Who believes in Global Warming?
Do you believe in Global Warming? Yes/No
If Yes, is it Manmade? Yes/No
If Yes, is it Manmade? Yes/No
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I belive in globel warming it has happened here every July and Augest for the last 60 years that I know of. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by CA sucks
quote:There is a corresponding increase in ice in the Antarctic. That is also a fact.
Please provide a source for this "fact", I suspect it is made up BS.
CA sucks, when was the last time I gave you some "made up BS"? Ask anybody on this forum. All my oatmeal is the genuine article. Now I didn't mind when you said I was even less intelligent than you thought I was, but when you accuse me of making up my own oatmeal, that's over the line.
I'll give you this much. You and Al Gore are much more intelligent than I am. You and anyone else who knows that there is "Global Warming", know what it is, know what is causing it, know how to reverse it and how to stop the reversal are much more intelligent than I am.
I believe we are going through something, but I don't claim to know if it's weather changes, global warming or climate change. I doubt that it is caused by humans, but it don't know. What I do know is I don't trust humans to start some kind of "corrective action".
Here are a few references you asked for:
Warming Is Blamed for Antarctics`s Weight Gain
Warming Is Blamed for Antarctica's Weight Gain
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: May 20, 2005
The eastern half of Antarctica is gaining weight, more than 45 billion tons a year, according to a new scientific study.
Data from satellites bouncing radar signals off the ground show that the surface of eastern Antarctica appears to be slowly growing higher, by about 1.8 centimeters a year, as snow and ice pile up.
The gain in eastern Antarctica snow partly offsets the rise in sea level caused by the melting of ice and snow in other parts of the world. The finding also matches expectations that the earth's warming temperatures would increase the amount of moisture in the air and lead to greater snowfall over Antarctica.
''It's been long predicted by climate models,'' said Dr. Curt H. Davis, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri and the lead author of a paper that was published on the Web site of the journal Science yesterday. ''This is the first observational evidence.''
The accumulation occurring across 2.75 million square miles of eastern Antarctica corresponds to a gain of 45 billion tons of water a year or, equivalently, the removal of the top 0.12 millimeter of the world's oceans.
''This is the only large terrestrial ice body that is likely gaining mass rather than losing it,'' Dr. Davis said.
The data, from two European Space Agency satellites, cover 1992 to 2003, but because the satellites do not pass directly over the South Pole, they did not provide any information for a 1,150-mile-wide circular area around the pole. Assuming that snow was falling there at the same rate seen in the rest of Antarctica, the total gain in snowfall would correspond to a 0.18-millimeter-a-year drop in sea levels.
The data also deepen a mystery: Satellite measurements show that the level of the world's oceans has been rising about three millimeters a year in recent years, and scientists cannot figure out where all of the water is coming from.
Because water expands when it warms, the rise in global temperatures by itself causes sea levels to rise about one millimeter a year. The melting of glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere appears to account for another millimeter or so.
That leaves ''at least a missing millimeter a year to explain,'' said Dr. Robert Thomas, a glaciologist who works with NASA. ''This is perhaps another reason to suggest the information that Curt has presented doesn't include the entire picture.''
Dr. Thomas said that there could be as-yet-unseen melting of ice along the edges of Antarctica, where the satellites could not map the steeper coastal topography.
The new study is ''another piece of the puzzle that we're still putting together,'' said Dr. Waleed Abdalati, head of the cryospheric sciences branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the research.
West Antarctic ice sheet is thickening
AS ARCTIC ICE MELTS, SOUTH POLE ICE GROWS
THE NEXT ICE AGE-NOW!
Glaciers are growing around the world, including the United States0 -
quote:Originally posted by RUGERGUNZ
Do you believe in Global Warming? Yes/No
If Yes, is it Manmade? Yes/No
Does this also include all other influences like; the earth is being covered in black top (as we all know this will retain heat longer. like 'burbs in Phoenix where the night time temp is basically the same as the day time temp because of it). Or too many mammals which also raise the temp. on earth (body heat is a real killer). Or Polar shifts from earth quakes which throws the wobble off.
Personally I'd like to see and know what is under the North Pole (I have a feeling this is where the white folks came from. so there should be some buildings).
Yes I believe in this so called global warming, and man made as well as a natural cycle (speeded up). I'd also like to see global cooling in my life time. Looking forward to that big show[:D].0 -
quote:Originally posted by CA sucks
Re: that picture... thats greenland, its ice covered land, not part of the sea ice, if you think greenland wasnt covered in ice in the summer in 1979, your even less intelligent than I thought.
Yes, I do beleive it.
???? Who cares what you think.0 -
quote:Originally posted by jma2006
NO
Its my understanding that the area that is still covered is thicker than is was when it was wider.
These people don't know, they do have an agenda.
Save the 2nd amendment and keep out the U.N., Thats important
quote:Originally posted by Rack Ops
Your "understanding" couldn't much more wrong.
People are so busy searching for an "agenda" that they ignore the evidence thats right in front of them.
Maybe so Maybe not.
Arctic`s big melt challenged
Friday, 4 May, 2001, 17:21 GMT 18:21 UK
Arctic's big melt challenged
New data suggest the North Pole got a little thicker in the 90s
By BBC News Online's Jonathan Amos
If ever you needed convincing that climate science was complex stuff, just look at the Arctic. We are told the sea ice in the northern polar region is disappearing fast; some computer models even suggest there could be completely open water there during the summers at the end of this century.
If this really is the case, the implications could be immense - and not just for the polar bears which rely on the ice to go hunting for seals. The cryosphere plays a crucial role it helping to regulate the climate on planet Earth. An ice-free Arctic would likely accelerate any global warming process that was taking place.
But a new, and as yet unpublished, piece of research is challenging the idea that a big melt is underway. Dr Greg Holloway, of the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, Canada, has got tongues wagging with his suggestion that the missing ice is still there, piled up in locations where researchers have not been looking for it.
The evidence for major thinning is supported by submarine data. Upward-looking sonar readings, studied by both US and British scientists, have produced broadly similar results: about a 40% reduction in draught between the 1960s and 1990s - by draught, researchers mean the difference between the surface of the ocean and the bottom of the ice pack.
But the submarine data are not exactly comprehensive: the cruises were not continuous and the data sets only cover certain areas in the Arctic. And this is partly what got Dr Holloway into thinking the ice may simply have been "mislaid".
Satellite methods
He wondered if multi-decadal wind patterns known to operate in the Arctic could have shifted the ice into areas not surveyed by the submarines, giving the illusion that the ice was losing volume over a period of time. And when he matched the timing of the submarine visits with what he knew about wind cycles, his suspicions were confirmed.
"It's a circumstance where the ice tends to leave the central Arctic and then mostly pile up against the Canadian side, before moving back into the central Arctic again," he told BBC News Online. "Because of territorial waters and where US submarines weren't allowed to go in the 1990s - the submarines couldn't enter Canadian waters and that's where the ice was."
Dr Holloway believes the fact that the British research tallied with the American studies was purely coincidental - a "fluke".
"Trying to get a picture of the volume of Arctic ice is pretty sketchy," he said. "It's a question of what other information we can bring to bear so that we get a fuller picture. The great hope for the future is that satellite methods may be able to observe the thickness of the ice as well as the extent."
But Dr Peter Wadhams, of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, and one of the world's leading experts on Arctic ice, is not yet prepared to accept the Canadian's analysis.
Stability returns
"It needs testing obviously, but I think on the whole the evidence is against it," he told BBC News Online. "There are some submarine data sets from these regions that are not yet published and they show no thickening, and data from radar altimetry suggest thinning over the entire Arctic, not just over the regions where the submarine data exist."
Dr Wadhams said he also thought some of the theoretical basis underpinning Holloway's ideas was not supported by what science had learnt about ice dynamics.
"Modellers suspect it is not as simple as Dr Holloway suggests - the ice will not simply pile up in some other place. There will be a change in the distribution of ice thickness around the Arctic but it won't involve any massive build-ups to compensate for overall thinning."
If the submarines have got it right then at least some stability appears to have returned to the Arctic. The latest and most comprehensive analysis yet of the sonar data collected in the 1990s shows little if any thinning - at least towards the end of that decade. Indeed, at the North Pole, there are indications in the data that the ice even got a little thicker.
For Dr Holloway, there is a recognition that he needs to put his research through peer review and get it published. "There are certainly regional changes taking place," he said. "And if you take the western Hudson Bay, it may well be that the Polar bears are being stressed there because of declining ice coverage. But I believe we have been a little bit overly stampeded into the idea that there is a terribly alarming melting taking place."0 -
Are the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets in Danger of Collapse?
Are the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets in Danger of Collapse?
Written by Cliff D. Ollier, Ph.D.
Thursday, 08 November 2007
Introduction
Much has been made of a possible precipitous collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets due to manmade climate change and the catastrophic sea level rise if such a collapse were to occur.
Recently, my attention was drawn to a Working Paper by Alan Carlin (2007), which was basically about how emissions reductions may be a dangerous strategy to avoid climate change. Carlin sounds the alarm about climate change, claiming that, "The long standing concern about dangerous climate changes is that there may be a `tipping point' where a continued rise in global temperatures will trigger non-linear, self-reinforcing further warming or other dangerous environmental effects beyond those resulting immediately from the temperature rise itself."
Carlin argues that the collapse of the major ice sheets is one of the most serious threats we face. He bases his discussion of this perceived threat on papers by Hansen (2007) and others who propose rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctica (henceforth Antarctica) Ice Sheets that would lead to a sea level rise of five meters or more. Carlin notes that, "Hansen et al. believe that the most likely and most critical of these dangerous effects is the possibility of substantial sea level rise due to the breakup of parts or all of the ice sheets covering Greenland and West Antarctica."
Hansen's scenario is not reasonable. Indeed, it is not even possible. Hansen's seeming ignorance of the mechanism by which glaciers flow leads him into major errors. In this paper, I will describe glacier dynamics, such as the glacier budget, how glaciers flow (through a process known as "creep"), how creep is related to temperature and stress, and how the simple rules of creep allow us to understand some observations of glaciers.
Hansen's Glacier Model is Wrong!
Hansen is a modeler, and his scenario for the collapse of the ice sheets is based on a false model. His model has the ice sheet sliding along an inclined plane, lubricated by melWar on Terrorer, which is increasing because of global warming. The same model is adopted in many copycat papers. Christoffersen and Hambrey (2006) and Bamber et al. (2007) are typical. A popular article based on the same flawed model appeared in the June 2007 issue of National Geographic and the idea is present in textbooks such as The Great Ice Age (2000) by R.C.L. Wilson et al.
Unfortunately, Hansen's model includes neither the main form of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow. The predicted behavior of the ice sheets is based on melting and accumulation rates at the present day, and on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by melWar on Terrorer, which is itself increasing because of global warming. The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by melWar on Terrorer seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then.
It is not enough to think that present climate over a few decades can affect the flow of ice sheets. Ice sheets do not simply grow and melt in response to average global temperature. Anyone with this na?ve view would have difficulty in explaining why glaciation has been present in the southern hemisphere for about 30 million years, and in the northern hemisphere for only three million years.
To understand what is possible, it is necessary to know something about the physics of glacier flow, which explains a few things not accounted for in the Hansen model, including:
Why are ice crystals at the foot of a glacier a thousand times bigger than those in the snow that feeds them?
Why does lake ice deform at lower stress than other ice?
Why do crevasses only reach a limiting depth?
In reality, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point. The accumulation of kilometers of undisturbed ice in cores in Greenland and Antarctica (the same ones that are sometimes used to fuel ideas of global warming) show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation with no melting or flow. Except around the edges, ice sheets flow at the base and depend on geothermal heat, not the climate at the surface. It is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to "collapse."
A Glacier Budget
In general glaciers grow, flow, and melt continuously, with a budget of gains and losses. Snow falls on high ground. It becomes more and more compact with time, air is extruded, and it turns into solid ice. A few bubbles of air might be trapped, and may be used by scientists later to examine the air composition at the time of deposition. More precipitation of snow forms another layer on the top, which goes through the same process, so the ice grows thicker by the addition of new layers at the surface. The existence of such layers, youngest at the top, enables the glacial ice to be studied through time, as in the Vostok cores of Antarctica, a basic source of data on temperature and carbon dioxide over about 400,000 years.
When the ice is thick enough it starts to flow under the force of gravity. A mountain glacier flows mainly downhill, but can flow uphill in places. In an ice sheet the flow is from the depositional high center towards the edges of the ice sheet. When the ice reaches a lower altitude or lower latitude, where temperature is higher, it starts to melt and evaporate. (Evaporation and melting together are called ablation, but for simplicity I shall use "melting" from now on).
If growth and melting balance, the glacier appears to be `stationary'. If precipitation exceeds melting the glacier grows. If melting exceeds precipitation the glacier recedes.
How Glaciers Move
Flow is mainly by a process called creep, essentially the movement of atoms from one crystal to another. The first clues to this came from the study of lake ice, which can flow at a stress much below the shear strength of "regular" ice if the stress is applied parallel to the lake surface. This results from the crystal properties of ice. Ice is a hexagonal mineral with glide planes parallel to the base (see (a) in Figure 1). Lake ice is a sheet of crystals with the c-axes vertical and the glide planes all parallel to the lake surface, so a push parallel to the glide planes deforms the ice readily (See (b) in Figure 1).
Figure 1. (a) Hexagonal ice crystal with glide planes parallel to the base. In lake ice the c-axes of the crystals are vertical and the glide planes parallel to the water surface. (b) Crystal deformed plastically by shear stress parallel to the glide planes. (c) Elastic deformation of crystal by strain normal to the glide planes. Grains in such orientation lose molecules to less stressed crystals, which grow bigger. This is why ice crystals grow bigger towards to toe of the glacier, a feature not explained if the ice simply slid along its base.
Another method of flow is important in "regular" ice. There is constant gain-and-loss of atoms between different crystals in a mass of ice, and in the absence of any stress an individual grain of ice will lose about the same number of atoms that it gains, and so remain unchanged. But if a crystal is stressed it will lose more atoms than it gains and so shrink, while a nearby, unstressed grain will gain more than it loses and so grow. In this way there will be preferential growth of those ice crystals that are oriented in such a way that their glide planes are parallel to the stress, and grains in other orientations will tend to disappear.
This is observed in glaciers where it is found that a preferred crystal orientation appears with distance down-valley and the ice crystals at a glacier snout have a volume about a thousand times greater than that of the first-formed ice crystals at the source of the glacier. These observations cannot be explained by mechanisms that ignore the crystal structure of ice.
Figure 2: A glacier snout is the lowest end of a glacier, also known as the glacier terminus or toe. This is a Glacier at the head of Canon Fiord, Ellesmere Island,
Canada (Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center).
The flow of material in a solid crystalline state is known as creep, and there are three laws of creep relevant to the flow of ice:
1. Creep is proportional to temperature.
2. Creep is proportional to stress (essentially proportional to the weight of overlying ice)
3. There is a minimum stress, called the yield stress, below which creep does not operate.
All these laws have significant effects on glacier movement. Alpine glaciers differ significantly from the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, and care is needed to transfer knowledge of one kind of glacier to the other. Incidentally, the physics of ice as described here was worked out over 60 years ago by people such as Perutz (1940)
Creep is Proportional to Temperature
The closer the temperature comes to the melting point the greater the creep rate. In experiments at a fixed stress it was found that the creep rate at minus 1 degree Celsius is 1000 times greater than at minus 20 degrees Celsius. In valley glaciers (glaciers that form in the valleys of mountains, see Figure 3), the ice is almost everywhere at the prevailing melting point of ice, because the latent heat of ice is very much greater than its specific heat.
Very little heat is required to raise the temperature of an ice block from minus 1 degree Celsius to zero degrees Celsius; it takes about 80 times as much heat to turn the same ice block at zero degrees Celsius into water at zero degrees Celsius. Since the temperature does not vary in valley glaciers, this first law of creep does not affect them.
Figure 3: Valley glacier in northcentral Chugach Mountains, Alaska (Source: USGS).
But ice caps are very different. They are cooled to temperatures well below freezing point, which reduces their capacity to flow very greatly. Ice caps can be kilometers thick, and their warmest part is actually the base, where the ice is warmed by the Earth's heat, and where flow is concentrated. This was evidenced by the fact that drilling by the Northern Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) was stopped by relatively high temperatures near the base. New equipment had to be designed just to drill the core from 3001 meters to 3085 meters. It is because ice only flows at the base that great thicknesses of stratified ice can accumulate, as revealed in the ice cores.
Some Greenland cores show no flow at all. This is cold-based ice. A large geomorphology literature describes delicate landforms such as tors and patterned ground in areas that were formerly covered by an ice sheet. The general view is that cold-based ice essentially preserves any pre-existing landforms, and the erosion potential of cold-based ice is zero or minimal. Importantly for ideas of "collapse," the ice is not sliding: it is not moving at all.
Greenland differs from Antarctica in that the ice sheet spills out through gaps in the mountain rim, and the glaciers overlie deep narrow valleys. According to van der Veen et al. (2007), such valleys have higher than usual geothermal gradients, so it might be geothermal heat, rather than global warming, that causes some Greenland glaciers to have higher than usual flow rates. The overspills have some of the characteristics of alpine glaciers, where evidence of glacier recession is more obvious.
Creep is Proportional to Stress (i.e., proportional to the weight of overlying ice)
This means that the thicker the ice the faster the flow, but a great stress is required if the ice is very cold. This is shown by the huge thicknesses of undisturbed ice revealed by the ice cores that are used to work out paleoclimates. In Antarctica, in the Vostok cores the undisturbed ice that provides the desired information continued to a depth of 3310 meters or 414,000 years, but below this the ice starts to be deformed.
There is a minimum stress, the yield stress, below which creep does not operate.
At the surface there is no stress, so the ice does not flow: at a certain depth the weight of ice is sufficient to cause flow, and all the ice below this limit must flow. The threshold boundary between non-flowing ice and flowing ice marks the yield stress level. The upper, brittle ice is a solid being carried along on plastic ice beneath. Since the flow is uneven the solid, brittle ice is broken up by a series of cracks called crevasses. The base of crevasses marks the position of the yield stress and the transition from brittle to plastic ice.
In Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets crevasses occur towards the edges, where the ice is flowing, but not in the areas of accumulation. In the middle of the ice sheets there are no crevasses to transmit melWar on Terrorer to the base of the ice sheet, even if it were present (which is impossible).
Some Results of the Laws of Glacier Flow
These simple rules of creep allow us to understand some observations on glaciers.
Glacial Surges
The speed of valley glaciers has been measured for a long time and is rather variable. Sometimes a valley will flow several times faster than it did earlier. Suppose we had a period of a thousand years of heavy precipitation. This would cause a thickening of the ice, and more rapid glacial flow. The pulse of more rapid flow would eventually pass down the valley. It is important to understand that the increase in flow rate is not related to present day air temperature, but to increased precipitation long ago.
Melting and Climate
On July 21, 1983, the lowest reliably measured temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok at a minus 89.2 degrees Celsius. The highest recorded temperature at Vostok is minus 19 degrees C, which occurred in January 1992. During the month of July 1987, the temperature never rose above minus 72.2 degrees C. At these temperatures ice cannot flow under the pressures that prevail near the surface. Warming has no effect at such low temperatures: ice will not flow faster at minus 60 degrees C than at minus 70 degrees C.
Ice sheets may take many thousands of years to flow from the accumulation area to the melting area. The balance between movement and melting therefore does not relate simply to today's climate, but to the climate thousands of years ago.
Glaciers and Precipitation
Glaciers and ice sheets are in a state of quasi-equilibrium, governed by rates of melting and rates of accumulation. For a glacier to maintain its present size it must have precipitation as snowfall at its source. This leads to a slightly complex relationship with temperature. If the regional climate becomes too dry, there will be no precipitation so the glacier will diminish. This could happen if the region became cold enough to reduce evaporation from the ocean. If temperatures rise, evaporation is enhanced and so therefore is snowfall. Paradoxically a regional rise of temperature may lead to increased growth of glaciers and ice sheets. Today, for example, the ice sheets of both Antarctica and Greenland are growing by accumulation of snow. The Age of Ice Sheets
In the Greenland ice sheet, several cores have over three kilometers of undisturbed ice that go back in time for over 105,000 years, much less than the Antarctic equivalent. The Vostok cores in Antarctica provide data for the past 414,000 years before the ice starts to be deformed. The "Dome F" core reached 3035 meters and "Dome C" core 3309 meters, and both date back to 720,000 years. The Epica core in Antarctica goes back to 760,000 years, as does the Guliya core in Tibet. But what is more important than the age is that vast thicknesses of ice are preserved, and they retain complete records of deposition, in spite of the fact that temperatures at times during that period have been warmer than now. They do not fit the model of surface melting, even infrequently. After three quarters of a million years of documented continuous accumulation, how can we believe that right now the world's ice sheets are collapsing!
The Collapse of Ice Sheets
Some of the present-day claims that ice sheets "collapse" are based on false concepts. Ice sheets do not melt from the surface down - only at the edges. Once the edges are lost, further loss depends on the rate of flow of the ice. The rate of flow of an ice sheet does not depend on the present climate, but on the amount of ice already accumulated, and that will keep it flowing for a very long time. It is possible that any increase in temperature will cause increased snowfall thereby nourishing the growth of the ice sheet, not diminishing it.
The very ice cores that are used to determine climates over the past 400,000 years also show that the ice sheet has grown over that period by accumulation of stratigraphic layers of snow, and has not been deformed or remelted. The mechanism portrayed by Christoffersen and Hambrey (2006), by which melWar on Terrorer lakes on the surface find their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers, but it tells us nothing of the collapse of ice sheets.
Conclusion
The global warming doomsayers claim the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting catastrophically, and will cause a sudden rise in sea level of five or more meters. This ignores the mechanism of glacier flow, which is by creep. Glaciers are not melting from the surface down, nor are they sliding down an inclined plane lubricated by melWar on Terrorer. The existence of ice over three kilometers thick, preserving details of past snowfall and atmospheres used to decipher past temperature and carbon dioxide levels, shows that the ice sheets have accumulated for hundreds of thousands of years without melting. Variations in melting around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing. Indeed "collapse" is impossible.0 -
Well, regardless of what we think , a fact remains: there will be more pressure on natural fossil fuel reserves because all the rest of the world is demanding more.
Hey, I like my cars, Poncho 5.7,6 speed , LBC Spitfire and Big Momma SUV and I don't want to be paying $10.00 per gallon for fun on the open road.
To satisfy me , then, demand must drop to keep gas prices reasonable. If most of the world (the US also)goes voltmobile , this can happen. I'll just keep the Pontiac and motor off into the sunset.
Logically , this means we need to produce energy in the form of electricity independent of oil , gas and coal. GOTTA GO NUKE!
This solves the personal economic problem and satisfies the "warmies" . The "warmies" may be off base but in the end , they'll be doing us a favor. Think of an energy independent US. It'd be really a pleasure to tell certain countries what they can do with their oil.
Stan0 -
Maybe/no 0 -
How did Greenland get its name?
Why is the artic receeding on Russia's side?
If our polar cap is shinking and Mar's polar cap is shinking, did we cause that too?
Mike C.0 -
who really cares, we will be speaking a diff language in a few decades anyways 0 -
quote:Originally posted by JamesRK
quote:Originally posted by Rack Ops
I'm no scientist, but it looks to me like it just moved over. I've heard the accumulation of ice in Antarctica is actually growing.
When I was in Antarctica the eggheads told me they had found evidence that the entire continent used to be a rain forest (jungle). The earth is in a constant state of flux.
But remember continental drift. Antartica was not in the same place when it was hot and wet as it is now, it was part of Gondwanaland.0 -
As a species living on this planet we are having an impact on it's climate, not a great impact but it has been noticed. We are tiny little critters on a very big piece of rock and there is little or nothing that we could do, even if we wanted to, to destroy the earth. it is just too big and we are too small. What we can do is impact the climate to a certain point that we can no longer live here and that is the problem. The earth won't care one way or another if it is too hot or too cold, only humans worry about the weather, the planet will continue orbiting the sun for another billion+ years whether we are along for the ride or not. 0 -
I thought it was interesting that a recent expedition to the North Pole studying the effects of global warming was called off due to people getting frost bite. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by Bohunk3006
I thought it was interesting that a recent expedition to the North Pole studying the effects of global warming was called off due to people getting frost bite.
I can only imagine your amazement when you discovered that there was an ice-free passage all the way to the North Pole last summer....0 -
the sky is falling! the sky is falling! 0 -
People getting frostbite at the North Pole: Interesting
Ice free seaway to the North Pole: Uninteresting
Wow....0 -
quote:Originally posted by Rack Ops
I can only imagine your amazement when you discovered that there was an ice-free passage all the way to the North Pole last summer....
That's a bit of an exaggeration. I think you meant to say there was an ice-free Northwest passage. If there were an ice-free pole, New York City would be under water.
The Arctic's legendary Northwest Passage is ice-free for the first time in recorded history. Recorded history started in 1972.
Arctic's Legendary Northwest Passage is Ice-Free for the First Time in Recorded History
August 29, 2007
Arctic's Legendary Northwest Passage is Ice-Free for the First Time in Recorded History
The North-West Passage, the sea route that runs along the Arctic coastline of North America, should be perilously clogged with thick ice this time of year. However, the passageway is now almost completely ice-free.
"Since August 21 the North-West Passage is open to navigation. This is the first time that it happens," Nalan Koc, head of the Norwegian Polar Institute's climate change program, told reporters in Longyearbyen, a town in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
"The Arctic ice sheet currently extends on 4.9m square kilometers. In September 2005 it measured 5.3m square kilometers."
Koc quoted research from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, where scientists monitor the surface of the Arctic ice sheet at regular intervals. Last week they noted "the imminent opening" of the North-West Passage.
"Analysts confirm that the passage is almost completely clear and that the region is more open than it has ever been since the advent of routine monitoring in 1972," they said in research conclusions published on the center's website.
The route was first navigated in the early 1900s by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who later beat Robert F Scott in the race to the South Pole in 1911. Amundsen and his crew took nearly two years to pick their way through a labyrinth of narrow lanes of open water and thick ice. But now it's pretty much smooth sailing.
The news is another global warming milestone and somewhat expected. It has long been believed that Arctic sea routes, including the North-West Passage and its northeast counterpart along the coast of Siberia, will become more passable as the Earth's temperature climbs. Both are considered strategic cargo routes because they are shortcuts between the northern parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In a few years the route could be completely accessible to commercial shipping.
As inaccessible areas of the planet become more accessible, we can expect nations to become increasingly territorial in claiming those areas as there own. Historically, much of the Arcmtic has been uninhabitable, and therefore the question of ownership wasn't all that important. But over the past few decades things have started to heat up-both literally and figuratively.
Canada and Denmark, for example, are currently embroiled in a battle over sovereignty over Hans Island, a small, uninhabited barren knoll off of Greenland.
Already the Russian gas giant Gazprom is eyeing the exploitation of the world's largest gas offshore field, Shtokman, off the coast of northern Siberia. This month Russia caused international controversy when they planted a flag on the seabed under the north pole to symbolically claim the region. The act has more than just annoyed Canada, who claims the area belongs solely to them.
Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has pledged to spend billions defending Canada's sovereignty over the Arctic if necessary, and is planning a military deep-water port.
Last month, Harper announced that six to eight new patrol ships will be built to guard the Northwest Passage sea route in the Arctic, which the U.S. insists does not belong to Canada, or anyone else. U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins has criticized Harper's promise to defend the Arctic, calling the Northwest Passage "neutral waters."
However, Harper refuses to step down on the issue stating, "Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it."
Currently, several countries are competing to secure subsurface rights to the Arctic seabed including Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway and Denmark. According to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic has as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas.
Posted by Rebecca Sato0 -
By the way, the article mentions it took Roald Amundsen almost two years to navigate the passage. Part of the reason for that was his little side trip to the North Pole. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by JamesRK
[ That's a bit of an exaggeration. I think you meant to say there was an ice-free Northwest passage. If there were an ice-free pole, New York City would be under water.
That was an error on my part. The articles I remembered were refering to the an ice free Northwest passage.
The statement that "if there were an ice-fee pole, New York City would be under water" is, however, incorrect. A mile wide expanse of ocean opened up at the pole this year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/888235.stm0 -
quote:Originally posted by Rack Ops
The statement that "if there were an ice-fee pole, New York City would be under water" is, however, incorrect. A mile wide expanse of ocean opened up at the pole this year.
That's not my prediction. It comes straight from Chicken Little. [:D]
Arctic Melting Fast; May Swamp U.S. Coast by 2099
Arctic Melting Fast; May Swamp U.S. Coasts by 2099
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
November 9, 2004
Scientists have determined that the ice in Greenland and the Arctic is melting so rapidly that much of it could be gone by the end of the century. The results could be catastrophic for polar people and animals, while low-lying lands as far away as Florida could be inundated by rising sea levels.
The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was released yesterday. It will be discussed by the Arctic Council (the governments of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden, and the U.S., as well as six indigenous-peoples organizations) at a meeting in Iceland today.
The four-year study of the Arctic climate involved an international team of more than 300 scientists. They used a number of climate models and made a "moderate estimate" of future emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are widely believed to be contributing to the recent warming trend of the Earth's climate.
The study concluded that in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia, average temperatures have increased as much as 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 4 degrees Celsius) in the past 50 years, nearly twice the global average. Temperatures are projected to rise 7 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 7 degrees Celsius) over the next hundred years.
The rising temperatures are likely to cause the melting of at least half the Arctic sea ice by the end of the century. A significant portion of the Greenland ice sheet-which contains enough water to raise the worldwide sea level by about 23 feet (about 7 meters)-would also melt.
The consequences of such a massive meltdown of northern ice would be dramatic, according to the study.
Low-lying coastal areas in Florida and Louisiana could be flooded by the sea. A 1.5 feet (50-centimeter) rise in sea level could cause the coastline to move 150 feet (45 meters) inland, resulting in substantial economic, social, and environmental impact in low-lying areas.
The health and food security of some indigenous peoples would be threatened, challenging the survival of some cultures.
Should the Arctic become ice-free in summer, it is likely that polar bears and some seal species would become extinct.
The melting of so much ice, and the resulting addition of so much fresh water to the ocean, could impact the circulation of currents and affect regional climate.
Science and Policy0 -
I am at 5,000 feet elevation so it will stay dry here in the desert, but I am cold. Wish the warming would come tomorrow. 0 -
Maybe, and no.
I was always taught that systems in nature are NEVER STATIC. They are DYNAMIC. They are either going up or down, and are never still. So when you ask if the earth is warming, the only correct answer is that it is either warming or cooling, until it swings the other way.
Man is puny and insignificant. God and His nature are huge. The supposition that mankind is ifluencing warming/cooling trends is the height of arrogance.
Having said that, I agree that we should not be vandals. We should live simply, minimize pollution, and treat this planet with respect. Not because nature is to be worshipped, but because it belongs to God and I don't want to p*** Him off.0
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