Capitalizing on Melting Polar Ice 505
efuzzyone writes "As an affect of global warming, the polar ice caps seem to be slowly receding, what do you do? The NYT reports it is a gold rush, 'the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars.' Also, 'polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries.'"
Maybe we should worry about the ice, not profit (Score:1, Insightful)
Humans are stupid.
Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
With all of these benefits who cares about preventing damage to our environment?!</sarcasm>
How ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
DONT FEEL RIGHT (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Money : Because killing 6 billion people just to make some more was so worth it, now that it's totally useless because everyones dead and paper has no use when it's already doodled on.
New cruise ship destinations? (Score:3, Insightful)
FIVE DAYS lag time on Slashdot now? (Score:1, Insightful)
Lemmings for sale (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe we should worry about the ice, not profit (Score:3, Insightful)
"I can always buy air filters with my money," or something to that effect. It's gosh darn arrogant goatse-holes like that that make the world a harder place to live.
Blame Canada (Score:1, Insightful)
Big deal. I could as easily and justly consider the moon and all the stars to be my own personal property.
Unless Canada can think of a legitimate reason why 600 years of seafaring tradition should be abandoned, they should shut up. Their writ does not extend more than three miles off shore, same as ours. The Law of the Sea, both formal and informal, has long recognized that navigable deep water "belongs" to anyone and everyone.
Moreover, Canada is always first in line to bitch about American exceptionalism and our contempt for international law. I'd say they should practice what they preach, but instead I'll note that all nations, at all times, have no more morals or ethics than my little fingernail. Nations always do what is in their own self-interest, and nothing but what is in their own self-interest.
And right now, with the USSR defeated and America pretty much doing what it pleases in the world, it is in the interest of many Lilliputian nations to band together to tie down Gulliver. The goals and moral sensibilities of many do-gooding leftists happen to coincide with the internationalist, anti-American platitudes currently being mouthed by the ruling elites in places like Canada and France, but the Left shouldn't delude itself that the Canadian or French governments would behave much better than the American government if their roles were reversed. Politicians are the same everywhere, and so are voters.
-ccm
help me out here... (Score:2, Insightful)
They also said we created the hole in the ozone; however in 2004 the hole in the ozone was recorded as getting smaller by up to 20%. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNe
Take a few hours and read about how much crap volcanoes spew into the environment (e.g. sulfur dioxide). Do some Google searches on how many erupt each year... compare that with our fossil burning. The environmentalists have always been pretty disappointed with the results. Don't forget to include the ocean volcanoes when you do it.
Still think we are causing global warning? Remember the Ice Age? Scientists are starting to dispute whether or not an asteroid caused it. Where were we with our wicked cars then? We all know that Solar activity had been written off as crap until recently when the numbers were just to obvious... the environmentalists account for it now by saying that ONLY 10-30% of the warning is being caused by the sun.
I just wish you guys would preface all your "we are killing the earth" talk with, hey we really don't know, but we THINK "we are killing the earth". I certainly will ay I don't know for sure, but the evidence isn't cut and dry in your favor. The media is, but not the facts. Just some food for though. I know I'm going to get slammed for this post, the same way I do when I defend MS, but hey what can ya do?
Re:No change in sea level (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two other effects to consider however - you alluded to the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica, which would have a much greater effect on sea level if they should melt or even just flow into the ocean faster than they do now. With the polar ice cap gone, the Greenland ice cap would probably move faster and possibly even disintegrate.
The other effect is that once you get above about 4 degrees C, water starts expanding again. So if the entire volume of ocean water becomes warmer on average, you may well get a rise in sea level even without the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps melting (the quibble is whether enough of the water will remain around 4 degrees C where it reaches minimum volume per unit mass - this is going to be difficult to compute because the effect of a melting polar ice cap on ocean currents is hard to predict accurately).
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
can someone say CRAP! (Score:2, Insightful)
Amazing, how stoopid humans are, we just deserve to be eradicated.
Re:The first thing I though of.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No change in sea level (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't know, I guess it could all just be floating around.
Your poor research has lead to false facts. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll put it in a voice that fellow geeks can understand. The skewed facts of global warming is much like that of music downloads effecting cd sales. Harvard did a study on it, and found out the facts were taken over a span that just tap the boost in cd sales due to everyone switching over from cassette. Of course sales were booming. After people rebought old music and started buying new, it slowed down. This just happened to start at the beggining of p2p. If you ignore the boost cause here, I believe the article said music sales were only lowered by
So you are right, stupid humans. Stupid for not seeing the other side of things.
Kyoto is useless... (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead we have whiney Euro politicians who want to appease their Green parties and stick it to the Americans, while avoiding fulfiling their obligations as much as humanly possible.
International Treaties aren't worth the paper they are written on.
Re:Anyone.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of like that tsunami that hit indonesia a little while back. Tons of devastation, killed over 100,000 people. Wikipedia reports only 1200 deaths from hurricane katrina. Only 2000 US soldiers have died in Iraq. 200,000 Allied soldiers died during the battle of normandy. Americans don't even remember what real devastation is, and some have never ever experienced it. At least not first hand. They hear about it on the news, but it's hard to relate to pictures on a tv screen. Maybe this is why so many people forget how vulnerable we are. Because in the last 50 years, there has been very little in terms of real devastation.
Re:help me out here... (Score:2, Insightful)
The other day I thought my wife was having a heart attack, but hey I don't really know that, I only THINK that's what was happening. I'm going to wait a few more days to see what happens, and then I'll decide if it's worthwhile to take her to the hospital. After all, I only have evidence, not proof.
Republicans Hate the Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst American politician whiner was Bush, who whined "we'll give you something better than Kyoto" when he rejected it. Just another lie from Bush, who has given us nothing but tax rebates on SUVs that did nothing but further break the environment, and even break the American carmakers' future sales, driving them to the brink of bankruptcy.
Just to complete your Bushwacko rhetoric, your "aren't worth the paper they're printed on" was Bush's comment about our Social Security "lockbox" that he looted, referring to the debt he owes us to finance his $3TRILLION annual budget, his $45TRILLION in committed debt. When, in fact, those Social Security debts, backed by US Treasury Bills, are by law the highest priority debt obligation of the US government. Bush is talking about defaulting on America's $TRILLIONS in debt, which would do for our country what he's been doing to the economy and the environment. And you're happily parroting his insane talking points. You really deserve the ecocaust you're courting. But I don't.
Extinct animals or increased human prosperity (Score:3, Insightful)
Humans would have to give up their multi billion dollar coastal mansions and their riverboat gambling. Eskimos would have to get real jobs instead of living off welfare in the middle of nowhere. Antarctic scientists would have to shift to rainforest studies. There wouldn't be any more arctic polar bears.
On the other side, we'd consume much less energy for heating. 1000 less marines would die every year extracting heating oil from terrorists. Russia and Canadia would become inhabitable.
Re:help me out here... (Score:1, Insightful)
Casting doubt on whether we are the primary cause isn't going to help either. If we're contributing to the problem, the other factors you mentioned don't matter much, since they're pretty much out our control.
We aren't killing the earth, but we are (with a little help from mother nature) making it harder for the human race (and of course other organisms) to live on this planet. There is truth in: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
_V_
Re:Yep (Score:1, Insightful)
Good Point... (Score:3, Insightful)
The right way to judge a situation is not emotionally, or sentimentally, but through cost-benefit analysis. As an example, I'm afraid that environment==good :. kyoto == good is simply not a logical assertion. First of all, the environment is not intrinsically worthy... what makes a bunch of carbon atoms organized as molecular skeletons any more important than carbon atoms organized as a rock? You would be hard pressed to come up with a formula. Sentience on the other hand introduces a whole new prospect of morality and evaluations of worth that can exist without a reductionist deduction from particles and and particle properties. (You can argue that sentience does not make us any more important than other molecular aggregates, but then you are arguing the irrelevance of your own stake in the argument, so forgive me if I don't feel too bad about neglecting a critical analysis of that philosophy.)
So in an analytic, rational way, we should look at what outcome, subsuming all its possible advantages and disadvantages, is to the greatest benefit of mankind. Global warming is not ipso facto a bad thing just because that's how people spin it when they talk about it. The earth used to be rather more tropical than it is now. Is it's moving back in that direction a bad thing? Was it's moving out of the ice age a bad thing? Could global warming stave off what would cyclically appear to be the inevitable of another earth iceage?
I think most people are rather more reactionary than they should be about this topic. Global warming != the sky is falling, global warming == gradual climactic change we are faced with drawing up a reasonable response to. Rising sea levels over a hundred years is not a big deal. Coastal cities face infinitely more peril from sudden oceanic storms than waters that will take hundreds of years to reach them. We should certainly consider what the effect will be on ecosystems, what species will die off, and whether we want to accept this as another stage in earth's evolution (mass extinctions are nothing new) or if we want to stick our noses in and try to keep things the way we like it. But "The earth is doomed!" is not a terribly levelheaded approach. The sky is not falling, people. Climactic change is something that planets do. It is quite possible that a warmer earth may be a bad thing for us, and that we should invest to arrest its change. It is also possible that it is a very good thing, or that we simply do not have the capacity to affect it significantly at all. My recommendation is simply that we recognize (1) change != apocalypse (2) that doesn't mean taking action is not warranted, only that we should not be reactionary about it.
Re:Kyoto is useless... (Score:1, Insightful)
The rest of the world should only pay their own way to meet the full terms of the Kyoto agreement.
As I have said, the US can do a lot to clean up its own act. What obligation does the US have, though, to financially pay for the rest of the world to clean up their act?
AC specifies above:
Kyoto asks Western nations to lower CO2 emissions by 500M tonnes by 2012. In 2012 China will bring online coal-powered electric generation plants that will produce 5,000M tonnes of CO2. Yup, Kyoto is useless.
Now, if this is indeed true, why should America pay to make these Coal plants cleaner burning? America has a big enough burden paying for its eco-friendly tasks.
If you can afford to build it, you can afford to build it right. What's wrong with that theory, aye? Am I really an arrogant, ignorant American? Or am I just concerned with the way the world keeps forgetting that the US actually does the right thing once in a while (as seldom as it may actually be)?
Re:help me out here... (Score:2, Insightful)
> us all during the 80's and 90's. How come we have had the terrible hurricanes
> this year and last...
I don't recall any such thing being said, but then I did smoke alot of pot during the 90s. Like a proper hippy should.
It's not as simple as the oceans cooling en masse. The melting of arctic ice affects the gulf stream, lessening the flow of warm water northwards. Thus tropical oceans are warmer causing more hurricanes.
> Why is it happening if the ice caps are melting? How about explaining
> Antarctica's glaciers getting larger?
> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1806 [newscientist.com]
You really shouldn't confuse trends with single instances. That article itself asks whether this reversal is a trend or a blip: " The big question is if the change marks the end of the retreat, or just a short-lived reversal."
Even if the antarctic ice sheet is expanding, you might have observed that the emphasis these days is not on global warming but climate change. And climate change will benefit nobody but speculators.
> They also said we created the hole in the ozone; however in 2004 the hole in
> the ozone was recorded as getting smaller by up to 20%.
That's one year. See http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=graph+ozone+h
> Still think we are causing global warning? Remember the Ice Age?
I don't think you appreciate the sensitivity of complex systems. Yeah global climate changes. But a giga tonnage of atmospheric CO2 released over a much shorter period of time than the system is used to, could cause all sorts of changes to the system.
Spend a few hours studying chaotic systems and how minor changes in quasi periodic systems can cause a bifurcation into a completely new set of behaviours.
The idea anyway, as people keep trying to point out, is that we take care to value our environment and our effect on it over plastic crapola, fat cars and not giving a toss about anything but the here and now.
> I know I'm going to get slammed for this post, the same way I do when I defend
> MS, but hey what can ya do?
Not try to play devil's advocate.
It's not a liability, it's an opportunity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately doing so would require both business and political leaders with vision. Something we lack bigtime.
North Polar icecap melt will (Score:4, Insightful)
Flooded = gone (Score:5, Insightful)
>
> So relax, the Pacific islands aren't going anywhere.
But anything built on them or growing on them will be going away if/when they get flooded.
The islands may indeed catch up to even something like a 5m rise in sea level, but even if it's in such a ridiculously short time as 100 years, that means (a) they cease to exist as islands for the near future, (b) they're scoured of all terrestrial life, and (c) all buildings and equipment on the islands are destroyed.
In other words, the islands are gone, at least as far as current human use of them is concerned. Witness what 5m of flooding did to New Orleans in just 3 weeks.
> Why do people discard rational thought when discussing the Kyoto treaty?
A fine question indeed.
Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
"If Clinton commanded a congress with a dominant Democrat majority, as Bush commands a Republican majority, the Kyoto protocol would have passed under his administration."
Please explain to me this contradiction. Or are you saying that there was 95 Republicans in the Senate and 5 Democrats?
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Your argument is a logical fallacy. It does not disprove a link between CO2 and temperatures on earth, it simply shows that it's not as simple and straight forward as you'd wish. If there was a 1:1 correspondence between CO2 and temperature anywhere, figuring this all out would be a piece of cake.
The fact that there isn't a 1:1 correspondence does not mean that there is no effect. It just means that the timescale and other factors affecting temperatures over the course of 5-30 years is not insignificant.
I find it absurd that you are attempting to discredit something using a 30 year timescale when all of the scientific community is studying data covering a half million years to try and figure out how big the CO2 effect is.
Finally looking at the chart you quoted, you are doing something that every newbie BSc/MSc student does - you are giving a huge weight to minor jigs and jags in a graph. I look at that graph, and I see an upward trend over the past 120 years. At most we can say there is a dip of some type between 1960 and 1990 - geeze, wonder what caused that, maybe there are other mechanisms that affect how warm the earth is? You figure? The existence of other things (say a volcanoe lowering temps for 10 years) doesn't disprove a link between CO2 and temperature.
What I love about the American viewpoint towards Kyoto is the whining child like "if they won't do it then I won't either", along with the obstinate expectation that just because everyone else in the world isn't industrialized yet they shouldn't ever be allowed to have an industrialized first world emission level. A real adult would realize that it's not a valid excuse to do nothing ourselves. How can we ever ask them (once they are getting fully industrialized) to keep their emissions down when you've spent another 50 years with no restrictions? You want to wait until they're as bad as you to finally have everyone agree to the same targets? Idiotic and short sighted.
.
Try telling that to the residents of Tuvalu (Score:4, Insightful)
But Europeans are ruining their economies.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, Kyoto is fatally flawed because it seeks to manage the atmosphere by controlling emissions, rather than by mandating or establishing a carbon sink. And its a consumer pays treaty, not a producer pays treaty, so the USA would have to foot the bill, when OPEC should be.
Re:Kyoto is useless... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, perhaps you knew you were wrong in the first place, but besided to say it anyway? Well, yes you are wrong. The US is by far the worst polluter (OVERALL, not Per Capita) in the world. The difference is that they don't pollute into the heart of their urban areas, so it's not visible to the average citizen. Some statistics to back this up:
Carbon Dioxide Emissions [nationmaster.com]
Energy consumption [ourplanet.com]
The central argument of your whole post is destroyed when you discover that your basic premise is wrong. Everyone in the world agrees that there is man-made global warming. Only in the US has the propaganda been strong enough to still sustain a debate, no matter how senseless. EVEN BUSH finally admitted [bbc.co.uk] that humans are causing global warming. Perhaps you need to admit to yourself that it's possible you could be wrong, and that the attachment to your lifestyle and your nationalism is what makes you so apprehensive of seeing the truth.
Re:Kyoto is useless... (Score:2, Insightful)
The U.S. as a country needs a collective kick in the ass to learn that they can't treat the rest of the world as their cheap labour and as if they were inferior. Otherwise sooner or later (probably within the next 10-25 years) they will be surpassed and then we'll see how the rest of the world feels like treating the U.S..
BTW the retoric about the U.S. being "the leader of the free world" is pure bullshit. A leader of the Free World wouldn't invade/disrupt other countries/governments just because they don't like their political ideology or the price of a certain natural resource.
Re:Republicans Hate the Earth (Score:2, Insightful)
As Kyoto sets up an international trading system in "emission rights", the signatories are not obliged to reach hard emission targets: They can opt to pay cash instead. I would have assumed that this free-market approach to environmental policy has appeal to economic conservatives, but apparently they are too busy sticking their heads in the sand.
The argument that Kyoto is ruinous for the economy makes very little sense. Apart from the damage that will be done by unchecked global warming, it makes both economic and political sense to reduce the consumption of such fuels. It would still make sense, even if there was no climate change connected to it at all. We are seeing the end of cheap oil supplies, and over the next decades the more energy-efficient (and self-sufficient) economies will have an important competitive advantage.
As for the "failing euro", what failing euro? The currency that has taken a steep plunge in recent times is the US dollar. Admittedly less so because of any fundamental problems with the US economy, than because of the financial market distrust of the haemorrhaging US debt -- and the apparent total indifference of the debtor concerning his ability to finance (let alone repay) his debt to the rest of the world.
Simply wonderful (Score:2, Insightful)