Members of the Arctic Council — the United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden — plan to sign an agreement on Thursday to coordinate search-and-rescue operations across 13 million square miles of ocean that are becoming more navigable as Arctic sea ice decreases. In a sign of the council’s new prominence in American foreign policy, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first secretary of state to attend one of its biannual meetings.
Originally posted by JBA2848
reply to post by AngryCymraeg
It could also mean Hillary Clinton just got involved with the Arctic Council.
green.blogs.nytimes.com...
Members of the Arctic Council — the United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden — plan to sign an agreement on Thursday to coordinate search-and-rescue operations across 13 million square miles of ocean that are becoming more navigable as Arctic sea ice decreases. In a sign of the council’s new prominence in American foreign policy, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first secretary of state to attend one of its biannual meetings.
www.arctic-council.org...
A very important research effort has been under way during recent summers in the warming, increasingly ice-free shallows off Russia’s Siberian coast. There, an international array of scientists has been investigating widening areas of open water that are disgorging millions of tons of methane each year.
To review, the authors confirm “drastic bottom layer heating over the coastal zone” that they attribute to warming of the Arctic atmosphere, but conclude that “recent climate change cannot produce an immediate response in sub-sea permafrost.” That’s the understatement of the year considering their conclusion that even under sustained heating, the brunt of the sub-sea methane won’t be affected in this millennium.
Himalayan glaciers are melting and retreating at their edges because of global warming. But they also conceal a more ominous effect of climate change: they are deflating. They are losing internal ice mass to melting, which can substantially hasten their disappearance. Scientists have recently captured real-time video showing a glacier purging its own meltwater, and at rates far faster than the experts had imagined.
Originally posted by jadedANDcynical
Water vapor in the atmosphere plays a much larger role than CO2.
1. Only around 380 parts per million of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide.
2. Only 3% of the CO2 results from human activity.
...
7. Water in the air is a greenhouse gas which swamps the others. It is about a hundred times more prevalent than CO2 in clear air, and millions of times more significant on a cloudy day. Yet moisture only changes temperatures about 10-20 degrees on a cloudy day. This means CO2 must be changing temperatures less than 0.000001 degrees all of the time.
8. When el Nino heats the Pacific, CO2 increases in the atmosphere; and after El Nino, it normalizes. It wouldn’t normalize if oceans were not reabsorbing the CO2. And if oceans can reabsorb that CO2, they can absorb any other CO2.
Furthermore:
Compare the numbers to water vapor. There’s less than 1% as many molecules of CO2; it absorbs less than 1% of the radiation; and it sends less than 10% back to earth. That’s 100 x 100 x 10 times less effective than water vapor, which totals one million times less effective. If a cloudy day changes the temperature by 10 degrees, carbon dioxide would be a millionth as effective, which would be 0.00001 degrees. The quantities are absurd.
Additionally:
The cause of the oceans warming cannot be the atmosphere, which has very low heat capacity, but must be due to heat from within the earth’s core, as described on other pages dealing with climate and the earth’s core.
The globe is heating, but the cause is hot spots rotating in the earth’s core and heating the oceans, not greenhouse gases. This can be known from the fact that the past ten ice ages have cycled at 100 thousand year intervals. Environmental factors would not be so cyclic.
There are numerous indications of the oceans heating up. One is increased rainfall in the upper plains, where the moisture originates in the Pacific Ocean. A few years ago, Chicago was flooding due to a rise in Lake Michigan; and another canal had to be built around Niagara Falls to drain it.
Blog entry @ world-mysteries.com
For those who may scoff at the above referenced work, here are some other sources for deep ocean warming you may prefer:
Originally posted by jadedANDcynical
Ok, you got me thinking and after a few minutes of looking around I have found some very interesting results.
Warming waters in the deepest parts of the ocean surrounding Antarctica have contributed to sea-level rise over the past two decades, scientists report today (Sept. 20).
In an attempt to pinpoint all culprits for the rising oceans, scientists analzyed warming trends in the abyssal ocean — below about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters), said study team member and oceanographer Sarah Purkey of the University of Washington in Seattle.
The scientists found that the strongest deep warming occurred in the water around Antarctica, and the warming lessens as it spreads around the globe. The temperature increases are small — about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit (0.03 degrees Celsius) per decade in the deep Southern Ocean, and less elsewhere. But the large volume of the ocean over which they are found and the high capacity of water to absorb heat means that this warming accounts for a huge amount of energy storage.
Well what do you know? I wonder where all of that energy is coming from and what does that mean in terms we can grasp?
This amount of energy would be the equivalent of giving every person on Earth five 1,400-Watt hair dryers, and running them constantly during the 20-year study period, said study team member and oceanographer Gregory Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Wow, I think that might have a noticeable effect, don't you?
Sea level has been rising at around one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) per year on average since 1993, with about half of that caused by the ocean expanding as it's heated, and the other half due to additional water added to the ocean, mostly from melting continental ice.
The oceanographers note that deep warming of the Southern Ocean accounts for about one-twentieth of an inch (1.2 mm) per year of the sea-level rise around Antarctica in the past two decades.
So we have empirical evidence that there is heating going on in the deep oceans, and a substantial amount of it indeed. That heating is causing almost fully half of the rise in global sea levels.
For everyone who missed this the first time. It's nice to see Al Gore's publicists have earned their keep because he's hauled into every Climate conversation, relevant or not. Equally pictures of China's smog aren't making your argument because they refuse to reduce emmissions or even attend the sumits. I refuse to feel guilty over what another country does. They may polute shamelessly, but suffer no sanctions.
