NASA/GRL/Science - Collapse Of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Appears To Be Under Way, Likely Unstoppable

Just getting a feel for where you're at. I don't think I've ever disagreed with you. I personally don't subscribe to AGW. I do think we are still in a warming period however and I think we'll get warmer.

A reply to: Phage

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

In the last global warming thread, the debate was whether there was global warming. I said well here is a start for the debate: what was the temperature last year, and what is the temperature this year? Zero responses. So my guess is global cooling at least for the past year or the numbers would have been brought to the table. Either you have the data to prove your point or you don't. Simple.

All I can say is the word " APPEARS " turns the article into an opinion. Do they appear to be right or do they appear to be wrong. Possibly they appear not to really know at all.

My question was facetious in nature. I am fully aware we are still in an ice age

en.wikipedia.org...

The gradual intensification of this ice age over the last 3 million years has been associated with declining concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide

People don't seem to realize that the earth was much warmer and had much higher levels of co2 in the past. I for one wouldn't mind investing in beach front property in the south.

Right now the majority of land in the world is uninhabited because it isn't near an ocean...that would change if the ice caps melted. Coast line would increase by way more than it lost. I for one welcome our beach dwelling Alabamians...

Humans need to quit fooling themselves into thinking they can stop it. Nothing stopped it the last few times, and nothing will stop it this time. We just need to relocate...

a reply to: Chronon

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

YAY!

It's about damned time! New land, less ice, less desert - what's not to love there?

a reply to: wayforward

I think the biggest mistake people make is they assume we are not in an ice age, and we are techniquelly in an ice age right now. Ice ages end, and when they end they usually end fast, and they also begin fast too.

originally posted by: trollz
Please let it submerge all of Florida...

South Florida will be gone, as well as the keys, Bahamas, and quite a few caribbean islands. The map is gonna look different in the not too distant future.

Please don't let it submerge Florida, I live on the Canaveral national seashore and I like it here.

a reply to: trollz

Ocean front property which was once inland would be nice I suppose, but all of the things which would become submerged if the oceans level rose would cause a lot of pollution.

Septic systems, fuel tanks, junk from people's houses and so on, landfills would be inundated and the poison would be spread far and wide from all of these things.

The oceans are full of enough garbage already and the problem will only be worse still.

a reply to: raymundoko

I live in an area that was covered by the Laurentide ice sheet 20,000 years ago. The ice was two miles thick. Today, we sit at the beach and dip our toes in the runoff waters, now called the Great Lakes. The ice has been melting for tens of thousands of years and will continue to do so, until the interglacial period ends and whatever instigated the the Ice Age causes the ice sheets to return.

Whether volcanic activity plays into the mix, is a theory that seems to me to have merit and has been published in accredited scientific journals. These articles are written on a geologic time-scale. It takes thousands if not tens of thousands of years to see cause and effect.

So what is happening in Antartica today? We would need to understand what has happened thousands of years ago in the past. And what will happen in the future? We would need two things; a time machine and x-ray glasses that can see through miles-thick ice. Until then, it's only a theory.

"This is really the golden age of discovery of the Antarctic continent," Richard Aster, a co-author of the study and a seismologist at Colorado State University, told Livescience. "I think there's no question that there are more volcanic surprises beneath the ice."

Much nonsense, many guesses, very silly.

Look, it has been mentioned but it is worth mentioning again.

We cannot hurt the Earth.

It has been hit by asteroids, possibly comets, and there is a theory that even Mars ran into it at one point. We can't even dream of doing that much damage.

We can, however, make things icky for us by ruining water with waste or filling the air with junk which we shouldn't breath. In 1000 years or 1,000,000 years or whatever, whatever we have done will be gone and or nature will have accommodated it. Think radiation loving fish near fukushima.

This global warming camp is obviously not really taking science into account or else they would research where we are in our galactic orbit within the Milky Way and look for correlations to heating or warming over millions of years. They would also look at the current cycle of the Sun and its storms and spots and output and so on and correlate that with prior heating or cooling periods. Then there is volcanic activity to take into account (above and below the ocean) and so on and so forth.

It is fact that CO2 in the atmosphere is many MANY times less than it was when the earth was much warmer and much more "polluted" which led to huge trees and vast forests and so on. CO2 isn't doing bupkiss at these levels.

CO2 through geologic time

Humans waaaaay overestimate their importance. We are nothing but a flea on the skin of the earth. The earth has gone through many cycles to include the "mini ice age" of the 1300-1800s to the thoughts in 1970s that we had a "global cooling" problem. Hell, some scientists are warning of a new mini ice age on its way.

Yes things are different now, weather-wise, than they were say 20 or 30 years ago. This is most likely attributable to the Sun and the fact it is acting a bit calm. Some places are warmer earlier (OMG GLOBAL WARMING) and some places are cooler than before (OMG GLOBAL COOLING).

Now we have idiots who continually try to rebrand natural events to gain some sort of political gain. "global warming" "man made global warming" "climate change" and now "climate disruption".

Oy ve

Yes we should reduce pollution of our waters and air BECAUSE IT MAKES PEOPLE SICK. Not because it is "hurting the Earth".

So, whether it is the OP or whomever, if you want people to come together on a common cause to work on pollution; then you should work on pollution and the harmful effects of it on us and wildlife and so on. Drop all this "global warming" nonsense because you are never going to convince everyone of it (especially with the lies of the IPCC and East Anglia being posted online).

Everyone agrees that pollution is bad. So, stick with that and you can probably gain some headway. Otherwise, when you couch the discussion as "global warming" and want to talk about alternative power sources; those that are sick and friggin tired of hearing from global warming whiners will immediately shutdown and no reasonable conversation can be had. Most everyone agrees that burning things for power is an inefficient and pollutant way of doing things and if we just address that common ground perhaps these conversations can move forward.

But no. Global warming people are zealots. They are like the radical church offshoots or Al Qaeda. They believe what they believe no matter what and they despise you for not believing it the same way and they will do everything to convert you or damn you if you will not be converted.

Polarization is not the way to success.

We are not hurting Earth

"Man made" global warming is nonsense

Pollution is bad

Let's concentrate on fixing that.

a reply to: Bakatono

Some places are warmer earlier (OMG GLOBAL WARMING) and some places are cooler than before (OMG GLOBAL COOLING).

What places are cooler than before? How many all time low temperatures are being set as opposed to all time high temperatures? This winter was cold in parts of North America. Was it the coldest on record?

We are not hurting Earth

Who cares about the Earth? I care about my childrens' children.

Don't let me down Yellowstone

According to the Weather Channel (I know) we had quite a few record lows set.
Including the coldest temperatures of the century for some areas.
But also, "Contrast this with December 2013, when dozens of all-time December record highs and record-warm daily lows were tied or broken, especially ahead of Winter Storm Gemini Dec. 21-23."
www.weather.com...

originally posted by: MyHappyDogShiner
Please don't let it submerge Florida, I live on the Canaveral national seashore and I like it here.

a reply to: trollz

yeah it would be terrible
all those old retired people bobbing in the ocean..shoe leather for sharks

It's so tempting to insult people, isn't it?

When the glaciers atop mountains melt and water isn't available for efficient storage, and when rices rise, people will start paying attention. It'll become far more obvious to them that burning fossil fuels on the scale that we burnt them indeed, quite obviously, will create disturbances in the planets climatology and thus it's life cycles.

When cities like Dhaka in Bangladesh become flooded by rising sea levels, people will realize and take for more seriously the magnitude of the problem when millions of city dwellers flee the city in search of refuge; but where will they go?

When things become hotter normal weather patterns will change. More water will be extracted from the soil via evapotranspiration. Farms in states which currently maintain large infrastructure will experience drought. The areas will have to be abandoned as they no longer conduce to the changed weather pattern.

When temperatures rise, so do the prevalence of contagious viruses. A hotter atmosphere is more conducive to carrying viruses from person to person. Cholera, Influenza etc, will no doubt kill more people.

Lets see, what else? What can a logical person deduce from the effects of climate change? How about the collapse of basic institutions like agriculture, water distribution, and world peace. States under duress will become more liable to starting conflict with one another when wanted resources become needed resources.

Climate change could bode absolutely catastrophic to our civilization, and yet there is so much disinformation, and so much confusion still in so many minds. Human beings are tremendously funny creatures - and thats putting nicely. We can be as enlightened to a problem as a sage, but another part of us will stubbornly resist and dismiss the importance of a subject with a rigour and conviction that is baffling if you aren't a student of the mind. And even if you are aware of how human consciousness works, through the discovering of cognitive science, social science and developmental psychology, it is still incredibly frustrating that people could still be in a situation where climate change appears like a ruse to them. I commiserate with them. I do not think they are stupid, but rather haven't fleshed out their knowledge of the subject. A common dynamic in human psychology is the relationship between ideas/concept and the self. The individual, if he is not sufficiently aware of his own mental processes and ulterior drives i.e subconscious emotional proccesses, biases, prejudices, etc will be controlled by the thing he believes. He will become a puppet for it. His sense of self and indentity has literally become "intertwined' with the subject hes come to support.

It's so important to be aware of processes like these ^ so that we do not fall into a perspective where we give precedence and value to matters that aren't consistent with our deepest beliefs and don't reflect the underlying unity between selves and the world - and ecosystem - which supports our physical existence.

I am not perfect. I frequently make mistakes in judgement and can act coarsely and flippantly from time to time. But I make a conscious effort to live the right way. As the scientist James Clark Maxwell said, happy is the man whose day to day activities agree with his life goals which in turn fit into a larger cosmic perspective.

True, the Western Antarctic is undergoing conditions that are inherited from the global environment. But there are conditions specific to this area that are driving the melting of the glaciers named in the OP, namely the unusually warm air and water temperatures centered over this area that are rising two to three times faster than the global average.

We can best see that the hot spots are localized to this region by looking at temperature maps of the air and water:



The red areas show the warmer areas, which are pretty well confined to the land and coast of this portion of West Antarctica, Marie Byrd Land.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer


Ummm...YAWN...Blah, blah, blah, blah......"Anthropogenic Global Warming doom porn"...Blah, blah blah...

Funny...........that's all my tired eyes could make out in your OP...

Oh...and..."The sky is falling, the oceans are rising, we're all going to....gurgle, gurgle............drown"

Yawn...




YouSir

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Bakatono

Some places are warmer earlier (OMG GLOBAL WARMING) and some places are cooler than before (OMG GLOBAL COOLING).

What places are cooler than before? How many all time low temperatures are being set as opposed to all time high temperatures? This winter was cold in parts of North America. Was it the coldest on record?

Hey, Phage The Debunker, LMGTFY

"For the first year since 1993, there were more daily record lows than daily highs that were either tied or set in 2013,"

World-wide: there about 7% more all-time highs vs all-time lows world-wide based on monthly records.

linky

Here is the website you can use to find data in the future: www.google.com

We are not hurting Earth

Who cares about the Earth? I care about my childrens' children.

For the immediate above, and the quote above that, you are actually not engaging in an honest debate but instead practicing subversive debate tactics; the first of which is that you are attempting to "put words in my mouth." Meaning, I never said that there aren't warmer or colder spots; in fact the quote is evidence that I am saying that both are occurring. Some places are warmer, some are colder. I am not challenging that at all. I am stating it as fact. You are attempting to twist the statement and intimate that I am saying that there are no hotter spots at all, when in fact I only said that the fallacy of "man made" global warming is nonsense. Just as "man made" global cooling was nonsense when they were worried about cooling just over 40 years ago.

The second is where you attempt to intimate that I am stating I "don't care" about Earth; when in fact I never said that. What I did say is that we cannot hurt Earth. We can't. The examples I give is the fact that massive asteroids and possibly another planetary body have smashed into earth (theoretically tilting it and creating the moon by some accounts) and it is still here. So, burning some coal and driving around cars isn't going to do squat to Earth as a planet.

I also go on to say that I do not like pollution and I think we should do something about it. I state that these divisive discussions are non-productive because man-made global warming kooks and man-made global warming kook haters both normally agree, if you ask them individually, that pollution is bad. Therefore, drop the nonsense and clean up pollution because it is the right thing to do.

In addition to putting words in my mouth you are practicing "observational selection". Meaning you are cherry picking information (from a rather long post) and deleting the rest of the context so that you may make your "argument".

Next, you are attempting to "oversimplify" by not debating any of the actual post but by taking your "observationally selected" sentences, simplifying them down so that you may "put words in my mouth" and then attempt to argue the point you yourself have created; not the one I was making.

Finally, you are making an "irrelevant conclusion". Meaning that you conclude that I hate earth and your children's children therefore you must defend them. This also allows you to give the appearance of "appealing to higher principles". This helps to shift the argument to me defending myself vs you actually debating the premise of my post and derails the actual conversation.

In modern internet lingo it is called "trolling."

In short, your "argument" (if you can call it that) is basically a "straw man" argument.

I am disappointed in you Phage The Debunker. You normally have a better argument.

Or, are you the night shift and the intelligent one is off duty right now?

It would take more than 50 of the largest nuclear bombs ever created to lower the temperature of all Earth's arctic ice by 1 degree. This would be quite temporary due to -60 f temps.

Source: algebra

breath deeply