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originally posted by: cavtrooper7
If GLOBAL WARMING occurs I hope it happens soon....
www.pbs.org...
originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Pluginn
That would be nice but there is no single solution. It is a highly complex problem.
As Peter said we need a new kind of Manhattan project. Finding a way to get co2 out of the atmosphere, so an invention to make this possible which needs lot of funding and research.
However, since the OP does not believe that human activity is the cause of the warming trend, I'm curious to find out what solutions she has to offer.
This is normal when you look back on history. No need to wonder the cause as the cause is really of no importance. We cannot change mother nature. The Sun has a lot to do with our weather and climate.
www.abovetopsecret.com...
nsidc.org...
Bringing the high heat to the upper inside corner
August 19, 2015
Surface melting was significantly more frequent and more extensive than average on the Greenland Ice Sheet in July, especially around the northwestern coast. July also saw high air pressure over the entire island and warmer-than-average temperatures in the northwest. This warmer summertime pattern, combined with lower winter snowfall patterns, resulted in a large mass loss from the ice sheet for the summer to date.
The sharp increase in surface melt extent (and estimated melt runoff) in July resulted in large ice mass loss rates. Although 2015 is not at satellite-era record levels (set in 2012), there was a large rate of loss overall. A combination of low snowfall in the past winter season and warm temperatures with extensive melting resulted in a large loss of ice from the ice sheet in the northwest. Some areas in the southern one-third of the ice sheet have less loss than average. Greenland typically loses mass due to melt runoff through the summer, although in recent years both low snow and runoff, and an increase in glacier outflow (not shown here) have combined to significantly shrink the thickness of the ice sheet, contributing to sea level rise.
www.theguardian.com...
The extreme loss of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is forcing thousands of walruses to crowd ashore on a remote barrier island off Alaska, and threatening their survival.
Sea ice cover in the winter months fell to a new low this year because of climate change and abnormal weather patterns.
Some scientists believe the Arctic could be entirely ice-free in the summer months by the 2030s – with profound effects for local indigenous communities that rely on the ice, as well as wildlife that depend on extreme conditions.
Chill out and enjoy your life. Change is inevitabke. Man , even in their billions, cannot change the inevitable
The Arctic is one of the world's least explored and last wild places
www.economist.com...
It is hard to exaggerate how dramatic this is. Perhaps not since the felling of America's vast forests in the 19th century, or possibly since the razing of China's and western Europe's great forests a thousand years before that, has the world seen such a spectacular environmental change. The consequences for Arctic ecosystems will be swingeing.
www.economist.com...
In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation. But, paradoxically, in the meantime no Arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans. Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway. And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich.
Watch our animation of the receding Arctic ice-shelf and the shipping routes it could unlock
As the frozen tundra retreats northwards, large areas of the Arctic will become suitable for agriculture. An increasingly early Arctic spring could increase plant growth by up to 25%. That would allow Greenlanders to grow more than the paltry 100 tonnes of potatoes they manage now. And much more valuable materials will become increasingly accessible. The Arctic is already a big source of minerals, including zinc in Alaska, gold in Canada, iron in Sweden and nickel in Russia, and there is plenty more to mine.
The Arctic also has oil and gas, probably lots. Exploration licences are now being issued across the region, in the United States, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. On April 18th ExxonMobil finalised the terms of a deal with Russia's Rosneft to invest up to $500 billion in developing offshore reserves, including in Russia's Arctic Kara sea. Oil companies do not like to talk about it, but this points to another positive feedback from the melt. Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels will allow more Arctic hydrocarbons to be extracted and burned.
Yet how to reconcile the environmental risks of the melting Arctic with the economic opportunities it will present? The shrinkage of the sea ice is no less a result of human hands than the ploughing of the prairies. It might even turn out as lucrative. But the costs will also be huge. Unique ecosystems, and perhaps many species, will be lost in a tide of environmental change. The cause is global pollution, and the risks it carries are likewise global. The Arctic, no longer distant or inviolable, has emerged, almost overnight, as a powerful symbol of the age of man.
www.foreignaffairs.com...
The Arctic presents an extraordinary opportunity to rewrite the rules of the game for developing a frontier economy. But the time to start doing so is now, before a Deepwater Horizon–like oil spill stains the Arctic and its appeal. With the Arctic heating up faster than many predicted, it is a matter of not if but when the summer sea ice will be gone and the region will open up to widespread development. If managed correctly, the Arctic could be both a carefully protected environment and a major driver of economic growth -- with enormous benefits for both outsiders and the inhabitants of this prime real estate
arctic-news.blogspot.com...
There are a number of reasons why sea ice could fall dramatically over the next few weeks.
First of all, the situation today is in an even worse condition than one might conclude when looking at sea ice extent alone. The way NSIDC calculates extent is by first dividing the satellite image into a grid and then including each cell in extent that has 15% or more ice. So, if a few small and very thin pieces of ice floating in a cell happen to cover 15% of a cell, it is counted in as "sea ice".
There is quite a difference between the sea ice that was 5 meters thick north of Greenland in 2012 and the ice that is present there now. The image on the right shows the north-east corner of Greenland on the bottom left. There is almost no ice north of this point.
Thick sea ice is virtually absent compared to the situation in the year 2012 around this time of year, as illustrated by the image below that compares sea ice thickness on August 20, 2012 (left) with August 20, 2015 (right), from an earlier pos
The July data for sea surface temperature anomalies on the Northern Hemisphere contain a trendline pointing at a rise of 2°C (3.6°F) before the year 2030. In other words, if this trend continues, the sea surface will be 2°C (3.6°F) warmer in less than 15 years time from now.
Such a temperature rise would be a catastrophe, as there are huge amounts of methane contained in the form of hydrates and free gas in sediments under the Arctic Ocean seafloor. A relatively small temperature rise of part of these sediments could cause a huge abrupt methane eruption, which could in turn trigger further eruptions of methane.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
4.2. Implications and Conclusions
Sea ice concentrations and terrestrial methane emissions co-vary throughout vast regions of
the Arctic, with the clearest influence of sea ice decline on autumn fluxes, and perhaps to
some extent in spring. We estimate that the remote warming influence connected to sea ice
decline has, compared to the baseline period of 1981-1990, led to a higher release of 1.7 Tg
CH4 yr-1
from the terrestrial Arctic by the years 2005-2010, with an uncertainty range of 0.4–
4.1 Tg CH4 yr
-1
. Due to constraints imposed on our analysis, such as the detrending of timeseries
and fixed extent of the area influenced by sea ice, we consider this estimate to be
modest in size. Since sea ice decline and associated amplified warming on land is expected to
persist, a reasonable projection from our results is that methane emissions from northern
©2015 American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved.
wetlands will continue to increase
Although extending methane flux measurements to the later part of the year can be
logistically, technically and physically demanding, such actions are necessary to improve our
understanding of the effects of sea ice retreat on Arctic greenhouse-gas exchange
[Christensen, 2014], since essential processes may still be underrepresented in the models.
Effective complementary application of field measurements and modeling efforts is
imperative to verify and predict the ways in which sea ice decline affects Arctic greenhouse
gas exchange at distance. The crosscutting nature of such large-scale interactions emphasizes
the need for an integrated analysis of the marine and terrestrial carbon cycle within a rapidly
changing Arctic.
Microorganisms are key players in emissions of the greenhouse gas (GHG) methane from anoxic carbon-rich peat soils of the Arctic permafrost region. Although available data and modeling suggest a significant temperature-induced increase of GHG emissions from these regions by the end of this century, the controls of and interactions within the underlying microbial networks are largely unknown. This temperature-gradient study of an Arctic peat soil using integrated omics techniques reveals critical temperatures at which microbial adaptations cause changes in metabolic bottlenecks of anaerobic carbon-degradation pathways. In particular taxonomic shifts within functional guilds at different levels of the carbon degradation cascade enable a fast adaptation of the microbial system resulting in high methane emissions at all temperatures.
Arctic permafrost soils store large amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) that could be released into the atmosphere as methane (CH4) in a future warmer climate. How warming affects the complex microbial network decomposing SOC is not understood.
Do you suppose their science is better than the climate change scientists? What if their predictions come to pass? Come on folks, the climate is going to do what it is going to do. Humans have the power of a grain of sand in all the oceans of the world compared to the power of mother nature.
www.aip.org...
The sea-level rise alone makes it likely that low-lying areas where tens of millions of people live will become uninhabitable by the end of this century. Entire island nations are at risk. Then it will get worse. Even if humanity could bring its greenhouse emissions to a full stop, the gases already in the air will capture heat energy that will work its way gradually deeper into the oceans. The tides will continue to creep higher, century after century. Meanwhile, if the planet warms up a few degrees (which is the most likely scenario unless strong restrictions on emissions are promptly introduced), the forces melting polar ice will become irreversible. Eventually, probably after several thousand years, the Greenland Ice Sheet will be gone. In previous geological ages when the CO2 level in the Earth's atmosphere had reached 400 ppm (the level human emissions are already giving us), much of Antarctica's ice cap too had been gone, raising the sea level tens of meters. Even if nothing happens in Antarctica, the melting of Greenland will put the sea level at least seven meters higher, giving posterity its grandest, but unwelcome, monument of our civilization.(35)