[PassedOut]

NASA spots worrisome Antarctic ice sheet melt

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The huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting a glacially slow collapse in an unstoppable way, two new studies show. Alarmed scientists say that means even more sea level rise than they figured.

The worrisome outcomes won’t be seen soon. Scientists are talking hundreds of years, but over that time the melt that has started could eventually add 4 to 12 feet to current sea levels.

And, as reported recently, the ice in East Antarctica is not as stable as was once assumed.

[blackshoe]

OMG! The world is ending! What shall we do?! What shall we do?!

[Daniel1960]

PassedOut, on 2014-May-12, 13:18, said:

NASA spots worrisome Antarctic ice sheet melt


And, as reported recently, the ice in East Antarctica is not as stable as was once assumed.

According to Mengel and Levermann, simulated what would happen if the waters around East Antarctica warmed between 1.8 and 4.5F. Current research shows that the waters around East Antarctica exhibitied a "slightly negative (i.e. cooling) trend in average temperature anomaly over the entire region [1992-2011]. However, the trend is very weak, and found to be stastically insignificant."

http://www.hindawi.c...rn/2013/392632/

This corresponds with increasing the timeframe of increasing sea ice.

http://arctic.atmos....nteractive.html

Based on the recent trends in sea ice and temperature, it appears that the simulated increase in southern ocean temperatures will not occur anytime soon, and the East Antarctic ice sheet will remain quiote stable.

[PassedOut]

blackshoe, on 2014-May-13, 17:47, said:

OMG! The world is ending! What shall we do?! What shall we do?!

No need to be that frightened. Although the process is no longer reversible, the time frame means there are some years to mitigate and adapt to the consequences.

[blackshoe]

PassedOut, on 2014-May-14, 06:06, said:

…the process is no longer reversible…

Was it ever?

[PassedOut]

blackshoe, on 2014-May-14, 12:59, said:

Was it ever?

Sure.

[Al_U_Card]

[y66]

From Ellen Degeneres' 2009 commencement address at Tulane:

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I know that a lot of you are concerned about your future, but there’s no need to worry. The economy is booming, the job market is wide open, the planet is just fine. It’s gonna be great. You’ve already survived a hurricane. What else can happen to you? And as I mentioned before, some of the most devastating things that happen to you will teach you the most. And now you know the right questions to ask for your first job interview — like, ‘Is it above sea level?’ So to conclude my conclusion that I’ve previously concluded in the common cement speech, I guess what I’m trying to say is life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain. And if they like what they see, you’ll have more beads than you know what to do with. And you’ll be drunk most of the time.

Keep your shirt on. It's gonna be fine.

[mike777]

y66, on 2014-May-15, 10:33, said:

From Ellen Degeneres' 2009 commencement address at Tulane:


Keep your shirt on. It's gonna be fine.

No she did not say keep your shirt on

if anything she hints at show your boobs.

[y66]

Good story here about one grass roots organization's opposition to the Keystone pipeline.

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One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. “One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,” she said. “People here care about their neighbors. So we were looking for a face.”

...

The culmination of the effort came at a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game in Lincoln that September, when a TransCanada ad titled “Husker Pipeline” ran on the stadium’s giant HuskerVision screen. The stadium erupted in spontaneous booing, delighting Kleeb, who later asked people to go to State Department hearings in Cornhusker red. The next week, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln announced that it was cutting sponsorship ties with the company.

To the leaders of the larger climate-change movement, the group’s work in Nebraska has turned the tide against the Keystone XL. Bill McKibben, one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, told me that the Cornhusker uprising was one of the first moments he thought they could actually win the larger pipeline fight. “There’s no question that that moment happened because of the work Jane was doing,” he said. Kenny Bruno, who has coordinated many of the groups involved in the movement, went even further. “Without Jane and a few other people, without their organizing and education on the route, that pipeline would have been built already.”

[blackshoe]

Some people want a pipeline, some people don't. In the end whether there will be a pipeline will not be decided by logic.

Same for "global warming" or whatever we're supposed to call it this week.

[PassedOut]

blackshoe, on 2014-May-18, 17:13, said:

Some people want a pipeline, some people don't. In the end whether there will be a pipeline will not be decided by logic.

Same for "global warming" or whatever we're supposed to call it this week.

No one today doubts man-made global warming. The issue now is the pace of the changes it causes. Objective evidence requires accurate measurements, so Europe's Cryosat provides essential information about the rise in sea levels: ESA's Cryosat mission sees Antarctic ice losses double

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Prof David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, who was not involved in the Cryosat survey, commented: "The increasing contribution of Antarctica to sea-level rise is a global issue, and we need to use every technique available to understand where and how much ice is being lost.

"Through some very clever technical improvements, McMillan and his colleagues have produced the best maps of Antarctic ice loss we have ever had. Prediction of the rate of future global sea-level rise must be begin with a thorough understanding of current changes in the ice sheets - this study puts us exactly where we need to be."

You are right that logic does not tell us what the effects of global warming will be. Evidence does.

[blackshoe]

PassedOut, on 2014-May-19, 10:56, said:

You are right that logic does not tell us what the effects of global warming will be. Evidence does.

That is not what I said. What to do about it will not be decided by logic. But then I suspect you understood me the first time.

[billw55]

PassedOut, on 2014-May-19, 10:56, said:

No one today doubts man-made global warming.

(comment not necessary)

[PassedOut]

blackshoe, on 2014-May-19, 11:22, said:

What to do about it will not be decided by logic.

Maybe. The global warming problem today resembles the ozone layer problem of the last century: The Skeptics vs. the Ozone Hole

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On June 28, 1974, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, chemists at the University of California, Irvine, published the first scientific paper warning that human-generated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could cause serious harm to Earth's protective ozone layer (Molina and Rowland, 1974). They calculated that if CFC production continued to increase at the going rate of 10%/year until 1990, then remain steady, CFCs would cause a global 5 to 7 percent ozone loss by 1995 and 30-50% loss by 2050.

They warned that the loss of ozone would significantly increase the amount of skin-damaging ultraviolet UV-B light reaching the surface, greatly increasing skin cancer and cataracts. The loss of stratospheric ozone could also significantly cool the stratosphere, potentially causing destructive climate change. Although no stratospheric ozone loss had been observed yet, CFCs should be banned, they said. At the time, the CFC industry was worth about $8 billion in the U.S., employed over 600,000 people directly, and 1.4 million people indirectly (Roan, 1989).

Critics and skeptics--primarily industry spokespeople and scientists from conservative think tanks--immediately attacked the theory. Despite the fact that Molina and Rowland's theory had wide support in the scientific community, a handful of skeptics, their voices greatly amplified by the public relations machines of powerful corporations and politicians sympathetic to them, succeeded in delaying imposition of controls on CFCs for many years. However, the stunning discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985 proved the skeptics wrong. Human-generated CFCs were indeed destroying Earth's protective ozone layer. In fact, the ozone depletion was far worse than Molina and Roland had predicted. No one had imagined that ozone depletions like the 50% losses being observed by 1987 over Antarctica were possible so soon. Despite the continued opposition of many of the skeptics, the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out ozone-destroying chemicals, was hurriedly approved in 1987 to address the threat.

So it is not impossible for folks to act responsibly to counteract an environmental threat.

[y66]

blackshoe, on 2014-May-19, 11:22, said:

That is not what I said. What to do about it will not be decided by logic. But then I suspect you understood me the first time.

I suspect that even Marco Rubio will become persuaded by the logic of rising sea levels that carbon pricing makes sense.

[Al_U_Card]

Hmmmnnnn and if there was a net ice GAIN, would that make the carbon price negative?

400 -160 = -240

Now, the fact that Antarctica is contributing 1 zillionth (technical term for an insignificant quantity) of a meter to global SLR while Greenland is accumulating ice and reducing it by 3 zillionths... maybe we need to be finding a price for icebergs?

[y66]

From The Obama Tapes (January 2014) by David Remnick:

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Q.: Mr. President, when the Copenhagen pact was signed, our carbon emissions were about the same as the Chinese. Now the Chinese are double ours—double. And you’ve now had meetings with the Chinese leadership, and you know the forces that impinge on them in terms of development and lifting people out of poverty. But, as I think I remember you saying, if India and China develop at our rate we’ll be “four feet underwater.”

Obama: Yes, we’ve got problems.

Q.: What leverage do we have?

Obama: Well, the good news is the Chinese and Indians understand that. I may have mentioned this to you earlier—the most popular Twitter account in China is the U.S. Embassy’s daily air-quality measurement. When you talk to China experts, they will tell you that the most active, robust civic organizations, and the area where there’s been the loudest complaint about government inaction, alongside corruption, is the issue of the environment.

It's going to be fine.

[Al_U_Card]

"The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of observation and inference for authority. Every attempt to revive authority in intellectual matters is a retrograde step. And it is part of the scientific attitude that the pronouncements of science do not claim to be certain, but only to be the most probable on present evidence. One of the greatest benefits that science confers upon those who understand its spirit is that it enables them to live without the delusive support of subjective certainty."

-- Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, p. 102.

[Zelandakh]

Daniel1960, on 2014-May-03, 07:17, said:

http://www.aps.org/p...-transcript.pdf

Thanks Daniel, I found this very interesting, particularly the presentation from Richard Lindzen. This little section also made me laugh:

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DR. COLLINS: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is that we are not using the models as statistical projection tool.
DR. KOONIN: What are you using them as?
DR. COLLINS: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
DR. KOONIN: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
DR. COLLINS: Well, I mean, it is part of the assessment process.