red giant and engulfs it. So by the "destruction is eventually inevitable" standard I suppose you're right.
Well, it'd be more correct to say that there is no long-term nuclear disposal problem for most of us, because it's relatively simple to dispose of nuclear wastes in such a way that it won't pose problems for decades with near perfect confidence.
While I do think nuclear has a place in slowing the pace of climate change, we need to consider the impact on proliferation of nuclear being the only possible option for having a modern industrial economy. If we were to wave a wand and replace all the fossil fuel plants in the world with nuclear plants, that means, for example, Iran would have a nuclear program 10x its current size -- even larger if you want to replace ALL fossil fuel use. It would certainly be processing uranium ore on a vaster scale, and probably have a nuclear research program that could produce plutonium.
There's also the unspoken assumption that we must have a single, simple basket to put all our eggs in. The problem with putting all your eggs in one basket is you run into rising marginal environmental costs as you rapidly scale one thing, like nuclear power, in some kind of crash program. If we did that with nuclear today, we'd face a huge decommissioning problem in fifty years as a crisis rather than a gradually developing problem.
One of the big keys is electrifying more stuff, because electricity isn't a *source*, it's a distribution medium. It allows you to have multiple energy baskets to serve your demand eggs.
This is called appeal to the stone. I can turn it around on you: no YOU are the one who is being religious here.
Or I can take a more scientific approach and ask you this: how would you falsify your belief that climate isn't changing due to human activities?
There are, do doubt, some people on both sides who take their position on AGW in a pseudo-religious way; that has nothing to do with where the bulk of the evidence points.
"Uselessly credentialed" would include just about everyone.
In most US state, people aren't educated to think for themselves, they are educated to be capable of efficiently carrying out the orders of superiors. People who uncritically accept opinions from people they trust aren't some kind of accident.
As a software engineer I am disinclined to put my life in the hands of other software engineers if I can avoid it.
You end up with morons driving.
A rocket is the easy part.
I think we can get have a credible Mars program in place in ten years, if for some reason the public wanted that.
I think it would be physically possible -- although just barely -- to land a human on Mars in that timeframe, if cost and risk to that person are no object, which they will be.
Remember, half of all Mars missions have failed. Mars is hard; much harder than the Moon. The trip is long, requiring years of consumables to be packed and large quantities of fuel to be tankered. There are considerable health problems that a trip to Mars in an Apollo style vehicle would entail. You will likely need a vehicle of unprecedented size to provide radiation protection, supplies storage, and weight simulation.
After which they halted production, even though they had customers who wanted to buy.
The point is not to take anything away from Toyota or GM, but what they built in the 90s weren't intended to become production vehicles; they were more like large-run prototypes used to obtain real-world data on EVs. These vehicles were historically significant, but they didn't shake up the market and force other manufacturers to get into EVs.
That's partly a matter of timing. It couldn't be done prior to 2000; ten years in technology makes a big difference. But Tesla invested to get out in front of the curve, which is why Toyota turned to them for the 2nd gen RAV4 design.
Nope. Like the GM EV1, the 1st Gen RAV4 EV was lease only. The second gen RAV4 EV was designed in conjunction with, wait for it.... Tesla.
The anti-vaxx conspiracy theory is that Big Pharma have co-opted scientists.
Tesla makes cars for the rich, sure. But it has also revolutionized the industry by creating the first production electric car that wasn't a glorified golf cart.
As for launching satellites to LEO, most *nations* can't do that yet.
I have a younger relative who's an anti-vaxxer, and she has a master's degree in school counseling. She's not a bad person, in fact she's a good person but with overblown, romantic disposition that blinds her to her own folly on the issue.
Here's what I think happened. After Vietnam, and revelations about cigarette companies lying about lung cancer, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, we've done a good job teaching people to be wary of authority and corporate power. We haven't, however, done such a great job in giving them something *other* than trust in authority to fall back on. We haven't taught them to be skeptical.
Disbelieving a traditional authority figure and then putting your faith in an alternative authority is not skepticism. Treating every question of fact as if it were a matter of opinion isn't skepticism either. Both these things kinds of weak-tea skepticism are just alternative forms of credulity.
Will I need an umbrella tomorrow? I'm going to be in either New York or Denver.
As we demand forecasts become more *accurate* and *temporally* precise, we also need them to become more *geographically precise*. If you want to know whether you'll get rained on at exactly 10AM tomorrow morning, you have to use the forecast for the exact place you will be, not some place twenty miles away. If you look at high precision radar map it could be pouring in one place and completely dry ten miles away. As you integrate rainfall over the entire day, the variation smooths out, but not completely.
So for off-road motorsports, unless you are going around some kind of track it's probably impossible to predict exactly what weather you'll encounter, not without an exact itinerary that you follow strictly. Even if you stay in one area, the forecast for a nearby town probably isn't going to be that accurate on an hour by hour basis.
Oh, yes, which is why Marvel went from being rich back in 1996 to being bankrupt now... No wait, I have that backwards.
Not every business has to cater to *you*. If there are enough people like you, then businesses will find you. There are comic publishers who cater to libertarian, right-wing, even white supremacist tastes. Patronize the comic artists and publishers who produce what you want to see.
As Thoreau noted, a man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one. If Marvel and DC think it's profitable to cater to a gay feminist agenda, then wash your hands of them and stick with Vox Day.