Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans As Antarctic Ice Melts 784
mdsolar (1045926) writes "The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday. The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis."
Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck all this Prius hippie shit. I'm buying a Hummer.
Re:Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:5, Funny)
All the cool kids these days are buying amphibious demilitarized "ducks".
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So they're getting ready for rising sea levels?
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Re:Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:5, Funny)
Why? 10'?
Only the male scientists say it's 10 feet, the women say it's really about 5-6 feet.
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Do you really think all that water is going to stay in the oceans?
The rise in sea level has already increased the size of tide flats and salt marshes. Which are evaporation basins. Expect an increase in atmospheric water, some as vapor (which is a potent greenhouse gas) and some as cloud (increasing the Earth's albedo). How those opposing factors will play out is anyone's guess.
But this much is obvious: the increase in atmospheric water is going to increase PRECIPITATION! The worst flood damage from the l
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As to floods, well, rivers came about because of floods that cut into the earth and that leads to a constant run-off path. IOW, it will simply create new rivers.
Re:Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:5, Funny)
Well, there's also the issue of the numerous global financial centers along various coasts.
Yea, not seeing the problem...
Re:Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe global warming will be self correcting then.
Re:Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Well, since it's inevtiable (Score:3, Funny)
Translation... (Score:4, Interesting)
99.9%+ of the people alive today will not live to see the crisis, or even live long enough to know whether or not the crisis will actually occur.
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We're already seeing large scale changes. The crisis *is* actually occurring.
Re:Translation... (Score:5, Informative)
You mostly need to use science to see it, unless you live in unfortunate areas like the arctic. It still happens gradually enough that you can conveniently forget that things were ever different if you go by your trusty, truthy gut feeling.
Re:Translation... (Score:5, Informative)
False. Antarctic land ice mass is decreasing [imbie.org], and reliable estimates of Antarctic sea ice volume (or mass) aren't available.
Even if you meant to refer to Antarctic sea ice extent (not mass), you already ignored me when I told you [slashdot.org] that this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 [noaa.gov] page 811: " sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide."
But maybe you'll listen to the National Academy of Sciences, if you honestly don't think [slashdot.org] the National Academy of Sciences is "alarmist". Again, their recent report [nas-sites.org] is educational. They address Antarctic sea ice in question 12 [nas.edu].
Jane and Lonny Eacus have repeatedly ignored me whenever I've told you [dumbscientist.com] that there's been no statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. But if you honestly doesn't think the NAS is alarmist, you might learn something from their answers to questions 9 and 10 [nas.edu]. This point is particularly relevant: "More than 90% of the heat added to Earth is absorbed by the oceans and penetrates only slowly into deep water. A faster rate of heat penetration into the deeper ocean will slow the warming seen at the surface and in the atmosphere, but by itself will not change the long-term warming that will occur from a given amount of CO2."
No, that's not science the way it's practiced by the National Academy of Sciences [nap.edu], the National Center for Atmospheric Research [ucar.edu], the American Geophysical Union [agu.org], the American Institute [aip.org] of Physics [aip.org], the American Physical Society [aps.org], the American [ametsoc.org] Meteorological [ametsoc.org] Society [ametsoc.org], the American Statistical Association [amstat.org], the American Association for the Advancement of Science [aaas.org], the Federation of American Scientists [fas.org], the American [inqua.org] Quaternary Association [agu.org], the American Society of Agronomy [soils.org], the
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Has there been a warming trend over the last 15-17 years, or hasn't there - and how, in the name of Zombie Tyndall, is that a 'long term trend'?
In our world of instant gratification 15-17 years seems like forever, especially to the younger ones. But the classical climatological period is defined as 30 years by the World Meteorological Organization for a reason. It's long enough for the decadal and shorter cycles to average out.
BTW, "Zombie Tyndall", I like that.
Re:Translation... (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a list of the 10 warmest years, globally, since 1880. That's 134 years ago.
2010
2005
1998
2003
2002
2006
2009
2007
2004
2012
Do you notice any trend or commonality among those data points?
Re:Translation... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why were those old thermometers always wrong in the negative direction?
Re:Translation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any problem with the fact that some time in the distant future, the sun will stop shining? Maybe 5 billion years from now? No problem?
Okay, how about the fact that rivers change course? The Mississippi might have already switched to the Atchafalaya, if not for our meddling. We don't want New Orleans made useless. No problem with that either?
Then, what of the fact that large and powerful corporations lie, and engage in propaganda campaigns? You know, like Big Tobacco did? And like Wall Street did not too long ago with home mortgages? And like Big Oil does now? Big Oil lies about a lot of things, like the safety of offshore oil drilling. An accident like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill wasn't supposed to happen. When it did, they kept right on lying, about the rate of the leak and the amount of damage it was doing. Are we still okay here? Corporations routinely tell self serving lies, agreed? And surely you see that, whether or not Climate Disruption is real, Big Oil is highly motivated to be dismissive of warnings about it. If Climate Disruption is real and a huge problem, and Big Oil knows it, would they attempt to distract and deceive the public with propaganda campaigns? Yes, yes, they would. Still with me, I hope?
Now let's look at the other side. Either a) scientists are right and Climate Disruption is real, happening right now, and will cause huge problems. Or b) scientists are united in a big conspiracy to lie about Climate Disruption because it gets them more grant money, or c) scientists are morons and are getting it all wrong. The trouble with b) and c) is that they are not at all credible. I hope no one seriously credits c), it's just too implausible. As for b), you do realize that the flow of grant money does not much depend on the subject matter. If anything, being forced to study and restudy the climate takes away money that could have been used for other science. The public has turned negative and cut back funding for all science, so I'd have to say the Great Conspiracy, if it exists, is not working and if anything is backfiring. And do you suppose smarties like scientists wouldn't see that? And if their main interest was grant money, wouldn't they change their tune to the nicey nicey good news the public seems to want? Why haven't they done so then? Why haven't they dropped this story of Climate Disruption like a radioactive spud, given the damage it's doing to scientific funding? Could it be because it's real, and scientists are honestly worried about it?
Also, don't you understand how competitive science can be? For the time being we're stuck with anti-competitive oligopolies in oil and banking and several other industries. But not in science. If a few scientists had good evidence that Climate Disruption was wrong, do you suppose they would keep quiet and maintain the front? No way! They'd all be scrambling to publish first. It'd be a bombshell, like figuring out how to build a usable quantum computer and breaking many and perhaps all of our public key encryption schemes.
As for the evidence you demand, the "large scale changes", you have only to open your eyes and admit that what's right in front of your nose is indeed exactly that. Just 180 years ago, atmospheric CO2 was about 280 ppm. Now it's 400ppm, certainly higher than it has been in nearly 1 million years, and probably higher than any level in the last 20 million years. That is a very fast change. We're seeing ocean acidification. And we are indeed seeing higher average temperatures. In recent years, we've had far more record highs than record lows. The Arctic Ice Cap is smaller than it has ever been in recorded history. Antarctic ice shelves such as Larson A and B have collapsed. How can you hear of such events and not think they are significant?
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Also, don't you understand how competitive science can be? For the time being we're stuck with anti-competitive oligopolies in oil and banking and several other industries. But not in science. If a few scientists had good evidence that Climate Disruption was wrong, do you suppose they would keep quiet and maintain the front? No way! They'd all be scrambling to publish first. It'd be a bombshell, like figuring out how to build a usable quantum computer and breaking many and perhaps all of our public ke
Re:Translation... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, that sentiment cuts both ways. None of the people who are blocking action on AGW will be around to be pilloried either if it turns out that they were wrong.
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But the Antarctic is gaining ice! (Score:5, Informative)
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So global temperature is stable because the heat is going into ice melt?
I can't solve these problems without a dyson sphere; and only a society with a dyson sphere can sustain the economic weight of building a dyson sphere.
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Are you saying that melting of ice does not affect temperature?
Do you have a problem with the idea of endothermic reactions?
Re:But the Antarctic is gaining ice! (Score:4, Informative)
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Only one link man... (Score:4, Informative)
How hard can it be when the summary has but a single link:
"Scientists said the ice sheet was not melting because of warmer air temperatures, but rather because of the relatively warm water"
Re:Only one link man... (Score:5, Insightful)
A crisis? (Score:2)
I'm a bit puzzled. If it will truly become a crisis, does it not suggest that the ice was frozen for all time and has never in history been running water?
Wouldn't that mean that eons ago, we had a crisis to solve and managed to create the worlds biggest ice-box in the process... who cares if it made some dino-ice cubes?
The world is constantly changing, for better or worse, and people always seem genuinely surprised when it changes.
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The crisis isn't "all life will end on the Earth." If we keep burning fossil fuels like crazy and warm the Earth, we might end up disappearing, but life will adapt. Maybe one day, a million years from now, some intelligent creatures will dig up the remains of our society and wonder just how we killed ourselves off.
The problem is that rising sea levels and rapidly changing global climate patterns will disrupt our lives. Food that was able to be grown in certain locations won't be able to be grown there an
Meteor Impact! (Score:3)
When it hits, we'll have of few months of darkness to fix the problem.
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This line of reasoning always makes me fee a bit uneasy. What if we do all the hard work of fixing the climate, only to get hit by an asteroid and have it all go to shit anyway?
I mean really, it'd be global scale Murphy's law to fix the climate and then get hit.
But in all seriousness, it does bother me to see near Earth asteroid detection projects loose funding, IMHO they are as important as climate change projects.
Looking forward to future spin (Score:5, Funny)
water shortage and rising sea levels (Score:2, Interesting)
Two things associated with global warming are a water shortage and rising sea levels.
Seems like if we really wanted to we could use one to help the other.
For instance pumping sea water to death valley and filling it full of water would
create a ton more waterfront property. We have oil pipelines much longer than this.
You could do the same thing by digging a big hole in the sahara desert or any other
desert relatively close to the ocean. Heck, we could even solve the other potential
problem of human overpopul
Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not "waterfront property" that anybody is worried about. It's the fact that a very large number of the world's current cities happen to be located near the water for historical reasons (major trading hubs built around ports for oceangoing ships.) The utter annihilation of those cities is a huge economic problem.
And flooding Death Valley with seawater doesn't create a single acre of arable land. You can't farm jack $hit out of soil contaminated with salt. The shores of the Persian gulf (nor, for that matter the shores of southern CA) don't support much in the way of farms, despite the large body of water next door.
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Launch Solar Shade! (Score:2)
unless Svensgaard vetoes it...
Well, that settles it (Score:2)
Time to start buying real estate in the southwest. [imdb.com]
I Don't Buy the Consensus on Antarctica (Score:5, Funny)
I have never even seen Antarctica, and I don't recall anyone talking about it twenty years ago. If 97% of geographers say Antarctica exists, I'd just like to point out that I've driven 50 miles in every direction but up and haven't seen no sign at all. And I'm pretty sure that my brother's boss once heard that geographers are telling us about this mythical Antarctica to take money from people like me and give it to themselves.
No continent I've ever seen is going to make me worry about sea-level rise, so keep yer commeenistic plots off of Slashdot.
And don't forget . . . (Score:3)
Virtually all of the people who have visited "Antarctica" are SCIENTISTS. And the rest are GOVERNMENT WORKERS.
Can we really believe people who have a vested interest in grant money to accurately report on this place?
Pretty soon now we'll find the set in Alaska where "South pole research station" news segments are filmed.
Re:Chicken Little (Score:5, Insightful)
Chicken Little because it isn't going to happen in your lifetime?
I don't get it. This is happening.
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Just remember, short term comfort ALWAYS trumps long term viability. We live in a world dominated by the next few fiscal quarters. It's a breeding ground for sociopaths and the mentally deficient dupes who follow them.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall day is literally the motto for so many people.
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If short term comfort was all that mattered to people nobody would ever take out mortgages, so, er, yeah.
This article says is that even if we and all of our works vanished tomorrow, it still wouldn't make a difference. Despite which most if not all developed nations have goals to reach in terms of renewable energy generation, and many of them are reaching or exeeding their goals. In a hundred years I'd be surprised if fossil fuels are in use at all to be honest.
The world is changing. I for one am rather gla
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Get a house TODAY you don't need to save up your money! Mortgages let you have immediate comfort now.
The cost of a house forces a long term payment plan but you can STILL have short term thinking. Short term thinking is central to the mortgage crisis we are still recovering from. bad planning / rates .... adjustable rates. That'll solve itself somehow you'll probably make more money long term...
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I haven't actually met most people so I can't really say what they consider, although well done on finding the time to post here what with your busy schedule meeting them by the way. From those I've spoken to they generally seem to feel that inflation will eat away at the last decades of their mortgages, which is probably true to an extent. Short term pain, long term gain.
Re:Chicken Little (Score:4, Insightful)
So what do you want to do about it? We live in the real world, most of us in elective democracies where any politician that purposes a reduction in the standard of living will quickly find himself out of a job. Green energy doesn't scale and nuclear is a bad word, so where do you propose we get the gigajoules needed to both run Western civilization and bring the third world out of poverty?
The climate change crowd never has a good answer for this question. Thankfully we're an adaptable species, arguably the most adaptable ever to live on the blue marble. I think we'll manage just fine.
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Do some reading about base load power [wikipedia.org], then contemplate the fact that the United States consumed 3,866,000,000,000 kilowatt hours (that's 13,917,600,000,000,000,000 joules, if you were wondering) of electricity in 2012. Since nuclear fission is politically explosive, explain how you propose to generate a sizable fraction of that energy (never mind all of it) without relying on carbon based sources. Limit yourself to technologies that are actually here, not distant fantasies like nuclear fusion.
After you
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Great Britain used to be in the wine belt.
Great Britain used to be able to produce wine, and it still does produce wine. We know the current wine is good enough for modern commercial sale, but we know nothing of the quality wine the Romans made.
We do know that while there aren't vast numbers of vineyards now there's no evidence of there ever being more at any time in the past.
So what's your point? Just repeating a stupid denier myth?
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We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit.
Which won't change a damned thing, because the third world is not going to meekly sit back and accept their current level of development. The United States could literally cease to exist tomorrow and the freed energy wouldn't be enough to bring the billions in the third world out of poverty. You can't even convince Westerners to waste less, but you think you're going to convince those in the third world to meekly accept their current lot in life?
First we need less babies.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of
Re:Chicken Little (Score:4, Interesting)
" but we'll survive it. "
based on..what? what happens at 500 ppm? 600 ppm? 1000 ppm?
What happen when the sea temperature is too warm to support the lowest part of the food chain?
250 - 350 ppm – background (normal) outdoor air level - OOPS past that
350- 1,000 ppm - typical level found in occupied spaces with good air exchange.
1,000 – 2,000 ppm - level associated with complaints of drowsiness and poor air.
2,000 – 5,000 ppm – level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.
Yeah, we kind of need an 'aggressive' plan to deal with this now.
We need to be build large solar furnace, re-engineering the electrical grid, get coastal cities on board with moving inward with time, we need thorium reactors, we need to put tough regulation and taxes on vehicles.
We need to get some sort of solar system on every house. Panels, some sort of shingle what ever. All this take time, so we need to start now. The longer we wait, the more we pay.
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Re:Should solve water shortage issues... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, let's find out if that's actually true. Here's a math problem: The salinity of the ocean is 3.5%, and the ocean has an average depth of 3700 meters. If enough fresh water is added to the ocean to increase its depth by 3 meters, what is the new salinity of the ocean?
(Answer: 3.5%, i.e. not significantly different from before.)
In other words... (Score:5, Funny)
California should build MASSIVE quantities of desalanization plants along the coast. So that we can keep the oceans properly salined. While extract massive amounts of water to turn the entire southwest into a lush green sub-tropic region, and keep sea levels in check. Start now!!!
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody should build anything along the coast. At least any coast that is not at least 100m above sea level.
Push the button for the interactive map -
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.... [nationalgeographic.com]
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Informative)
Thats 10ft due to the west antarctic ice sheet. There is a lot more ice out there.
10m =~ 30ft
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The last time the planet was steadily 2 degrees C warmer than pre-industrial times, some 120,000 years ago, sea levels were 5 to 10 meters higher than today. It’s likely we’ll hit 2 degrees C of warming by 2100, unless we take extreme measures to mitigate emissions.
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And there are factors other than ice melt.
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In China, the Yellow River delta is currently sinking so fast that local sea levels are rising by up to 25 centimeters per year, nearly 100 times the global average. Places that were once covered by kilometers of ice, like northern Canada, are now rebounding upwards — which means local sea levels are actually falling in some parts of Alaska. But that upward-moving land is hinging nearby areas, like the U.S. East Coast, downward by millimeters per year — adding millimeters per year to the local sea level rise there. The U.S. East Coast has another problem too: Climate change is weakening the Gulf Stream current, and that is allowing water to slop back towards shore. Overall, the U.S. East Coast is seeing rates of sea level rise that are 3 to 4 times the global average. The tropics, meanwhile, are seeing extra sea level rise thanks to a strange gravitational effect. As high-latitude ice melts, there is less mass at the poles to pull ocean water towards them; instead, the water slopes more towards the equator.
Re:An article that suggests a counter-effect.... (Score:5, Informative)
You're probably trolling, but here goes:
Any continent will rise if the mass on top is reduced, because the mantle acts as a liquid on geological time scales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound)
However, it's not the loss of mass or height of the antartcic that is causing sea levels to rise, but the movement of water from "long term storage" on top of the antarctic continent into the ocean. What the container does after the contents have been released is immaterial.
(for the arctic ice it is different because it is all floating, so melting it won't do anything to sea levels (it will to salinity and hence ocean currents) - and greenland has a lot of land ice, of course)
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So, if the ice is currently sitting in a bowl BELOW sea level, and water uses more volume as ice than as a liquid, when the ice melts, it will fill less of the bowl t
Re:An article that suggests a counter-effect.... (Score:4, Informative)
Except the ice sheet is not at float eqilibrium.
If the ice was at float equilibrium its melting would then take up less space. But because the ice sheet is stacked so high above sea level the floor of the glacier is grounded there is much more ice there than the float equilibrium point. There is a lot more ice there than the water it displaces. Your argument does not cover that point.
Re:Meanwhile, in reality world... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Meanwhile, in reality world... (Score:4, Insightful)
Once again, everyone uses their own biased sources. You're both wrong. The only ice that matters is the ice that was ON LAND before and is now IN THE OCEAN and bellow the water line. Does melting ice in a glass of water raise the level of water in the glass? No. Put a new ice cube in, does the water level raise equivalent to the volume of ice? No. It raises equivalent to the volume of ice bellow the water line.
What volume of ice was their on the land 100 years ago? No one knows. There's no way to find out. Probably more than there is now. The truth is probably more on the side of people concerned about climate change and less on the side of the people who deny it. That said, things aren't nearly as bad as the alarmists would have you think. This is something we should address, but stupid knee jerk reactions based on made up science are what alienates people and gives the deniers an excuse to stall and do nothing. Lets have real facts, and common sense so we can address a growing problem that will hurt our great grandchildren.
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Ah, nothing like quoting an anti-AGW blog as if it were the equivalent of a published article.
Tell me, do you get your biology information from Answers in Genesis as well?
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"Ah, nothing like quoting an anti-AGW blog as if it were the equivalent of a published article"
Ah nothing like quoting Skeptical Science or Real Climate or DeSmogBlog or HughPickensDOTcom, because those are outlets of pure unvarnished truth that no sane man may object to.
In fact the WUWT article points to an article in "The Australian" and quotes the NSIDC.
I assume you get your answers from Genesis because you like things handed down as Holy Writ, probably because its easier than thinking. Climate alarmism
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So, we're supposed to believe that in a warming world, ice sheets melt, but then sea ice will extend to cover the entire planet? :)
Funny how warming produces more ice and less ice at the same time :)
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Actually, the models have been too conservative. Things are significantly worse than predicted.
But you're clearly not a "facts oriented" kind of person.
Re:Hurray (Score:5, Insightful)
comments like these.
Well yes, that's how it works. Flamebait gets modded as flamebait. If you find that all the posts like this one are being modded similarly, it just means that the modding isn't some statistical outlier and that the masses have a consensus for what they consider "flamebait".
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You don't even need to click on the TFA to see the glaring text: "The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so"
That's really lame scaremongering. And especially bad timing:
"The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSID), with the support of the NASA Earth Sciences, just announced that Antarctic sea ice has expanded to all-time record levels for April. " http://www.breitbart.com/Big-P... [breitbart.com]
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Sea Ice: Floats in water, doesn't affect sea level when it melts.
Land Ice: Sits on Land, raises sea level when it melts.
There's a difference between these two. The additional sea ice is also caused by the land ice melting, which is raising the freezing point of the sea in the area (review Freezing Point Depression if you don't understand why).
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Yes, 3.2 mm/year since 1993 but the rate in the early 20th Century was about 1 mm/year and in the middle of the 20th Century it was around 2 mm/year. That looks like an accelerating trend to me. For comparison from about 6,000 years ago until the start of the 20th Century the rate was less than 0.1 mm/year.
On top of that scientists can't rule out some non-linear reactions of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where it collapses like a slow moving landslide into the ocean rather than simply just melting away. T
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Informative)
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The Gobal cooling "hysertia" of the 1970's was mainly a couple scientists musings getting blown out of proportion by scientifically illiterate reporters reporting on science. At the time it seemed quaint, kind of like reading the cover of the National Enquirer is quaint while wating in line at the grocery store. It got more milage around the water cooler than in the journals.
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Informative)
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Back in the seventies, we were trying to figure out whether there was a likelihood of climate change in the near term, and the possibilities of both global warming and global cooling were considered. However, global warming was, even then, considered more likely. We have much more data and much better models now, which is why you aren't hearing about global cooling anymore.
This past winter, in Vermont, we had a pretty good late winter, but early winter was characterized by unseasonable melts. There wa
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There was unusual freezing in the northern plains states. Worst we've had in years. Not just "normal" winter cold. I put normal in quotes because of course when I was a kid back in the seventies, it would have been considered less unusual, although still unusual. But your basic point is correct, of course: the fact that it's cold in winter doesn't contradict the theory global warming, any more than an airplane in the sky contradicts the theory of gravity.
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"If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
The story from 1869 only worked because he removed the frogs' brains.
now you know! and a bit of a sad commentary about where we are.
Re:In a century... (Score:4, Funny)
So it's an accurate model of policy making, then? Campaign contributions make for wonderful scalpels.
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All of the claims the past 15 years have been about the expected state in 2050 or later.
If you know none of it came to pass, I'd like to borrow your time machine.
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I think the question is if global warming is essentially man made or mainly just the natural cycle of things. IMHO this is an open question not settled science.
And on what do you base your humble opinion. Sure it's not settled to the level of Newton's laws, but it's settled enough for practical purposes.
Remember Al Gore?
You're basing your opinion of the science on the opinions of a politician? Are you utterly nuts?
apply tags (Score:3)
Again with the claim of big $$.
Do you have any idea how moronic that looks when the "let it burn" crowd is the oil and coal industry?
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Measure insolation in an enclose environment with CO2 content x, and then measure it with CO2 content 2x. Every single time for over a century and a half the environment with the higher CO2 content retains more heat. High school honors students do the experiment, and that is always the result. Why do you think that for some reason carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going to somehow defy the laws of physics and act differently?
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! Just like we adapted when the dinosaurs died out and we could no longer ride them.
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Informative)
we have no idea what might happen. Its possible that the ice may reform there or somewhere else
Actually, thanks to science we do have an idea!
"at this point, a decrease in the melt rate back to earlier levels would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new paper in Science. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.” The basic problem is that much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits below sea level in a kind of bowl-shaped depression the earth. As Dr. Mercer outlined in 1978, once the part of the ice sheet sitting on the rim of the bowl melts and the ice retreats into deeper water, it becomes unstable and highly vulnerable to further melting."
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Insightful)
*cough* [google.com] *cough* [wikipedia.org]
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For your information, "Clinton's surplus" was because of Republican Congress that didn't let him spend much money. It also was only possible because of the DotCom Bubble of the 1990s. Once that burst during Clinton's final year in office, the surplus vanished.
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Informative)
For your information, "Clinton's surplus" was because of Republican Congress that didn't let him spend much money. It also was only possible because of the DotCom Bubble of the 1990s. Once that burst during Clinton's final year in office, the surplus vanished.
Now if your post had contained actual information, instead of made-up stuff.
CBO analysis [cbo.gov] shows that despite all the economic events that transpired after Bush's election, the U.S. Federal Budget would have remained in surplus (more than a trillion dollars) right up until the time of the Bush economic meltdown that began in 2007.
Legislative changes - the bills the Republicans passed and Bush signed - spent the entire surplus, and trillions more.
Re:In a century... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, as has been pointed out, your contention is completely unsupported by reality. But nice try. Maybe you should take your own advice about not being a "partisan pawn"?
Re: In a century... (Score:3, Insightful)
The national debt is a misnomer unlike climate change. Climate change involves real consequences. The national debt is a financial residual value that has no economic meaning in real terms. It's not the national debt that is important, it's inflation that we should be monitoring. As it stands we actually need more inflation today as well as more government spending.
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And AC can't be bothered to learn the difference between sea ice and ice sheets that are based on land. Oops!!
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You have a serious issue with time frames. In one case you are referring to plate tectonics which move over periods of millions of years. On the other you are referring to our causing changes in the next 100 years that are equivalent. Then you say since they change would have happened anyway in the next million years or so, why is everyone upset at it happening in the next hundred years or so...
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And the short sighted continue to not change becasue they need to be led like sheep. How does it feel to be a sheep? Staring blankly at some screen, shoveling food in your mouth. Here is a translation into you native tongue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You think there might be some complex reason on why the president needs to make person appearance?
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Not a denier or Rubio fan, but most of the comments on this page miss these two paragraphs in TFA.
"Scientists said the ice sheet was not melting because of warmer air temperatures, but rather because of the relatively warm water, which is naturally occurring, from the ocean depths. That water is being pulled upward and toward the ice sheet by intensification of the winds around Antarctica.
Most scientists in the field see a connection between the stronger winds and human-caused global warming, but they sa
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Actually, the effect of the 9/11 grounding was to increase maximum daytime temperatures and decrease minimum nighttime temperatures (see article) [wikipedia.org]. Reasons for this are generally accepted as being due to the change in water vapor high in the atmosphere affecting heat absorption (daytime) and radiation (nighttime).
Re:Meanwhile In Other News (Score:4, Informative)
In a place where the temperature is always well below freezing, "global warming" is not going to melt all the ice. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem elsewhere. Even if there were no net ice loss on earth, if we're losing ice in places we need it (such as mountain ranges that supply people with drinking water), and accumulate it in places that have no humans at all (Antarctica), that's an enormous problem.
But hey, let's confuse land ice and sea ice and create doubt about the actual science by cherry picking data, spreading half-truths and general misinformation.