NASA Launches Operation OMG

OMG stands for Oceans Melting Greenland. It's NASA's effort to determine the melt rate with "unprecedented accuracy;" being that a report released last month says that the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica will melt ten times faster than previous estimates which will raise Oceans that much faster and causing major problems for coastal areas.

Greenland is coated in nearly 700,000 square miles of ice, a reservoir of frozen water the size of California and Texas combined. If it all melted, the sea level would surge about 18 feet, devastating the world’s coastal cities and creating a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scale.
Scientists already know that this ice cover is thinning and that the planet’s thermostat is being pushed up by man-made carbon emissions. The last decade was the hottest on record, and each of the last three decades was hotter than the one before. In 2007 alone, according to a recent study, Greenland lost “the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps.”

What scientists still struggle to understand, however, is how the ocean and the glaciers interact, and what that interaction means for sea level rise. Existing global climate models consider only the the air and ice, and ignore what’s happening elsewhere.

Does warmer, saltier ocean water lap against the edges or undersides of the ice? And if so, what affect does that have on the integrity of the glaciers? Will the ice melt at a linear rate or an exponential one?

All I can says is "OMG!" What says ATS?

www.msnbc.com...

originally posted by: lostbook
OMG stands for Oceans Melting Greenland. It's NASA's effort to determine the melt rate with "unprecedented accuracy;" being that a report released last month says that the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica will melt ten times faster than previous estimates which will raise Oceans that much faster and causing major problems for coastal areas.

Greenland is coated in nearly 700,000 square miles of ice, a reservoir of frozen water the size of California and Texas combined. If it all melted, the sea level would surge about 18 feet, devastating the world’s coastal cities and creating a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scale.
Scientists already know that this ice cover is thinning and that the planet’s thermostat is being pushed up by man-made carbon emissions. The last decade was the hottest on record, and each of the last three decades was hotter than the one before. In 2007 alone, according to a recent study, Greenland lost “the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps.”

What scientists still struggle to understand, however, is how the ocean and the glaciers interact, and what that interaction means for sea level rise. Existing global climate models consider only the the air and ice, and ignore what’s happening elsewhere.

Does warmer, saltier ocean water lap against the edges or undersides of the ice? And if so, what affect does that have on the integrity of the glaciers? Will the ice melt at a linear rate or an exponential one?

All I can says is "OMG!" What says ATS?

www.msnbc.com...

Too bad most of America is more outraged at criminals being treated like criminals, the latest Kardashian news, and other such nonsense.

This is truly horrible. OMG indeed.

Are you saying that Al Gore was not accurate and scientific?

Funny thing is the beaches seem to still be the same, depending on tide of course. Aren't we supposed to be drowning in liberal tears by now? I went down to Galveston several times this year and the beaches seemed to look exactly the same as when I was a kid. Actually the water and sand were ALOT cleaner.

Don't know what to believe when it comes to climate change anymore. There are far too many conflicting studies from far too many sources to be able to sort any truth out nowadays.

I'd say we're more likely to have a global freeze than all the ice caps melting. Aren't we suppose to have a mini ice age around 2030 due to lack of sun activity?

Mini Ice Age

a reply to: WhiskeyDick

Low blow

a reply to: amsterdamn87

He's just mad he doesn't have cable, because the Kardashians is his favorite show.

a reply to: lostbook

I figure that if all the ice caps through out the world melted, it would not raise the sea level enough to cause much of a problem. The reason behind my though is the water that is on this planet has been here for ages. All the cubic miles of water is accounted for. The land mass is accounted for. There was not that much difference in sea levels from long ago to now. Sure the water level will raise but not enough to cause flooding of biblical proportions.

James Hansen is sometimes accused of overstating the case, he is also an activist, (not that there is anything wrong with that particularly) Other times he has been correct in his accusation that NASA's PR dept had misled on climate change, and of political interference to downplay what 'evidence' there was at the time. Is he overstating the case here? I don't know, but I recall seeing something about glacial melt being overestimated, about particular glaciers or in general, so how that figures in his new findings.... I don't know about that either, maybe he considers it irrelevant anyway.
It's early days yet until some other scientists may review his findings published online.

When ever I've thought about this I can't help but feeling that the predicted rise in sea level attributed to ice melt is too damn high!!
Not all water resides in the oceans. Even if all rivers and glaciers meet the sea, it cycles back to other areas of Earths environment. The ice will not melt all at once. (If it did there would indeed be tremendous catastrophe.)

/takes drag of 'cigarette'/
If ice melts, even if it accelerates exponentially, sure, it'll raise see levels, but it'll also rain down over land, filling dams, aquifers, etc.

Cosmic Rays can seed clouds in the upper atmosphere. Ice turned to water might increase water vapour levels in the atmosphere. A more active Sun decreases Cosmic Rays reaching Earth, thus decreasing the chance of seeding clouds.... but, if the Sun is less active (I'm guessing here, most of this is opined guess-work ) and there is more water vapour in the atmosphere, Cosmic Rays reaching Earth have more potential to seed clouds that could cover the Earth.

My thoughts are that, whether it's man made warming or pure (natural) climate change on the Earth or a mix of the two (which I believe it is), the Earth heats up, ice melts, the Sun is (fortunately/unfortunately) currently less active, more water/water vapour is released on the system, the potential for Cosmic Ray cloud-seeding, could make temperatures dive down and lead to a tipping point towards the next global glacial period (ice-age).

Winter is coming

a reply to: lostbook

Maybe people have a hard time believing government figures because of some of the miss steps (we used to call it lying but they use other words now) with prior announcements. www.abovetopsecret.com...
which is about the polar bear crisis which was totally made up.
www.abovetopsecret.com... which is about the 1970s Global Cooling Scare..Graphs, scientific papers and everything !

Effects on the global temperature of large increases in carbon dioxide and aerosol densities in the atmosphere of Earth have been computed. It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth. Because of the exponential dependence of the backscattering, the rate of temperature decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 ° K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.

stevengoddard.wordpress.com...
Nothing really changes; fear and lies to separate you from your money is a new scheme to tax..... only this time they are using frying or drowning instead of freezing to death..

a reply to: 727Sky

Your links are incredibly disingenuous. The scientist didn't "confess" that he "made up polar bear population estimates". Populations were estimated from known numbers. That is to say, if we know the populations in half the areas, we can extrapolate to the other half based on the known population data.

The second link talks about global cooling in the 70's:

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, which showed a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. The current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but underwent global warming throughout the 20th century.[1]

en.wikipedia.org...

I find it deeply ironic that you use incredibly misleading and biased articles to make a point about blindly believing things.

originally posted by: buellmph
Funny thing is the beaches seem to still be the same, depending on tide of course. Aren't we supposed to be drowning in liberal tears by now? I went down to Galveston several times this year and the beaches seemed to look exactly the same as when I was a kid. Actually the water and sand were ALOT cleaner.

Sea rise isn't uniform.