Ice Caps melting

[AlexRoberts]

Do you think it will bring more piracy? Cause i keep thinking of this if they melt the Water Trade Will Go up more cause it will be demanded by Other countries and other things to.

Who Thinks it will bring more piracy?

[Pirate Seika]

Mate... if the polar ice caps melt.. Piracy.. will be the last of our worries...

[AlexRoberts]

Umm its raise by 20% that if what i hear/read etc is right.

[Matusalem]

No.

article on arctic shipping:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...c_landrush.html

In order for piracy to exist today, you need a complete absence of law enforcement, and to be near a country with a sizeable population and a nearly non-funcitoning govenrment. Somalia and Sri Lanka come to mind.

Somehow, I don't think the inuits or Nunavut population is all that commandeering. They just stay with bopping seals on the head.

Incidentally, I went on a business trip to China last year, and it was the first time I have ever flown over the Arctic Ocean. The view from the window was just awe-striking beauty, but you can see ruptures where ice is separating. A little bit distressing.

There is absolutely no human presence that far north.

[AlexRoberts]

Dang...They would Make the trade route faster ......Hmmmmm.

[Caraccioli]

This month. Look here. The environment is so complex that they can't quite figure it out. Just like they can't understand how the human brain works. These systems are so complex and we understand so little about them that anything that is reported as fact this week is likely to be wrong next week.

[Bilgemunky]

If we accept the premise that the ice caps are melting, then of course it will lead to more piracy. And I have definitive proof: watch Waterworld. If Costner portrayeth it, then so it must be!

[Lady Alyx]

Watch Al Gore's movie...we just watched a bit of it at lunchtime...the water will go up 20 feet...so islands and near or below sea level areas will be the ones that need to worry. In the film they say San Fran bay and Manhattan Isle and Florida and perhaps Louisianna will have major prob's. There is one island that is considering moving it's population soon already.

There is already piracy on the high seas on the eastern side of Africa...also there are warnings out there that it could get worse with terrorists taking on piracy. If they commandeer a Oil Tanker for example they can make it into a lethal weapon heading it into a port.

[oderlesseye]

"It's the ~ End of the world as we know it...

It's the ~ End of the world as we know it...

It's the ~ End of the world as we know it...

- And eye feel fyne..." REM

[Caraccioli]

Watch Al Gore's movie...

I should trust a politician (I could really stop there) who has much to gain from setting himself up as an expert so that he and his favored causes and companies can get a further purchase on my money? (Via increased taxation and punative legislation.) Did you know he owns a company that sells those absurd carbon footprint credit things? He even sold some to himself to cover the cost of his little pad that consumed 20x more energy than the average house did last year.

Despite what Albert says, the science is far from decided. It'll take me some time, but there is more than a little scientific evidence that global warming is primarily, if not entirely, generated by the sun. (And that hockey stick graph is essentially unprovable. There is no straight line temperature data going on for centuries. We only have accurate temperature readings going back 150 years for some places and 100 years or so for most places. Much of the data originally came from tree ring samples which is notoriously unreliable to all but the true believer.)

As for sudden climate change - that is being poised to take over for the buzzword "Global Warming" when it becomes old and tired like the news buzzwords "Overpopulation," "Spotted Owl," "Acid Rain," and "Rainforest Deforestation." They have to keep these things fresh or the public gets tired of hearing about them.

"All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance." -Will Rogers

[PyratePhil]

In order for piracy to exist today, you need a complete absence of law enforcement, and to be near a country with a sizeable population and a nearly non-funcitoning govenrment. Somalia and Sri Lanka come to mind.

Sorry, I disagree.

Piracy exists whenever and wherever one party wants something more than the party that already has it, and has the means and the will to take it.

Law enforcement? LOL - I hope they're more effective at anti-piracy than they are at anti-drug campaigns.

Size of country doesn't matter - as long as there's ONE target and ONE attacker, you can have piracy.

[oderlesseye]

We only have accurate temperature readings going back 150 years for some places and 100 years or so for most places. Much of the data originally came from tree ring samples which is notoriously unreliable to all but the true believer.)

ice core samples from the poles dating back 10,000 years. saw it last nite on discovery.. supposivley proves global warming..

[Mary Diamond]

I strongly support conservation and the environment ~ and I believe we are definitely contributing to global warming, species eradication, and waste of limited natural resources (etc.). However, I also feel global warming, like so many things, it is unlikely caused solely by human error.

Have a look at the Little Ice Age (in conjunction with the Maunder Minimum - a time period of reduced sunspot activity), which covers several hundred years, occurring after a warm period - the Medieval climate optimum. Think of extremely long term weather patterns.

The Earth is not as stable as we might think - events just happen on a scale which is difficult to comprehend.

[Rumba Rue]

Hi all, I'm moved this because even though it has some piracy elements, it's more in the Beyond Piracy area.

Rumba

[Caraccioli]

GW as a concept is so large and multi-faceted that to discuss the whole thing would fill a report (and has filled many). Let me focus on the rising sea level stuff. I'll start with a bit of rising sea level history.

In the 70s and 80s, a small group of scientists were trying to promote GW as a plausible scenario and the majority of scientists didn't believe the idea had any merit. So they resorted to making drastic claims to get media attention for their cause. (This is pretty standard behavior amongst activists.) Stanford University environmentalist Stephen Schneider told Discover in 1989 "To avert the risk (posed by GW) we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to off up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we have...Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

One such scary scenario offered was that the oceans would rise by 20 feet or more. Gore's movie suggests that this may happen and even includes a nice computer image showing what Manhattan would look like underwater. This is to be due to the melting of ice in places like Greenland, the Antarctic and so forth. One of the Inconvenient topics in Gore's movie was the dramatic change in the Greenland melt area from 1992 to 2005. But Gore's movie massaged the data for dramatic effect.

Dr. Petr Chylek, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax said: "Mr. Gore suggests that the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner." This sort of statistic slight of hand has been used in the past by activists to create greater drama. But it's essentially wrong and misleading.

Let me get back to the rising sea level itself. We start with activist-inspired 20 foot rises in sea level. That is a wild prediction that has had to be tempered quite a bit since GW became more mainstream. (Although, as Mr. Inconvenient attests, still manages to rear its ugly head now and again.) By the 1980s, it had gone down to three feet. One group of GW scientists currently predicts the sea rise by 7 inches to 23 inches in the next 100 years. Quite a dramatic difference, eh? But there's more...

The UN's IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) puts out a report every couple of years that calculates an estimated average sea level rise. The progress of the "rising sea level" value is quite telling. In the IPCC's 1990 report the "best estimate" for this number was pegged at an average of 25 inches over 100 years. By the 1995 IPCC report, it had gone down to 19 inches. In the last released report in 2001, it was down to 15 inches. Who knows what the report due this year will report it as being?

The wiki article on sea-level rise puts some of this into perspective quite well IMO. To wit: "Sea level has risen around 130 metres (400 feet) since the peak of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago. Most of the rise occurred before 6,000 years ago. From 3,000 years ago to the start of the 19th century sea level was almost constant, rising at 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr. Since 1900 the level has risen at 1 to 3 mm/yr." (Source: IPCC 2001 report, http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/425.htm ).

So is the sea level rising? Absolutely. But it been rising for thousands of years. The climate is an ever-changing, multi-variable thing that we don't fully understand. The best the IPCC can do is create computer models that are not fine enough to predict the weather accurately when starting from one point in the past moving forward to today. They are getting better at it, but I've read that it will be at least 10 years before climatologists have an system accurate and complex enough to even begin to approach real weather patterns.

The IPCC's report fully admits this. From the 2001 report: "Despite the higher temperature change projections in this assessment, the sea level projections are slightly lower ["slightly" apparently meaning "about 21% lower based on the average"], primarily due to the use of improved [computer] models, which give a smaller contribution from glaciers and ice sheets.

So, with all this in mind, just how much more are you willing to pay in taxes to fight off things like this? They can't even pin down the numbers. When you read this stuff, think critically. The debate is far from over.

[Lady Alyx]

I just love when people want to deny that "they humans" are too wonderful to cause any problems in the world.

1) Extinctions of animals are on the increase many yes due to us, overpopulation, polution, taking away their habitats, over hunted.

2) Polution since the industrial ages has what, poluted our rivers, lakes, streams, ground water and oceans.

3) Strip mining, de-forestation, damming...and the plain old concrete jungle has done a number on the landscapes of earth overall.

These are just some points there are many more...let's not put a blind eye to it...I hate that!

Get with it people yes we are a cause to a lot of it. I am not saying Al Gore is perfect but he points out a lot of things that are happening. I also know that the planet is in constant evolutionary change on it's own terms, but you have to see the big impact what we humans have done to this lovely natural planet. I however see a grim future. We should have started all of this back in the 60's when overpopulation and pollution where talked about and not hushed up. Your great grandchildren I am sure will ask "What the hell where they thinking"!

[Caraccioli]

We only have accurate temperature readings going back 150 years for some places and 100 years or so for most places. Much of the data originally came from tree ring samples which is notoriously unreliable to all but the true believer.)

ice core samples from the poles dating back 10,000 years. saw it last nite on discovery.. supposivley proves global warming..

The original Mann "hockey stick" diagram almost exclusively uses tree ring samples from North America as the proxy for actual temperature data. This tree ring data has several faults including: a) it is concentrated in one place and not representative of worldwide temperature effects, b ) it doesn't include temperature outside of land areas (oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface), c) tree ring thickness can be due to many things other than temperature and it is difficult to distinguish precisely what caused them to grow the way they did and d) trees only grow in the summer - so winter temperatures would be excluded.

As Mary Diamond mentioned, the Mann diagram fails to include the Little Ice Age from about 1350 to 1850 (when there was ice 3 feet thick on the Thames in London). It also fails to include the medieval warming period from around 900 to 1300 (when documents prove the Vikings were living in Greenland quite comfortably growing hay and grain there.) A 2001 IPCC status report even admits,

"...at present, it is debatable whether there is enough temperature proxy data to be representative of hemispheric, let alone global temperature.

There is no doubt that the temperature of the late twentieth century is greater than many previous centuries, but this cannot be taken as a simple indication of overwhelming global warming as we are also coming out of a Little Ice Age.

The claim that the temperature is higher now than that at any time throughout the past 1000 years seems less well substantiated, as the data essentially exclude ocean temperatures, night temperatures and winter temperatures..."

Now, arctic core samples have their own faults as temperature indicators, although they are considered richer in information than tree ring samples. The further down in an ice core you go, the more difficult it is to distinguish the date. From wiki on ice cores:

"Shallow cores, or the upper parts of cores in high-accumulation areas, can be dated exactly by counting individual layers, each representing a year. These layers may be visible, related to the nature of the ice; or they may be chemical, related to differential transport in different seasons; or they may be isotopic, reflecting the annual temperature signal (for example, snow from colder periods has less of the heavier isotopes of H and O). Deeper into the core the layers thin out due to ice flow and eventually individual years cannot be distinguished... Lower down the ages are reconstructed by modeling accumulation rate variations and ice flow." So we're back to modeling.

Second, the data is localized to the area where the core is taken.

Third, ice core samples are evaluated by examining air bubbles trapped within the ice. From wiki again,

"Dating the air with respect to the ice it is trapped in is problematic. The consolidation of snow to ice necessary to trap the air takes place at depth (the 'trapping depth') once the pressure of overlying snow is great enough. Since air can freely diffuse from the overlying atmosphere throughout the upper unconsolidated layer (the 'firn'), trapped air is younger than the ice surrounding it.

Trapping depth varies with climatic conditions, so the air-ice age difference could vary between 2500 and 6000 years (Barnola et al., 1991)." [emphasis mine]

On top of all that, ice core samples don't prove global warming anyhow. The key here is to prove that the temperature has been relatively stable until anthropological global warming (or "man-made GW") became a serious issue. So the samples are needed to prove stability and thus lay the blame at our feet. Except that's really tough to prove due to the problems inherent in evaluating ice cores. It is still a proxy, not truly representative temperature data.

[Caraccioli]

Just for the record, global warming (the greenhouse effect) is a real, undeniable phenomenon. Without it, the Earth would be about 60 degrees colder and we would have a much tougher time surviving. Also, anthropological global warming (GW caused by man-made impact) is also real. The question isn't whether it exists or not, but what the overall impact from it is. Third, like Mary Diamond, I believe in conservation. Conserving and taking care of the environment and being aware of our impact upon it is a matter of simple personal integrity. I strongly support personal integrity.

I do not support taking a scientific theory and using it as a grab for political power. That is how GW is being used by activists. Turning problems like this over to the government based on incompletely proven theories shows a lack of integrity.

In sum, I am all for taking personal responsibility for your impact on the environment and educating others on how they can do likewise. I am against assigning that responsibility to a wastefully administrated bureaucracy based on the urgings of politically motivated people and organizations.

[Lady Alyx]

There are countless problems besides the ice caps melting....that is just one of them.

[Matusalem]

It took several scientific studies by the federal govenrment, and countless universities and other goverments worldwide to finally determine that smoking causes lung disease , and to get the cigarette makers to shut up and go away.

The global warming issue is no different. Having studies done by this government will hopefull answer the question for good, .....and if it proves right, finally shut the lid on right-wing bigmouths like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly.

[Caraccioli]

There are countless problems besides the ice caps melting....that is just one of them.

Splendid! So many opportunities for people to do something. I do free trainings exclusively for volunteer groups to motivate and teach them for my little part (and to learn from them of course).

[Caraccioli]

It took several scientific studies by the federal govenrment, and countless universities and other goverments worldwide to finally determine that smoking causes lung disease , and to get the cigarette makers to shut up and go away.

The global warming issue is no different.  Having studies done by this government will hopefull answer the question for good, .....and if it proves right, finally shut the lid on right-wing bigmouths like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly.

If you're talking to me, we're apparently talking about different things. Many studies are already governmentally funded. Pure (or as near to pure as we can get) research is pretty much the purview of the government and universities. (Although universities are getting into private research as well.)

I'm talking about political power, not scientific studies. Legislation, regulation and (most particularly) taxation to solve this as yet incompletely proven problem.

[Matusalem]

I'm talking about political power, not scientific studies. Legislation, regulation and (most particularly) taxation to solve this as yet incompletely proven problem.

I would think that the first step is to take the wind out of the sails of the deniers. Having Al Gore saying GW is a proven fact is not enough. All I'm saying is show an example of human interference, like the goold old days when you saw photographs of lungs covered with tar from smoking. I don't believe it will happen with this current White House.

[jessie k.]

"Did you know...?" Just a rather interesting little factoid that I learned today in class: if the Earth warms up significantly, more water vapor should be introduced into the atmosphere, causing clouds to form. These hypothetical clouds will hypothetically reflect solar radiation and produce a cooling effect.

Interesting, no? I'm not trying to argue anything here, I just found this a fascinating little bit of information that nobody has ever brought up before, at least not in my hearing. This earth of ours really does work wonders to balance herself out, dont'cha think?

[Caraccioli]

Actually, that's another one of the flaws with the IPCC's models that are used to project the amount of global warming. (There are several.) They don't take cloud cover into account because of the way their system is built. The clouds are too small to model. The IPCC says in their 2001a report that,

"...probably the greatest uncertainty in future projections of climate arises from clouds and their interactions with radiation...Clouds represent a significant source of potential error in climate simulations."

"The sign of the net cloud feedback is still a matter of uncertainty, and the various models exhibit a large spread. Further uncertainties arise from precipitation processes and the difficulty in correctly simulating the diurnal cycle and precipitation amounts and frequencies."

BTW, jess, while what you say is true, clouds can actually both cool and warm the climate depending on how high they are and the distribution of water in them.