Old Arctic Ice Is Disappearing, and Taking the Rest of the Ice With It
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I do appreciate that global warming is a fact, and that we are responsible. I also realize this is going to have severe consequences all over the world. I also don't think anything we do at this stage could slow down or stop the process, other than banning modern civilization. What we need to do is psychologically and politically prepare ourselves to mitigate the damage. This means cutting back judiciously on fossil fuel usage, without ruining the economy that we're going to need to be able to deal with the worst consequences. It means being prepared to help those countries or regions that will be worst hit. Hysterical articles about sticking our heads in the stand honestly don't really help at this stage, they just perpetuate the sense of controversy without contributing positively to the debate.
Other is geoengineering the oceans to remove acid from them.
It's not hopeless, but there will be less and less simple solution as time goes by.
> Hysterical articles about sticking our heads in the stand honestly don't really help at this stage, they just perpetuate the sense of controversy without contributing positively to the debate.
... also I like to think that when this becomes a /real/ problem with consequences everyone can immediately feel then we will solve it. We have the power to solve this with (large amounts of) effort and technology - and we have done for a very long time... nobody cares enough to do anything because the effects aren't immediate and tangible yet. This is human nature...
Have you looked at a map of North Carolina or New Jersey? Please notice that both states have long, thin ribbons of land that run along the coast. Many people live on these ribbons of land, and their homes are vulnerable to rising sea levels. What shape should government policy take over the next 100 years? Should we say "We will never retreat one centimeter: we will rebuild in the same spot after every storm." Or should we say: "Defending these thin ribbons of land is too expensive, so we will pay to relocate these people further inland"?
If the USA wanted to spend a vast treasure on the defense of coastal barriers, it could do what the Dutch have done, and build an immense system of dykes to defend its east and west coast. The cost would be staggering, truly unimaginable. The coasts of the USA are much greater than the coast of the Netherlands (especially if the USA also decided that "We will never retreat one centimeter" also applied to Alaska). If such a colossal project was to be in any way affordable, its construction would have to be stretched out over 100 years, so the annual cost would be manageable. And therefore, we would have to start working on it now, not when rising oceans become "a /real/ problem with consequences everyone can immediately feel".
the fact that you use words like politics and expensive tells me we are imagining very different scenarios and consequences...
what i mean by 'real problem with consequences you can feel' is unavoidable stuff where /nature/ forces you to pay attention or die. i.e. you must respond to the situation because it is vital for survival and doing actual harm to you whilst you do not.
the fact that a flood is almost certainly going to happen tomorrow might make me run away - the flood happening right now forces me to run or die.
/run or die/
that is what i am talking about. not freedom of choice but unavoidable force of nature. i think that is what it will take for people to do something - and it will need to happen to most of us if not all...
i don't think thats a good thing. however i have a lot of faith in how creative and constructive people are when they are fighting for survival. cost and resources become irrelevant if they exist - if you need money (and you won't) then you will steal it because its preferable to dying... you will make a damned good effort too. the real limiting factors will be time vs. manpower (will we finish before we die - will we die trying?) and feasibility (i.e. does the universe allow it at all).
of course we may also just let ourselves die... its a very real possibility that we end ourselves through the fallout from climate change.
as an aside one of the biggest problems for climate change proponents, i feel, is that predictions are constantly wrong and have been historically. the situation you describe there i feel is very flawed... whilst it might be a good prediction is it really the thing to worry about? can you convince me of this?
a classic case to point at in this regard is the recent global dimming due to particulates in the atmosphere - which have caused more problems where people actually have been dying and living a lower quality of life as a result of climate change. we are already not fixing these problems and ignoring them. people are actually dying today because of this problem - but nowhere near enough for people to seriously care - melting ice (nearly harmless artic ice as well which will not cause sea levels to rise appreciably if at all) is so very far away from that level of seriousness... let alone a survival scenario.
... long :I
I just tough our civilization had implicitly agreed to hold itself to a higher standard.
First of all, environmental problems are not of black and white type. It's not something where "humanity puts effort", then suddenly the problem disappears.
It's perfectly plausible instead, that nature as we know it today is going to disappear, to be replaced by wasteland, while still having the capability to acceptably sustain human life.
Second, environmental problems are not primarily technical problems. We have already what we need to keep the environment clean and sustainable (with some limits, of course). But political and economical forces (and straight crime and bare ignorance, of course) play the main role. And they're not going to disappear, let alone suddenly.
Third, even if there were "solutions", that doesn't mean that they would restore the natural balance as we know it today. Some things may very well be "beyond repair".
Last one, and this is disturbing, it's not "human nature", it's your nature, and those of the people passively and lazily thinking this way. A lot can be done, and many people (and some countries) are trying hard to do it.
> First of all, environmental problems are not of black and white type. It's not something where "humanity puts effort", then suddenly the problem disappears.
I'm sorry if I implied that - I never meant to. Its not just about putting in effort - its about putting in a lot of effort. 'properly' is a vague term and i know what it means to me but nobody else does - its best demonstrated what i mean with examples:
not proper effort:
+ trying to reduce emissions to reduce pollution
+ no littering signs
+ banning environmentally damaging behaviour
proper efforts:
+ building plants/factories/machines whose sole purpose is to capture and fix or otherwise convert nasty gasses and particulates
+ actively cleaning existing damage, e.g. dedicated missions to get some of that plastic out of our oceans
+ outlawing the burning of petrol, shutting down the petrochemical industry (in total, even the good bits), stealing its assets and using them for projects to repair existing damage
to use a horrible analogy if you get lung cancer you don't just quit smoking - you want to cut the cancer out and throw it away. quitting smoking at that point is just a bad joke...
*
maybe i came across too strongly (do you mean disingenuous as 'dishonest' or 'wrong' - lots of people use it as 'wrong' to sound clever which is horrible...?) especially in light of this argument which shows another difference of perspective:
> It's perfectly plausible instead, that nature as we know it today is going to disappear, to be replaced by wasteland, while still having the capability to acceptably sustain human life.
This had entered my head - this is very possible but its also not what i consider to be the real enough consequences to kick us up the ass. A gradual decline in quality of life is easy to ignore... an immediate threat to your life is not. I don't think people will magically be motivated if their quality of life degrades - unless its rapid and potentially fatal.
This is a real problem. Actually climate change has already caused this to some degree... ironically via global dimming rather than global warming. (those famines from drought in africa have been quite definitively linked to pollution from europe afaik)
> Second, environmental problems are not primarily technical problems.
I'm confused here - I hope I never implied this because I was trying to state the opposite. I believe that we have all the technology to maintain the environment and to reverse any significant damage we have done - just that it is unaffordable to implement it at the moment. What I believe is that in a survival situation the 'artificial' financial cost has to give way somehow to the costs enforced by reality like available time and (actual) resources and the desire to survive.
> Last one, and this is disturbing, it's not "human nature", it's your nature
people will ignore future problems and underestimate them - immediate temporary gratification is very often more appealing than long term or permanent benefits unless those benefits are excessive. i'm very certain that this is true and i believe that there is considerable evidence.
today we have a capitalist economy which almost entirely relies on exploiting this mentality - that people will generally do what is in their best interest /now/ - even at the expense of long term gains.
most smokers do this i'm sure - they know smoking kills them but the risk is remote and intangible. drinkers do this too - drink drivers especially who do not think about the intangible risk of death when they drive to their death. driving at all requires some of this attitude because driving 'safely' is a risk and one that is really quite likely to kill you in the long run.
naturally i can feel myself thinking that these are unrealistic arguments but they aren't - they are quantifiable in facts and figures to the point where society tries to reduce the problems...
there are more examples everywhere...
gamblers will bet themselves into bankruptcy with similar mentality - their greed for the immediate winnings outweighs the very real risk of losses - especially that continuous gambling might ruin you a very 'remote' risk.
teenagers have unprotected sex because the risk of pregnancy or an STI seems 'remote' compared to the immediate gratification of sex. 'i won't be that unlucky, its just the once' is not uncommon thinking.
its everywhere and we exploit it too - quick fix beauty products that cause long term damage to your skin, stimulants to stay awake at the expense of tonight's sleep, a loan so you can have an instant pile of money at the expense of having less income for the near future.
you need to make a very convincing argument to change my opinion on this... much more than bold unsubstantiated claims wrapped in ad hominem.
... too long.
Greenland was not named Greenland for being green. The most common etymology is that the name was a marketing ploy to convince settlers to come to a hostile and bitterly cold land.
So, "this is a popular legend" is the most scientific link on the subject? The second best answer is "translation error"? Um. ok.
He purposely chose the pleasant name Grænland ("green land") to attract settlers, but the choice wasn't exactly misleading. Some parts of Greenland, especially the parts the Norse settled, really are green, as these pictures from the tourist board attest (www.greenland-guide.dk/outdoor_life_photo.htm). He may have been a killer, but at least he wasn't a real-estate scam-artist.
Al Gore? The guy who's the poster boy for climate change owns a huge mansion that's incredibly inefficient in its energy use:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
"In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home"
This doesn't even take into account the amount of fuel the guy burns on all of his globe trotting talking about the evils of Global Warming. So yeah, there's the deniers, but it's hard to take these people seriously who are talking about the end of the world, yet are greatly adding to its demise.
I'm all for alternative energy sources, but when do you think you're going to get solar to a point where's its more economically feasible? I just got an estimate from a company last summer and to get a few panels installed and up and running, it was around 40K up-front and then I would break even with the energy savings in about 10 years.
Now think about low income families, you think they'd ever be able to afford something like that? Add in the fact renewable resource companies keep going bankrupt and I keep wondering when, if ever there will be a decent alternative to actually mitigate the ongoing damage.
That doesn't affect who is right, of course. But everyone on both sides of this debate seems to have this notion that their side is the scrappy underdog going against a political and corporate behemoth manipulating the truth for profit.
Show some human understanding. Let them save face. Invite them in and make them want to join you. Find points of agreement. For example, it isn't incorrect to question science, especially when just tens of decades of data are being used to predict the outcomes of epochal processes. But now it's not just predictions. You can see the effects with your own eyes. Something immediate is happening now. And whether you believe(d) the cause was human or not, what is certainly true is that humans have the ability and urgent need to improve the situation.
The more important goal (more important than trumpeting your rightness) is solving the problem. Any one of us could have been a "denier" in different circumstances. World views take time to adjust, and getting insulted by your philosophical opponents over and over doesn't speed up the process.
As a scientist brought up to value Karl Popper's writings on the practice of science, it's disturbing to see a hypothesis (CAGW) making a whole series of failed predictions and each time some new excuse brought out to explain that failure together (from some) with choice epithets for those who remark on that failure.
Feynmann made the point here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
"If it (theory/hypothesis) disagrees with experiment - it's wrong"
Wouldn't the fact that the arctic and antarctic are geographically quite different have an effect here? The arctic ice in question is largely ice sitting atop water. Thus the feedback mechanism described in the article. Light colored ice thins, darker water is exposed to sunlight to warm and thin more ice or not freeze as rapidly the next winter.
See a similar effect in Greenland as pollution (mostly from North America?) is covering the ice sheet with a darker soot, leading to heating of the ice sheet and faster than normal melts.
The Antarctic is sitting away from pollution and the ice sheet is largely atop a landmass, not just water. In particular, the central ice sheet is on land. So any water warming affect would be going outside-in, not inside-out. No internal feedback loop to destroy itself. Regarding pollution, as a contrast to Greenland, its air currents aren't pulling in heavily polluted air from industrial centers and setting it down on the ice sheet.
Why it's grown? I haven't got a clue, but why it hasn't shrunk like the Arctic? It's not the same configuration, it shouldn't be expected to react the same way.
A skeptic could quite reasonably have been skeptical about any or all of those assertions at various points in time. If you manage to establish some of them to a satisfactory degree, that doesn't give you a free pass to assume away all the others.
Here is some ice core data from Greenland going back to 1800BC:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/gisp/dye3/dye3-1yr.txt
See, this is problematic. If we don't have articles documenting the problem, no one will care. Right now the possibility of the Keystone-XL pipeline is on the president's table, and for those of you who don't know, the Keystone-XL pipeline will double imports of tar sands oil, thus bringing climate change to even a bigger problem than before [1]. If we stop this, we have a chance of improving the problem.
I realize that you said we should "[cut] back judiciously on fossil fuel usage", but when things like the Keystone-XL pipeline are a serious consideration, not being alarmist is a problem. The idea that the fossil fuel industry's thinly veiled "jobs creation" argument (when in reality, the pipeline would create very, very few jobs in the larger scale [2]) could be one that gets this pipeline built, puts us in extreme jeopardy. It's time that people are scared about the world changing, because there are certainly too many people who don't really care.
> I also don't think anything we do at this stage could slow down or stop the process, other than banning modern civilization.
This is just wrong, and part of why we're experiencing a problem now. Germany is installing tons of solar panels [3]. Buenos Aires is switching to LED lighting to cut down on electricity costs by as much as 50% [4]. We should also be investing in sustainable technology, because this is going to be a serious problem.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/aug/23/tar-sands...
[2] http://www.livescience.com/38735-putting-keystone-pipeline-j...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/business/energy-environmen...
[4] http://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/buenos-aires-swi...
God is my witness, this has shades of Steve Jobs going vegan to try to treat his pancreatic cancer.
Human civilization as we know it is on the edge of an existential crisis, and action on it is being postponed by a small group of extremely wealthy individuals because they want to become more wealthy. That is it, period. Look at where the anti-global warming money comes from.
If you think I'm being 'hysterical' then by all means tell me:
1) how we plan on moving the populations and infrastructure built by the sea when sea levels rise 25+ feet when the Greenland ice sheet melts.
2) how we plan on feeding the world when temperatures render the American midwest to warm for wheat and corn production. Same for the bread/rice baskets in China, Ukraine, Africa.
3) how do you think the economy will be affected by #1 and #2. how do we deal with it.
I think that a good percentage just assume they'll be one of the 1-in-4 to survive the next century. Sorry if that is too pessimistic for you.
EDIT: And right on cue, it's flagged off the front page. Denial, it ain't just a river in Egypt.
(2) Even the IPCC says the next 1-3 degrees of warming will improve agricultural productivity. So if feeding the world is the priority we don't want to stop warming now even if we could - we should wait for at least another degree or two. In a warmer world you get longer growing seasons in the places that are most productive today for food crops, and in a more CO2-rich world timber forestry becomes much more productive near the equator due to CO2 fertilization. So for at least the next 50-100 years, warming is a boon. A good thing.
That gives us at least 50-100 years to check our predictions and figure out what, if anything, we need to do next. (Which is long enough that it's ridiculous to assume current trends will continue, but it can't hurt much to think about it.)