Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

[Chris Coles]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

There is so much evidence that this is a recent and man made change that today, there is no doubt whatsoever. If you believe otherwise, then I suggest you do not remain living close to any sea water, you just might get a very big surprise one morning. personally, I will place my trust in the Independence of the BBC any day.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7120770.stm

50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy

By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News

It is a scientific icon, which belongs, some claim, alongside E=mc2 and the double helix. Its name - the Keeling Curve - may be scarcely known outside scientific circles, but the jagged upward slope showing rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere has become one of the most famous graphs in science, and a potent symbol of our times.

It was 50 years ago that a young American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began tracking CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at two of the world's last wildernesses - the South Pole and the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.

His very precise measurements produced a remarkable data set, which first sounded alarm bells over the build-up of the gas in the atmosphere, and eventually led to the tracking of greenhouse gases worldwide.

The curve set the scene for the debate over climate change, and policies, sometimes controversial, that address the human contribution to the greenhouse effect.

Without this curve, and Professor Keeling's tireless work, there is no question that our understanding and acceptance of human-induced global warming would be 10-20 years less advanced than it is today - Dr Andrew Manning, UEA

"It wasn't until Keeling came along and started measuring CO2 that we got the evidence that CO2 was increasing from human activities," says Professor Andrew Watkinson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK. "The graph is iconic from a climate perspective."

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Ice breaking-off of the Antarctic ice sheet is normal at the end of the Antarctic summer. The process is called calving.

Please don't let the facts get your way. The separation was not caused by calving at the outer edges but since you've brought it up maybe you'd like to explain how you define calving as an ice shelf losing 1,400 square miles or over 25% of its area during a single summer. That's what happened to Wilkins in 2008.

Another point is that the Earth is actually cooling, not warming.

The point is simple, the Wilkins Ice Shelf is imploding due to warming. If you want to generalize maybe you'll want to show how Antarctica warming by 4 degrees over the last 50 years is actually cooling.

The Earth's climate is changing, and climatic change is normal on this planet.

Please show how this change in Wilkins is normal. Your ability to correlate global cooling with the exploding of the ice shelf into hundreds of icebergs in your proof is worth extra credit.

[vanvaley1]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Below is a NASA picture of the ice shelf before the last remnants broke away and from the day it happened.

[ATTACH]1406[/ATTACH]

http://www.physorg.com/news158428139.html

Neat photos. Thanks. Now if we can just get this type of clarity from the wall streeters et al we'd at least know what the hell is going on and work from that.

[pwcmba]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Same arguements as in the '70s. There is nothing new under the sun!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_...970s_awareness

- I think this happy icon came from that era too!

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Ice breaking-off of the Antarctic ice sheet is normal at the end of the Antarctic summer. The process is called calving. Without calving, the Antarctic (and Arctic) ice sheets would grow because more ice collects from the centre of these ice sheets and moves outward and breaks-off. In other words, the ice-deficits are at the rim of the polar ice sheets, and the ice-surpluses are in the centre of the ice sheets.

Another point is that the Earth is actually cooling, not warming. Just Google "global cooling", and you will see all of the recent papers written on this subject by real scientists, not eco-frauds on the Greenpeace payroll.

The Earth's climate is changing, and climatic change is normal on this planet. But what is interesting is that in recent centuries, change in the Earth's climate has been modest relative to the size of changes that occurred at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Sea level, for example, rose 300 feet at the end of the Ice Age, but in recent centuries, sea level has been little changed--- only up a few inches.

[roxtar]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

My gut tells me its more an attempt at a power grab than anything. If they'd just come out and say we want cleaner air, I'd be 100% behind it. But they don't. It has to be a crisis. We have to act now!

And by "act now!" they mean a total reconfiguration of society and destruction of the standard of living in the western world.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Below is a NASA picture of the ice shelf before the last remnants broke away and from the day it happened.

WilkinsIceShelf.jpg

http://www.physorg.com/news158428139.html

[vanvaley1]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Precisely right. Besides, who needs an Arctic Ice Shelf, anyway? It's not like I was ever going to go there.

Who owns the thing if it detaches and floats about the ocean? Too bad ya can't harvest it.

[leegs]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

. . .
The E.P.A. put signs on the shores of Almaden Reservoir and Guadelupe Reservoir in San Jose warning of fish contaminated with mercury. (I ate fish from those reservoirs as a boy, and I am just fine, thank you.) :p

So that's what happened to you. Well, better from eating fish than from tanning beaver hides like the Mad Hatter. I'm so sorry.

[Andreuccio]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

But don't worry about any follow-on events, global warming is a myth, a bogeyman invented by environmentalists. Even if it's not, I'm sure the financial meltdown will get you first.

Precisely right. Besides, who needs an Arctic Ice Shelf, anyway? It's not like I was ever going to go there.

[santafe2]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

In 1950, the Wilkins Ice Shelf was bonded to Antarctica with a 62-mile wide block of ice. Now it clings by an hourglass-shaped link that narrows to just a third of a mile.

Then from news yesterday -

Word that the ice bridge holding the Wilkins Ice Sheet to Antarctica had shattered....[and]...only ten percent of Arctic ice is more than two years old.

"We've been watching it all summer," said British Antarctic Survey glaciologist David Vaughan, "waiting for it to go, and bang -- now it's gone."

Oops, that didn't take long. Wilkins is on the loose. Better collect your kids, that ice shelf could be anywhere.

But don't worry about any follow-on events, global warming is a myth, a bogeyman invented by environmentalists. Even if it's not, I'm sure the financial meltdown will get you first.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michae..._b_183966.html

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Economists do not read textbooks, they only write them, and then re-write them.

It is a full time job to constantly re-write and re-model economic theory to fit the real world...it is very competitive...no time left for reading.

Hence, my comparison in this thread to religious groups that also seem select a faith, such a keynesian or Austrian school or whatever, and then spend thier time endlessly arguing and justifying.

[reallife]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

water is actually one of those things that expands when it gets colder... that's how you get your pipes exploding in the winter...

You should stick to the dismal 'science' of economics. As for water, you are less than half correct. Water does expand when it crystallizes, freezes. Then as the temperature continues to decrease, ice contracts just like most crysatalline solids, although the density is still lower than liquid water and the ice will still float.

Like most liquids, liquid water expands as it is warmed. (edit: warmed above around 4 degrees Celcius) Most of the small rise in sea level seen so far is due to thermal expansion of seawater in direct proportion to increasing temperature. The massive amounts of land-based ice, glaciers and the like, that has melted during the years of human industrial climate effects is relatively miniscule so far. All bets are off if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets slough off into the water. THAT would be something!!

The anecdotal 'evidence' cited here in this thread and in most of the lay press is just that: anecdotal. The Earth is warming. That simple fact is well documented and irrefutable. The overall warming of the Earth is due to many 'causes', both natural cycles and man-made effects, mostly due to release of greenhouse gases. The warming is unstopable. No matter what humans do or don't do, the Earth will continue to warm for the near-term future.

However, within a few centuries, certainly not more than a millenium or two, the Earth will begin to rapidly cool and then enter another period of more or less widespread glaciation. The Ice Age isn't over folks. We are just in an interglacial period. This cycle of warming and cooling, long periods of glaciation and shorter interglacial warm spells, will continue far into the future until tectonic shifts open up the relatively land locked Acrtic Ocean. This is all just basic freshman level geology.

Actual knowledge is very accessible and understandable if people would take the time to read a few basic textbooks instead of getting their 'information' from the web and mass media.

[cjppjc]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Excellent posts both of them. I wish I could make such reasoned arguments, but I get carried away too easily

Ditto. And as for radon gas causing cancer, the first instances of radon causing cancer was in uranium miners. Guess what? they smoked.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly

Last time I checked, coal doesn't grow on trees, it is dug up from the ground. Has someone figured out how to grow it? (It may have once grown on trees or, more likely as big algae blooms, but that was in a world mostly covered by shallow seas - not very conducive to cities unless you were a fan of Waterworld)

And as to Duke actually sequestering enough carbon to offset emissions, they have a powerful incentive to cheat: it costs money. With trees, offsetting sequestration is automatic. It doesn't cost you a dime. Therefore, since there is no financial disincentive for trees to grow and sequester carbon, I'd bet my money that it is far more likely to happen that your trees will regrow, than some 10's of executives at Duke going without that extra golf vacation.



Remind me what question it was you were asking, that relates to what I said before?



That's a nice rhetorical flourish there, volunteering to store nuclear waste in order to attempt to win an argument on the internet. Somehow I'm guessing that if the government suddenly wanted to put the waste in your backyard, rent free, that you wouldn't be so happy about it.



That's funny. Ever heard of Radon Gas? It produces low-level radiation and is a known carcinogen (http://www.epa.gov/radon/). Waste from a nuclear power plant, which includes unspent uranium along with alpha emitting actinides, is far more potent. Oh, wait, I'm sure you think that the whole radon thing is just a scare cooked up by the eco frauds who are trying to steal all your money from you. Sounds like they succeeded in already making you destitute, since you are in such dire economic straits that you would invite a nuclear waste dump to your backyard for a few bucks rent (either that, or you really do have some great rhetorical abilities!).

Actually, I think I get the picture. I recall living in a beautiful canyon in the rocky mountains when I was younger. There was one guy in the canyon who liked to collect old cars. Not nice old cars - just old cars. And lots of them, all junkers that sat there rotting away in his yard, within plain view of everyone. And they were right next to the stream, with all their fluids leaking out onto the ground then into that stream. Kind of ruined the pristine feeling around there. When the county told him to clean up the mess, he protested, calling them all crazy environmentalists and tying them up in court for years (he eventually lost)*. Those damn eco frauds! They bankrupted this poor man! I sense that something similar has happened to you in the past. Thou doth protest a bit too much.

-M

*Don't mistake me for a nanny state proponent. I actually think the best solution to the old cars problem would have been to allow the guy to keep the cars, if he: 1) paid every dime of the cost to put in some kind of barrier to keep all the leaking fluids out of the soil and stream, and 2) put up some kind of a visual barrier so that it didn't ruin the visual environment for everyone.

Yes, radon gas can cause lung cancer, but radon is emitted from the granite under my house, naturally. So, what difference does it make if the radon is from the very slow decay of uranium in nuclear waste or the radon is from the very slow decay of uranium in my granite? At least, I might get paid to store atomic waste. (This would be fun!)

Low levels of uranium are no worry, and they are part of the natural environment. Wherever there is granite, there is uranium.

If you are really worried about lung cancer, stop smoking cigarettes.

After witnessing as a boy the outright hysteria that the E.P.A. generated about cinnabar, the natural ore of mercury, by my parent's house in New Almaden in San Jose, California, I learned early in life what eco-frauds are all about--- especially if they work in government.

The E.P.A. put signs on the shores of Almaden Reservoir and Guadelupe Reservoir in San Jose warning of fish contaminated with mercury. (I ate fish from those reservoirs as a boy, and I am just fine, thank you.) :p