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Ok billigerentyouth, I read George Monbiot, and he said that the sky is falling and he said it was my fault. And I think that if the sky doesn't fall George Mombiot will still say that it is my fault. George Mombiot doesn't like people he likes plants. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Dec 2000
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old hand
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old hand
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> George Mombiot doesn't like people he likes plants. They are a pretty important part of the project earth, wouldn't you agree? > ... say that it is my fault. It is. And it's mine. That doesn't *have to be seen as an indictment against your person, but *could rouse a greater sense of personal involvement and responsibility. > ...if the sky doesn't fall... If it's black with pollution already though, isn't that bad enough? Nobody's trying to give you a downer dude, but people are wrapped up in negative stuff all day anyway (see news stories), so how'sa'bout talking out environmental problems - as oppose to all the other pokey ones? Do you prefer to wait for flames before reacting when you smell smoke in the kitchen? I wouldn't let some sensational Hollywood film scare me, but would you prefer people sculpt the truth into comfortable statements with 'it's not really that bad' clauses in them? If so, try the Economist, they are professionals at that. Their 18-28/12/04 edition, titled 'The end of the world' poked fun at 'conspiracy nuts' and had a title which showed a Christmas pudding creating a great wave on the planet's surface. A mere few days before December 26th, this end of the year double issue asked the question, 'Why do end-of-time beliefs endure?'. Why indeed. Spooky prescience on the part of abject rationalists. http://www.economist.com/diversions/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3490697
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Carpal Tunnel
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Sorry, the link clicks in to the article most time, but sometimes it won't get past a registration page. it's long but here it is, it's worht the read. Or you can google "Anatarctic Ice shelves Philadelphia Inquirer" and click on the "Polar Distress Feb. 2005" (third hit) to see the extensive graphs and geologoical illustrations:
Posted on Mon, Feb. 14, 2005
>> R E L A T E D C O N T E N T
Associated Press
The disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula can be seen in this March 18, 2002, satellite image. Inland glaciers have since been flowing more rapidly to sea.
Polar distress
Scientists worry that Antarctic ice shelves may continue to melt,
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press
PUNTA ARENAS, Chile - Scientists looking southward from the tip of South America, over steel-gray waters toward icy Antarctica, see only questions about the fate of the planet.
Now that one mammoth Antarctic ice shelf has collapsed into the ocean, when might another, bigger one crumble and slip into a warming sea? In 1,000 years? In 100 years? Sooner?
"People don't have the answer to the question yet - what the probability is of that collapse, if any," said scientist Gino Casassa. "But there's some indication of instability."
Fears of global warming arise as the Kyoto Protocol finally takes effect this Wednesday. The international accord seeks to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" without the world's largest emitter, the United States.
Casassa and fellow Chilean researchers have visited Anarctica to trace the effects of global warming and brought back some potentially unsettling news.
On a two-month round-trip trek by snow tractor to the South Pole, they pointed their sophisticated radar at the ground and found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be thicker than thought, many hundreds of feet thicker in parts.
Glaciologists like Casassa worry most about that western ice sheet, half a continent of frozen water believed enough, if gradually melted, to raise ocean levels worldwide by about 15 feet.
That would be a slow-motion catastrophe for global coastlines - not instantly deadly like a tsunami, but more universal and permanent. And "the deeper the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the greater the potential impact to sea level," Casassa pointed out, though cautioning that their data await full analysis.
Such pressing questions about the white continent and global warming - and the impact each will have on the other - are consuming more and more scientific resources these days, as hundreds of researchers migrate south in the southern summer to probe, measure and observe in an on-the-ice search for answers.
Advanced technology, like the radar lent by the University of Kansas, allows scientists to penetrate darker corners of polar science. ICESat, a NASA satellite launched two years ago, is giving them an unprecedentedly precise look at the state of the ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic. The same U.S. space agency, meanwhile, is boosting the power of its supercomputers to speed through millions of calculations to foresee temperature, evaporation, precipitation and other changes far into the future, using complex climate models.
The challenges remain huge, however, on the globe's most forbidding landscape. And technology sometimes fails. One of the ice-surveying satellite's laser eyes went dead, for one thing, reducing its useful data by more than half. For another, the vast continent has too few permanent monitoring stations to give scientists more than a sketchy grasp of its climate behavior.
"Even now, we're not so sure what's going on in all Antarctica. There aren't sufficient data," said Argentina's Pedro Skvarca, a veteran Antarctic glaciologist.
The hunt for data took on fresh urgency after Antarctica's "Larsen B," an ice shelf bigger than Rhode Island, collapsed into the Southern Ocean over the space of just 35 days in 2002.
The 1,300 square miles of ice had fringed the Antarctic Peninsula, a rocky arm of land that reaches north to within 750 miles of this southernmost Chilean city. In that peninsular region, average surface temperatures have risen by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit over 50 years.
Temperatures globally rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, most of that attributed by scientific consensus to the accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other warming "greenhouse gases," mostly from fossil fuel-burning. It hasn't been established whether the Antarctic Peninsula warming stems directly from global warming, or from more localized conditions.
Because an ice "shelf" already floats on the sea, displacing its weight in water, Larsen B's disintegration - and that of the smaller, nearby Larsen A in 1995 - didn't raise ocean levels. But what has happened since did.
Skvarca and American researchers, collating aerial reconnaissance with ICESat images, reported last September that land-based glaciers backed up behind Larsen B have accelerated their flow since its breakup - moving ice into the sea up to eight times faster than before.
Now scientists are warily watching the Larsen C ice shelf, farther south and 20 times larger.
Like the B sector before it collapsed, "Larsen C also appears to be thinning," said Robert Thomas, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center facility in Virginia. "It's quite possible that the thinning is the precursor to the breakup."
Scientists expect Larsen C to disintegrate sometime in this century, Skvarca said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires. "We should bear in mind what is happening to the Larsen ice shelves, because if it also happens to a big shelf, we are going to be in trouble," he said.
"Big" refers to the floating giants - the Ross and Ronne ice shelves. Each is around 200,000 square miles, bigger than California. They lie deeper south in a more frigid zone, are thicker in depth and hold back immense streams of ice coming from the heights of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the 1,100-mile-wide, 9,000-foot-high dome that sits atop continental rock.
No one has spotted signs of instability yet in the two giant shelves. But scientists also worry about what Thomas calls the "back door" - a stretch of Antarctic coast whose glaciers feed off the western ice sheet directly into the Amundsen Sea, or into small ice shelves on that sea.
"There's some indication of instability in the Amundsen Sea," Casassa said.
Casassa, Thomas and colleagues have watched the "back door" since the early 1990s, most recently via satellite tracking. They reported in the journal Science last September that a half-dozen glaciers there are now thinning and accelerating. The big Pine Island glacier is carrying ice faster toward the sea as far as 186 miles inland, deep within the western ice sheet.
"The instability and changes are migrating inland," Casassa said. "This could affect the whole of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, because the ice sheet 'feels' what is happening at the coast."
Glaciologists are quick to point out they've found no basis for fearing an imminent, massive collapse of ice into the southern seas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-organized network of scientists, concluded in a 2001 assessment that the impact of global warming "will be realized slowly" in Antarctica.
Although scientists assume major change might take a millennium, much remains unknown about the links among ice, ocean and skies.
It isn't known, for example, how excess amounts of cold, fresh water from glaciers, pouring into the salty sea, will affect the ocean current that circles Antarctica from west to east - a main driver of all the world's ocean currents, and hence of world climate.
Antarctica's own climate, meanwhile, may be verging on change.
Factors including the seasonal Antarctic "ozone hole" of recent decades are believed to have held temperatures in the interior stable while the world warmed. But NASA climatologists have reported that a computer model study indicates things may rapidly reverse toward warming in Antarctica, in part because an international ban on ozone-destroying substances is expected to restore the ozone layer.
Drew Shindell of NASA said "there's a lot of room for improvement in the modeling" - in upper-atmosphere dynamics, for example, including the chemistry of ozone.
"We're trying to get that kind of modeling. We have new computers, 10 times bigger," he said by telephone from his New York office.
In powerful computers, by satellite and on the Antarctic ice, the stepped-up search for answers will go on.
Like others, Skvarca sees a need for a bigger, better coordinated international effort. The Argentine scientist recalled the "premonitory" work of the late Ohio State University glaciologist John Mercer, who forecast in the 1970s that warming would cause the Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves to disintegrate, from north to south.
At the time, "nobody paid much attention," Skvarca said. "Let's not wait 30 years more to see whether Larsen C and others disintegrate. There's an urgent need for research now." <<
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Thanks Whitman, for the link. I couldn't pull it up myself.
But after reading it carefully I think that the report is mostly bunk. Global warming may be real. Good. If the Earth warms up by just three degrees then the rain forests of Earth will increase by about 30% according to the greenhouse people who calculate.
But mostly the increase in growth is not due to the increase in temperature but rather due to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rather than an increase in solar radiation...but thank heaven, both are saviors. Anyone with an ancestor older than a daughter should know that the immediate danger is not from global warming but from a global freezing which is long overdue. Ride lots, you gas guzzling SUV owners, and let's burn down the California Redwoods, and let's give to the sky the fumes from our coal burning contraptions.
Hear me now, Earthlings, the age of ice is almost upon us.
And when it comes... it comes with a fury.
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"But mostly the increase in growth is not due to the increase in temperature but rather due to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rather than an increase in solar radiation...but thank heaven, both are saviors. Anyone with an ancestor older than a daughter should know that the immediate danger is not from global warming but from a global freezing which is long overdue. Ride lots, you gas guzzling SUV owners, and let's burn down the California Redwoods, and let's give to the sky the fumes from our coal burning contraptions."
Way outside anything I know about. However,
1) Heating and cooling are not mutually exclusive activities unless they concurrent. There can be a succession of heating and cooling.
2) An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could cause an increase in temperature. It's called a greenhouse gas for a reason.
3) I sense that the worry is not that the temperature is changing, but that it's changing at rates that far exceeds that observed in various records of past changes. The fact of change is well-accepted and reasonably well understood. I think what concerns people is the lack of stability in the changes, to what extent we might be contributing, and what we might do to ameliorate the effects.
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, in the movie the change occurs in a matter of days. Sensationalistic? Yes. But it's a thrill of an adventure movie...and some of the science is solid. It would be great to have some of the more scientific readers here see the movie and then comment on the implausible parts for our edification.
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I saw it soon after it came out with my kids. I liked it a lot, but thought it was extremely exaggerated and sensationalistic. I don't know how much of it is solid science. As I said, it's way outside anything I know about. However, my thoughts on the movie aren't related to my thoughts on the issue of climate change.
k
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