Giant Ice Shelf Snaps 529
Popo writes "Sattelite images have revealed that an ancient 66 square-kilometer ice shelf, the size of 11,000 football fields, has snapped off from an island in Canada's arctic. The Ayles Ice Shelf was one of 6 major shelves remaining in Canada's arctic and is estimated to be over 3000 years old. The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 km away picked up tremors. Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
Overlooked (Score:3, Insightful)
Won't someone think of the ice caps?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Non Global-Warming Activity (Score:2, Insightful)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
So what was the cause 30 years ago?
It's a fair question, yes? Like when I hear "such and such place recorded the highest temperature in 150 years this week!" I think "What caused the previous high 150 years agp?" My brain has a pesky habit of continually asking questions. All those X-Files episodes, I guess. Trust no one. Ideologues hate me.
Re:Drinks all around! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
So the ice shelf is 3000 years old. That means 4000 years ago it was so warm that it couldn't form.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
While you're asking good questions, add this one on: How is it that this thing is only 3000 years old? In geological timescales, that's nothing. The "blink of an eye." If it only just developed in the first place, why should we care that it's gone away again?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
And in this case, the 30 years figure is because observations of this kind done with satellites has only been possible for 30 years, and any prior event would be impossible to measure.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a natural cycle? How long has this particular event been brewing? Have there been any other factors involved that can be discovered? These questions need to be answered before causes can be decided.
I am concerned about global warming, but I am also concerned about political motivations determining hypothesis, or special interest groups leaping on events and trumpeting them as being caused by their particular bugbear.
Such things do not good science make, and we need good science to get to grips with the causes of these events, lest we wander too far from the truth of it.
Re:A river in Eygpt (Score:3, Insightful)
While it would be absolutely foolish to dispute the reality of global warming, many of the arguments for it actually being human induced are somewhat specious, simply because global temperature records do not go back for enough to make a statistically meaningful analysis of the cause.
I'm not saying that we aren't the cause, but before the last ice-age this planet was a whole lot warmer than it is right now, and it managed to chill eventually. This whole thing could just be part of the normal geological cycle.
Re:A river in Eygpt (Score:4, Insightful)
Should be 70 million tons of CO2 a day. But I'm sure it's the sun "surging" or something. Let's organize a space mission to toss giant ice cubes into the sun!
How much evidence do we need? (Score:1, Insightful)
can I take a shot. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I see where your going with this ie. is it a new event or just a re-occuring event. I'm a guess and say the first. You figure 30 years ago the ice shelves/glaciers were as much as twice as big as they are now. It all comes down to proportion. let say 30 years ago ice shelves represented about 500 square miles of area (ficticous number) this number proportionally wasnt' much. now lets reduce the total square footage of ice sheets by half, then break of the same amout. Yes it's the same as 30 years ago but proportionally it is significantly larger than in the past.
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Prior to "Global Warming" and its bogus Hockey Stick "study" it was Glaciation and/or Nuclear Winter, complimented by the Club of Rome "studies". In the last 25 years Time Magazine has had it both ways, but the solution is always the same: "Progressive" policies (read: Socialism/Communism).
It's common for the Extreme Left, and their fellow travelers in the Media, to invent disasters from selected data so they can save us all by the application of Socialism, at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
Re:How much evidence do we need? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not the same as saying I approve of global warming. I'm merely saying more data is required. I would be quite happy if the US and other lesser polluters stopped ripping into the ecosystem, but last I checked I'm not a global power, so I am unlikely to be able to stop anything the power hungry are doing.
Such feeling aside, my point remains.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a fair question, yes? Like when I hear "such and such place recorded the highest temperature in 150 years this week!" I think "What caused the previous high 150 years agp?" My brain has a pesky habit of continually asking questions.
The problem is, you need to ask the right questions - you are asking the wrong ones. What matters is not what caused an area of ice to break off 30 years ago. The correct question is: "How much faster is the ice breaking off now than then?" Just because it has taken 30 years for an area to exceed the previous record, does not mean that no ice has been breaking off since.... in fact, warming might might mean that smaller pieces break off more often, explaining the long time to break the record!
Re:Because we all know (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
We are the frog, and global warming is the means by which we are being boiled. We are the latter.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny how on the extremes of both ends, personal liberties are what we lose. How do we stay in the middle? Also a good question if you're stranded on a melting ice shelf...
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Extremists are extremists.. plain and simple.
The only difference is which liberties they want you to surrender & why.
To be fair, sometimes they ask you to do it for the common good
and not because of some boogeyman.
Re:How much evidence do we need? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many vast Ice sheets have cracked recently? I haven't heard of many. This may be a natural event, it's certainly on a scale we are not normally accustomed to envisaging. To definatelly point to a cause for a thing, it must be seen more then once, preferably many times. What if, for instance, Ice sheets crack constantly? Until the 19th century there was little interest in keeping an eye on Ice in the arctic, that's not much time for events on such a large scale to be observed.
Ice is melting all over the arctic it seems, and there are tentative links to global warming. However no-one has proven that these are not natural events slightly speeded up.
I'm not interested in getting the facts from whatever group can shout the loudest, or who succeeds in worrying the most people, I'm interested in knowing the precise cause, or combination of causes, before resorting to being scared to voice a variant opinion.
This is aside from my views on pollution. Even if it weren't allegedly messing with Ice sheets I'd still think pollution was a bad thing. I am very wary of jumping to conclusions though.
Re:A river in Eygpt (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you didn't bother to. Why should I?
The point of my post is that we have fewer carbon sequestering plants each day while the rate of CO2 deposition into the atmosphere is growing each day. There's evidence the CO2 deposition into the oceans is causing them to become more acidic, affecting calcium carbonate-dependent sea life - i.e. all of it.
Yes, oceans and trees absorb CO2 - at a constantly declining rate due to the finite capacity of water to hold dissolved carbon at atmospheric pressure and biological constraints - and in case you hadn't noticed, there are fewer trees globally every year - and usually because they're burned, which puts that C)2 right back into the atmosphere.
The earth's capacity to self-sequester C02 is declining at an increasing rate while we are depositing CO2 into the atmosphere at a constantly increasing rate. Is that clear enough for you?
Critical thinking = idiocy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
That was my point. apparently I was being too subtle for you. That England has been that warm in the "recent" past. While CO2 emmissions might be speeding up the normal cycle, fact is that weather temperatures go up and down. if the ice shelf is 3000 years old then it's younger than the pyramids and younger than the jewish religion.
let's put it into perspective shall we.
So ancient jews weren't civilized? or do you mean technologically advanced? There is a difference. I will assume you meant they weren't technologically advanced.
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have to mention that realclimate "debunked" the global cooling myth. It was never considered as a mainstream scientific belief, it only existed because of the popular press. The press gets most things wrong, can't distinguish between global dimming and global cooling. As for Nuclear Winter - thats the least of our worries if that many nukes were to be detonated in order to either cause an effect or not cause like that. It is a doomsday scenario, quite unlike global warming.
I have for a long time realised that categorizations like left or right don't make sense in the case of 80% of the population, especially across countries. Some of my ideas for an optimal society have socialist touches, but I also believe that personal liberties are not contradictory with them, quite the opposite. Even though the classification is quite flawed, I have to add that most of the civilized world is "extreme left" compared to the USA. Facts have a liberal bias and all that.
Anyway, back to the topic. Global warming is not the popular opinion. Or if it is, it is irrelevant. It is the peer reviewed mainstream scientific consensus. Science is powerful, and self checking. Many scientists have tried to falsify the conclusion that global warming is happening, but didn't manage to, thus we accept it as our standing theory in relation to the projected temperature change of the planet. That's how science works, by testable theories.
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
We had global warming 30 years ago? I thought we were all supposed to fear global cooling back then.
Seriously, if we had an event of this size a mere thirty years ago, it obviously isn't the one-of-a-kind end-of-the-world-in-twenty-years event the media is portraying it to be. What is the frequency of such events?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, no. The world will not grind to a halt because a few cities experience some flooding. Will it be inconvienient for some of the population? Sure. But to think that it would be some kind of economic catastrophy? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. If humanity has become so inflexible that a little flooding throws everything into chaos, than we are well overdue for evolution to wipe us off the planet.
Am I failing to see the big picture? Not at all. I just believe the world economy doesn't consist of a few metropolitan centers of which I would guess much less than 10% of the world's population inhabit.
Climate Change is real. Saying mankind is the cause, or that it will be our doom is nothing more than fear mongering. I'm more affraid of the people who want to try and stop the climate change cycle. The planet is not a static system, nor should it be just for the convienience of mankind.
As a disclaimer for my calous attitude, I don't own any ocean front property and will not shed a single tear for people who stand to lose it. That however doesn't mean I'm not studying the topography and making educated guesses on where the next beach front paradises are going to be...
Where was that? (Score:4, Insightful)
At the north pole, isn't every direction south?
Re:Critical thinking = idiocy? (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone tells you: "We haven't got a better football player for 20 years!", you think: "Mkay, so there *was* a better one before that!", no?
If there were no one better, the time mentioned would be longer.
It's only logical.
If you do not know when thermometers were invented, and do not know when satellites were invented... For what reason would you think in another way?
It's an incorrect way to write a statement in the first place - because it is misleading.
A more correct way to express this would be: "We have the highest temperature yet measured." or "It is the biggest chunk of ice broken loose we have observed with our satellites."
Yes, I am aware that the satellite part says "largest event in 30 years", the above is just an example.
I think that can be forgiven though - don't you?
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
What else does it mean? WARS. Lots and lots of wars. Wars almost always are about resources, and shrinking resources and accelerating ecological catastrophe means mankind goes apeshit. Hell, we've just killed 600 thousand people just to control the oil spigot to Asia. Imagine what people will do for livable land and a water supply. Hell, water holes worldwide are being PURCHASED by American speculator right now -- Enron was big into water supply futures before the bastards went dead, but others took their place. Raw capitalism may ignite war long before real changes occur, because the truly evil men in this world will start charging fortunes to access water supplies around the world. We're gonna need a really big army to keep off all the people who are going to want to kill us.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it serves someone's political interests.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but that is nonsense. Kobe is not Tokyo.
Correlation is not causatin. Let me say that again; correlation is NOT causation. Would the world climate be changing if mankind was not here? Yes. This is undisputed. So what makes you so sure that mankind is all of a sudden the cause? If we are the cause then without mankind the climate would not change, yet science has demonstrated that the climate has been changing for quite some time, in cycles of heating and cooling long before mankind could possibly have any effect. Is it likely that mankind has some effect on the climate? Sure. But when you state that mankind is the cause you are making far more assumptions than hard science can support.
No, only more assumptions than your assumptions support.
Of course correlation isn't causation. And, of course, climate would be changing if mankind were not here. The issue is how fast things are happening. Climate change is now happening beyond what the normal natural cycles predict.
Here are some established hard scientific facts:
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Increase CO2 concentration and you warm the planet. This is well established, and there is no doubt about it.
2. Mankind is increasing CO2 at a dramatic rate. Mankind is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that is way above anything that is happening in Nature - more than decomposition, more than volcanic activity. There is a large turnover of CO2, but the amount we are producing is overwhelming it.
So, for you to be right, either:
1. CO2 has ceased in some way to be a greenhouse gas, or
2. The CO2 mankind has produced is some sort of 'magic' CO2 that has special properties.
Which of these is true?
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, we weren't. That was simply media misreporting of recent discoveries of the timings of ice ages.
Seriously, if we had an event of this size a mere thirty years ago, it obviously isn't the one-of-a-kind end-of-the-world-in-twenty-years event the media is portraying it to be. What is the frequency of such events?
That doesn't matter. What matters is the overall frequency of all events which indicate melting. The frequency is high, and increasing. Within my lifetime (if I have a long life) the Artic will be free of ice in summertime. Will you still be doubting global warming even then?
Re:Non Global-Warming Activity (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:How much evidence do we need? (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell you what: let's have one Earth where GHG emissions are eliminated, and a second Earth where GHGs continue to be produced at their current, increasing, pace. Then we can see if it is a precise cause, based on whether or not each Earth becomes uninhabitable.
You can live on the second one.
- RG>
This just in: Slashdot taken over by Exxon Mobile (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it just me who is wondering why these GW denier posts are continually being modded up. I'm shocked at the way these skeptics arguments seem to dominate any discussion here. Are we nerds really this stupid?
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)