NOAA: Arctic Likely Free Of Summer Ice By 2050 — Possibly Much Sooner 335
Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have published research into the shrinking levels of sea ice in the Arctic. They wanted to figure out how long it would take before summer sea ice disappeared entirely. Since there's no perfect model for predicting ice levels, they used three different methods. All three predicted the Arctic would be nearly free of summer sea ice by the middle of the century, and one indicated it could happen as early as 2020. Two of the methods were based on observed sea ice trends. If ice loss proceeds as it has in the past decade, we get the 2020 timeframe. If ice loss events are large, like the 2007 and 2012 events, but happen at random some years, the estimate is pushed back to 2030. The third method uses global climate models to 'predict atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea ice conditions over time.' This model pushes the timeframe back to 2040 at the earliest, and around 2060 as the median (abstract). One of the study's authors, James Overland, said, "Rapid Arctic sea ice loss is probably the most visible indicator of global climate change; it leads to shifts in ecosystems and economic access, and potentially impacts weather throughout the northern hemisphere. Increased physical understanding of rapid Arctic climate shifts and improved models are needed that give a more detailed picture and timing of what to expect so we can better prepare and adapt to such changes. Early loss of Arctic sea ice gives immediacy to the issue of climate change."
Hurry up damnit (Score:4, Funny)
The only chance (and it's a damned small one) of getting the various political entities motivated to actually do something is for major shifts to happen in a time frame so obvious that even Rush Limbaugh can figure out there is an issue. If the Arctic weather system collapses, pushes the jet stream away and lets Europe freeze ...
Damn it again.
That'll just confuse them even more.
We're doomed.
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what, will the political entities regulate the sun to run smoother ?
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Left up to some US state legislators, they'd probably try.
Look you loons, the climate IS changing, humans ARE pushing the carrying capacity of the planet, things ARE going to come to a head. Most likely in the lifetimes of some of the younger Slashdotters or at longest, their progeny (assuming a few will, like the original land dwelling animals, crawl out of the swamp and reproduce).
Details left as an exercise for the student or their favorite dystopian author.
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humans ARE pushing the carrying capacity of the planet
Hold on! I'm not a climate change denier, but this claim screams for a citation.
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That's slashdot for you. Climate change isn't real, but humans are a cancer that should be destroyed.
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That's kinda the point of my post. It's a weird juxtaposition of posters here.
Re:Hurry up damnit (Score:5, Informative)
Boy this was hard [wikipedia.org].
Or even harder [lmgtfy.com]
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What makes you think Limbaugh doesn't know GW is happening?
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Which is probably why I always get downmodded by members of both parties.
Re:Do what? It's already done. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hardly liberal. If you think that most conservatives like Mr. Limbaugh you live in an especially special place.
No, frakking isn't going to help much of anything except give us a few years before fossil fuel costs really go through the roof. It's not going to help unload the excess carbon from the environment. Natural gas is only marginally 'greener' than coal. Not enough to matter.
Nuclear power is another subject. IF we could do it correctly (better siting, upgrading, monitoring and decomissioning of plants as well as some sort of half reasonable way to deal with waste) it would be fine. Since we seem to be doing none of those things and since even solar and wind are cost comparable to nucs, it's not much of an answer, IMHO.
Kyoto was a bad political joke and had little to do with slowing global warming. It was simply a test of political will and as such, failed.
And yes, if humans, especially those in a 'leadership' position did something other than try to outrace the next guy in terms of carbon consumption it might help. However, the real problem is the several billion people trying to work their way up from dismal poverty to something better and scooping up all sorts of resources in the process. Can't say I blame them, but it is causing enormous, intractable problems.
All in all, Homo Industrialis won't deal with this problem very well. But it will get dealt with. It's just going to be ugly, protracted and scary.
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Finally (Score:3, Funny)
Do you know how long we've waiting for the Northwest Passage to open up? Finally we will be able to move goods between Europe and Asia in weeks rather than months!
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The Northwest Passage has opened repeatedly since at least the early 20th Century.
maundering along to the future... (Score:2, Interesting)
Too late (Score:5, Interesting)
Climatology isn't a dart board, you don't make a ton of predictions and then claim you are right when one of them hits. You go back and do further research to understand the climate better.
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Climatology isn't a dart board, you don't make a ton of predictions and then claim you are right when one of them hits.
When there's a lot of scientists, there is likely to be a lot of predictions. Some may be well founded, some may just be lucky but the one scientist who made the right prediction is probably going to say he was right because he was. It's the model's performance over time that'll matter.
Re:Too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Empirical curve fitting suggests sooner. (Score:5, Informative)
One approach looks only at ice volume measurements, and explicitly ignores theory because the existing theoretical models failed to predict anything like the ice loss that we observed. Using the simplest accelerating-curve-fit, we get first ice free in September 2017, and six months per year ice free by 2025.
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/08/more-on-arctic-sea-ice-volume.html [blogspot.com]
Re:Empirical curve fitting suggests sooner. (Score:4, Informative)
Here are more curves that were posted in the comments of the blog you're linking:
https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas [google.com]
Clearly, the exponential model has the best fit (which is not very surprising), and says 2015, take or give 1 year for 95% confidence. Of course, there is no theoretical model behind, but most of the time, the theoretical explanation comes after the empirical fit.
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There are a couple of good "Arctic Death Spiral" plots out there, none of them look very encouraging.
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> There are a couple of good "Arctic Death Spiral" plots out there,
> none of them look very encouraging.
Here's another worth looking at:
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No? I didn't think so.
Sigh...
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Exponential may have the best fit, but exponential is a very aggressive estimate. Quadratic is a conservative simple choice, and it's not completely divorced from theory -- the short-term "obvious" additional heat input is linear in reduced albedo, which gives you quadratic.
I'm not terribly happy at just saying "screw the theory, look at the curve fitting", but theory (such as we know it, which is a lot of the problem here) has severely underpredicted the melting.
A test problem from my applied probability class (Score:4, Interesting)
We took a look at past average temperatures and plotted the standard deviation and where the last 10 years of temperatures lie. The odds of this being a natural trend basically exceeded the age of the universe.
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And how far back did your past data go?
When wasn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
- Washington Post, 1922
( based on this original: http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf [noaa.gov] )
Dumb (Score:2)
The Greenland Riviera (Score:2)
Is the next real estate bubble.
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I'll be betting that it'll be wrong again. Then again if it's "ice free" by the summer of said year, we'll actually be at a point where we were previous to the last ice age. Which of course could mean really good stuff, or really bad stuff depending on your PoV.
Re:Or not... (Score:5, Interesting)
hey, give them some credit - at least it's a testable prediction that can falsify their model. That's progress.
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Its not testable at all. Its a prophecy set so far into the future that the modellers will likely be dead before 2050. There is no way to tell in any intervening period before then that the claim can be proven false.
Its not science at all. Its a religious belief in the validity of mathematical models which cannot predict climate in the near term better than by chance.
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hey, give them some credit - at least it's a testable prediction that can falsify their model. That's progress.
Not entirely sure what you mean - because of course models are inherently testable. If they show a meaningful result at all this result can be compared to what actually happens == testable.
By this means models which are inaccurate are discarded and models which aren't are kept. Simple enough.
Perhaps you mean that these results are testable - unlike the predictions of certain industry sponsored naysayers (Anthony Watts, Christopher Monkton et al.) which are varied and often self contradictory? I'm not
Re:Or not... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about "long range", but the medium-range projections have almost always proven to be too optimistic.
I suspect IPCC feels political pressure to tone down the bad news.
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I predict that the weather tomorrow will be better, worse or like it is today.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Predicting sensible weather in the short term is quite different from predicting broad climate trends. And as it happens, short-term weather prediction is actually pretty good these days. Hurricane tracks, for example, have fairly low error rates these days, outside of some exceptional scenarios. In what other field besides astronomy do we have that level of predictive ability and accuracy? Can we predict the economy? Social trends? What Egypt will do in a year? No. But we can predict the weather, regularly, and do a pretty damn good job. So stop shitting on the one field that is actually able to predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballistics.
Seriously, any part of physics that isn't significantly affected by quantum effects yields much more accurate predictions, as does chemistry.
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Plus chaos theory. And despite that, we still do a good job.
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It's only April, and I'm willing to give this "comment of the year."
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
how can you predict the average of 100 dice rolls, when you can't even predict what the next dice roll will give?
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That's a good line. I like it.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dice rolls can be predicted because unlike weather and climate they are not non-linear chaotic systems.
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That's just because you don't understand it. I guess that makes it a subpar analogy, but by no means the worst.
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You will HAVE to cut off trade with the third world until they pass environmental laws equal or better than your own, you will HAVE to add trillions to the debt to build the infrastructure to support hybrids, not to mention billions on a "people's car/truck" that would be something like a hybrid diesel/electric so you can wean the country off of fossil fuels onto something like carbon capture diesel, and you will HAVE to get the NIMBYs to STFU and build new nuclear plants because none of our renewable choices will even cover what we use now, much less power even 25% of the cars on the road.
I'm with you in spirit, but the generally negative tone isn't "productive".
But until you can get rid of the scammers, Al Gore on the left
But Al Gore proposed to do the same thing as you. Except, the plan didn't punish 3rd world countries nearly as much as your plan. It's the same idea, just differences in details.
The US will never get anyone to sign on to the "we poisoned the earth already, so you don't get to" stance. Though my plan would be to do neither. Tax all imports according to a "location scale". Bad labor laws? Tax for you. Bad environmental laws? T
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Weather and climate are not the same thing. Just as you can't predict whether a given coin toss will end up heads or tails, but you can pretty accurately predict the results of 50 or 100 or 1000 coin tosses in ensemble.
Second, there isn't a whole of precision in those climate estimates, as they range from 2020 (7 years away) out to 2050 (30 years later).
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Erm the accuracy of predicting a single coin toss is THE SAME as 1000 coin tosses.
Where as climate is a far more complicated system sort of like where the probability of heads is determined by the previous coin flips.
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Erm the accuracy of predicting a single coin toss is THE SAME as 1000 coin tosses.
The chance of 1000 tosses being an exact number is much smaller than the chance to guess the next toss. Also, the chance of guessing 1000 tosses within a 5% margin is very high. 5% margin on the next toss is the same as 0% margin, which is why it's easier to guess 1000 than 1. And it is a good analogy for weather. The chance of a single event at a single point of time is X, but the chance of a repeat is more "stable" than any single event.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Climate can change and it will change but predicting these kinds of trends to 2050 with any kind of accuracy is ludicrous at best, since they cannot even predict whats the weather next weekend.
Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit [wikipedia.org], or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...
Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...
"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions.
The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerous [newscientist.com] quality [scienceblogs.com] discussions [ilstu.edu] about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit' [wikipedia.org]:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
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It's Slashdot. Despite being a tech and science nerd gathering spot, there's a strange strain of climate change denialism here. Maybe it's because the non-denialists don't bother commenting on these stories any more, leaving the denialists to defecate all over the comment section.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's single axis of ranking that make it hard to sort out things, and find the signal amid the noise. If there were ways to flag a point of view, for example, you could find things you agree with (or don't) and want to read, and filter out all the rage post crap.
As it's strictly a popularity contest at present... stuff that appeals to the usual crowd self reinforces over time, and you end up with the crowd that stays here.
The current work around is to scatter our attention at a bunch of broken sites, looking for one that better matches our view... and always being disappointed.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is also remarkably conservative. You see this regularly in terms of computer technology (anti-Wayland, anti-Gnome, anti-Windows 8....) but it is also true in terms of American politics. Climate change is going to require coordinated large scale governmental actions through incentives and regulation. Libertarians don't like it so they pretend there is no underlying problem
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Slashdot is also remarkably conservative. You see this regularly in terms of computer technology (anti-Wayland, anti-Gnome, anti-Windows 8....) but it is also true in terms of American politics. Climate change is going to require coordinated large scale governmental actions through incentives and regulation. Libertarians don't like it so they pretend there is no underlying problem
It is generally true that the past has too many constituents and the future doesn't have enough.
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:5, Informative)
Anti-firearm tends to correlate with urban more than conservative.
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Urban environments have experienced what permissive concealed carry (in effect though rarely in law) would look like. There have been periods of time and neighborhoods where large numbers of people carry handguns concealed. What are otherwise unpleasant situations escalate into lethal situations. Even if there is some level of crime that is deterred people would rather have 5 additional shopliftings or vandalisms in exchange for 1 less shooting. Obviously guns can help when there is a total breakdown of
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Thinking you shouldn't be able to wander into a 7-11 and pick up an AK47 along with your coke and chips isn't being "anti-gun".
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Luckily, that's already illegal.
Just remember, what the anti-gun crowd is all about is banning Ruger Mini-14's with black synthetic stocks as "assault weapons", while, in the same bill, they declare the Ruger Mini-14 with a walnut stock "exempt from being considered an assault weapon".
Frankly, I consider the ignorance of the anti-gunners to be the biggest reason to oppose their po
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Yeah that's why the US has the lowest crime rate in the world . Countries that don't shit on their poor people are the ones with the lowest crime rates, that's why Switzerland has a low crime rate, not because people have guns.
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This is mainly about energy. We could be switching energy production towards renewables. That's going to take years and short term will boost consumption. But everyone knows it is the right long term approach. We don't need to cut standards of living just incentivize the switch.
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Climate change is not just CO2 emissions. All those computer chips, all those plastic bottles need more than energy to make.
That's resource depletion not climate change. Our resource discoveries are outpacing our usage. While there are going to be problems that's not high up on the list.
Do we really need a new smartphone every 2 years, do we really need to buy bottled water?
I hate the word need. But having higher bacterial content in the drinking water and drinking bottled water is less environmenta
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conservatives seek to preserve things as they are it is a resistance to change and progress in the messy way it often occurs in real life. Wayland is a change to Linux. Gnome3/Windows 8 is a change to the desktop paradigm towards an entirely new paradigm based on new hardware.
I was saying that this the computer manifestation of it. The political manifestation is the Republican party.
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And because "Slashdot" opposes a few changes, it means they oppose change in general? How does that work?
First off you are switching from asking what the change meant to disagreeing with the underlying facts. /. is generally, recently, opposed to paradigm changes. I could pick others like the conservatism towards languages. You don't see a lot of /.ers embracing new language paradigms. You don't see them generally embracing new ideas in databases much. If you disagree make a positive case of a general
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I thought this was over and done already? (Score:4, Informative)
Nooo...it was because many of us that was for actually FIXING the problem saw the AGW platform hijacked by scammers [nakedcapitalism.com] who don't give a flying fuck about the climate or the planet, they just want to fleece you for themselves and their friends.
Then let's look at the evidence: firstly you say that in general, people on slashdot adopting a counter position do so because emissions reduction schemes (i.e cap and trade, emissions trading, direct legislation for reduction) are a scam. But they think the actual phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change is real:
This guy thinks the reduction in arctic sea ice is caused by underwater volcanoes: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3645525&cid=43442631 [slashdot.org]. If he thinks that anthropogenic climate change is real, why is he saying that it is not? This seems disingenuous.
This guys seems to think that the predictions of climate science can't be trusted - although bizarrely, he posted a link which indicates otherwise: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3645525&cid=43441341 [slashdot.org]. If he though those predictions could be trusted, why not say so? This seems disingenuous.
This guy thinks that the arctic ice is not melting at all: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3645525&cid=43441403 [slashdot.org] - if he thinks that AGW is real (and evidenced by melting arctic ice) why did he not just say it? This seems disingenuous.
This guy thinks it's happened but won't get off his arse and do anything about it because it will mainly happen to poor people: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3645525&cid=43443501 [slashdot.org]. If, he, as you claim, is genuinely concerned about climate change, why does he not just say so? This seems disingenuous.
Notably, these positions are all:
1. Notably lacking any hard evidence
2. In contradiciton with one another
As is yours.
Why is the true position?
Which out of the whole crowd of you is telling us the truth?
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Because finding an excuse not to care gives him an excuse to do nothing.
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Informative)
I will be able to water ski from North America to Russia, always wanted to do this.
You already can. And Sarah Palin might even wave as you go by!
Seriously, check the map. You don't actually need to cross the Pole to reach Russia from Alaska.
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I think in the Aleutian Islands there is only 3 miles between Russia and the US at one point, if true it would be swimable.
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No, his name was "Bob".
Re:Let's ignore the fact that arctic ice is normal (Score:4, Informative)
Let's do only pick this one particular time when the ice is still below normal, but not by the much, and pretend like there's absolutely nothing going on. That's a winning strategy!
Take a look at the two year trend. At no point has it ever been at normal, much less above it, and many times it's been significantly below normal for significant periods of time. The trend is unmistakable.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png [uiuc.edu]
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png [uiuc.edu]
I'm not surprised that ice recovers in the winter when it's still quite cold. The Earth's tilt hasn't changed. The summer trends are unmistakable, though, and not be ignored.
Satellite data on ice mass [Re:Let's ignore th...] (Score:5, Informative)
The most unambiguious measurement of arctic ice at the moment is from the GRACE satellite (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), a satellite that is measuring the mass of ice on the poles.
These results do not support your statement "the amount of multi-year ice is increasing." In fact, it is significantly decreasing
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/news/grace20121129.html [nasa.gov]
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/multimedia/chart20121129.html [nasa.gov] shows the graph.
Here's an animation showing specifically the data from Greenland: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA13955_Greenland_Ice_Loss_20111205-640.mov [nasa.gov]
Not the end of the world [Re:Satellite data on...] (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the volcanoes on the Gakkel Ridge.
The comment I was replying to stated that the decrease in arctic ice thickness "has reversed." That statement is not correct, and I posted a link to the data.
Now you, apparently, are trying to come up with a hypothesis to explain this, other than the trivial hypothesis that since temperatures are increasing, ice is melting.
Fine. Do some back of the envelope calculations, and if you still think that's a viable hypothesis, well, uh, maybe you should get somebody else to check your calculations. Then, if you still think it's plausible, go get your ice model peer reviewed.
...
I tend to be a skeptic on all end of the world scenarios, until an asteroid or comet are heading in our direction.
This majorly pisses me off. I point out data showing that Arctic ice is thinning, and people jump immediately to "he's screaming about the end of the world"! That's a false dichotomy: either carbon dioxide has no effect on climate and everything's fine, or it's the end of the world, no other alternatives.
The planet is warming. This is very well documented. "End of the world"?? Why does everything have to be "it's the end of the world"? It's not the end of the world.
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Arctic ice extent is normal.
If by "normal" you mean "what you would expect if global warming was proceeding faster than the predictions".
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And meanwhile in the Antarctic, the year-on-year trend is growth. By 2050 the penguins will be able to walk to South America without swimming.
Or perhaps extrapolation of tiny trends is an idiot game believed by idiots.
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Normal might be too strong, but arctic sea-ice extent [uaf.edu] is certainly above the average for the 2000's.
Re:I predict... (Score:5, Funny)
Only climate scientists care about funding and it's clear it's all they care about, to the point that they don't even bother doing real science anymore. Everybody else in the world does things for the right reasons and never worries about funding or PR. And the "skeptics" are only in it to save humanity from the evil climate scientists. They have nothing to gain monetarily or in political capital. Straight from the goodness of their hearts. It's only those zany climate scientists we have to worry about, with their scheme to, uhh, take over the world by, uhh, convincing us to use clean energy sources and, uhh, their zeal to understand an interesting part of the planet. Yeah, those guys are pure evil moneygrubbers, I tell ya.
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Arguments I've actually heard:
Evolution denier: You can't trust biologists because they've all been brainwashed by their education.
Global warming denier: You can't trust climatologists because they've all been brainwashed by their education.
Evolution denier: You can't trust biologists because they're all part of a conspiracy to deny the existence of God.
Global warming denier: You can't trust climatologists because they're all part of a conspiracy to bilk the government for research money.
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Wow, the straw man production line is in top form!
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But these aren't strawmen. People actually say these things. In this very thread, I responded to a comment that said that the scientists are only publishing stuff to get more grant money.
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You do understand climate change is being used by politicians as argument for even greater government command-and-control of the economy, don't you? Even though there are plenty of solutions which do not require such; those are ignored because they don't fit with the agenda of politicians.
In this, the scientists are fulfilling their role as "useful idiots".
Secondly, moving inward from the seas over 100-300 years, when few modern buildings last that long anyway, is not the major trouble people think it is.
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Compare it to slowing the economy such that we lose 10 or 20 years' worth of tech every 100 years.
If the assumption that 'greater government command-and-control' retards economic growth were true, you may have had a point. Your belief that it is true is not enough.
In the real world, the element that slows down progress the most is protectionism by profit-driven oligarchies and monopolies. Imagine how economies around the world would have looked if oil prices hadn't been kept artificially high by the OPEC.
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I know. Isn't it sad?
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A modern society would have plenty of warning if a supereruption were to happen again on that scale, and plenty of resources to mitigate the effects (though not all obviously). I'm not saying it wouldn't be disruptive, but it wouldn't push humanity to the brink of extinction.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even in the worst case, it would take centuries for the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps to melt. People migrate so much faster than that that nobody would even notice even the most rapid sea level rise.
Yes, and there will continue to be rivers, coasts, and fe
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Are you simply not listening? It would take centuries for the Greenland ice to melt. On that time scale, people wouldn't even be aware of the changing coastlines, they'd simply slowly move around as conditions change, as they always have.
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"The idea that climate has been stable and is being upset by human activity is the left wing version of young earth creationism"
If I had mod points then that sentence would be worth at least a million. Climate change alarm is based on a myth of past climate stability - it is disguised creationism.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
"The idea that climate has been stable and is being upset by human activity is the left wing version of young earth creationism"
If I had mod points then that sentence would be worth at least a million. Climate change alarm is based on a myth of past climate stability - it is disguised creationism.
Nice straw man you've put up there to cut down, too bad no real scientists say that. Hell, if the climate hadn't changed here since the last ice age this message would be coming to you from deep under the ice cap. Here for example is a graph of the last 2000 years [wikimedia.org], last 12000 years [wikimedia.org], last 450000 years [wikimedia.org]. The climate changes naturally but not like now, which is all the time I'm going to waste arguing with a closed mind. And even though the planet has been hotter than it is now (look at the 450k year graph, nobody's denying this shit) a rapid man-made climate change won't leave nature or people time to adapt. Change that happens in a century is different than change that happens over 10000 years.
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The climate changes naturally but not like now
"The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold eve
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I wasn't talking about scientists, I was talking about left-wing politicians, voters, and activists.
And it's not at all a "straw man": that's what sustainability means.
The "natural change" would be for another deep glaciation to start very soon. Man-made melting of the polar ice caps is in every way preferable.
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It is even worse. Think of a city like Miami which is close to ocean level and the implications of flooding. The location of garbage pits, graves, fuel and chemical wells that have accumulated over the last 160 years would be astounding and every bit of that would end up in the ocean. Long term flooding of Miami would probably pretty much destroy the Atlantic ocean eco system at the very least and maybe a great deal more than that. And that is one city of two million people. So many coastal cit
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The issue of Arctic sea ice melting is not one of sea level rise. SLR happens as the oceans warm up and as the glacial ice, particularly on Greenland and Antarctica melts which is all ongoing. The difference that sea ice melting makes is that the interaction between the atmosphere and open water is much different than between the atmosphere and an ice surface. Heat transfer and evaporation are much greater with open water and that's bound to change weather and climate with effects as far south as the sub