No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum (NYT)

In 1969 Roy Koerner, a Canadian government glaciologist, was one of four men (and 36 dogs) who completed the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean, from Alaska through the North Pole to Norway.

Now, he said, such a trek would be impossible: there is just not enough ice. In September, the area covered by sea ice reached a record low. "I look on it as a different world," Dr. Koerner said. "I recently reviewed a proposal by one guy to go across by kayak."

Many scientists say it has taken a long time for them to accept that global warming, partly the result of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could shrink the Arctic's summer cloak of ice.

But many of those same scientists have concluded that the momentum behind human-caused warming, combined with the region's tendency to amplify change, has put the familiar Arctic past the point of no return.

http://nytimes.com/2005/10/25/science/earth/25arctic.html?

to pollution - as they rain cycle is so sparse. And so easily hurty by pollution. Women who live there and eat the food in the system - have not been able to breast feed due to high mercurty levels for years.

Nature is not fair. It is not us in the south of Canada who are suffering the most from environmental degridation.

of the worst kind...complete.

truly scary. But there isn't a whole hell of a lot we can do anymore. What gets me is the incessant breeding of the human race. Too many damned people screwing this planet up!!!

anything. If it will help - along with hurricanes - to maybe enable some thinking changes in people regarding the environment. Don't know.

If I remember, the stories said that at a certain point, there's no stopping the thawing. Less ice means less light is reflected back into space, which makes the earth's surface warmer, which makes the ice melt, which makes the earth warmer....

We can choose to continue to accelerate the warming effect by doing as we have been, or we can choose to attempt to give ourselves more time by contributing less to the problem. Sadly, I see no leaders on the left or the right who are serious about the latter.

It's prolly going to get pretty nasty, and it will usher in a lot more violence -- and possibly, wars -- over water and food, rather than oil and money.

I remember the first "Earth Day" celebration, that environmentalists all over America started. Over-population was one of the big talking points, as well as pollution and energy. But, instead of taking root in the minds of the ruling politicians, it was just another "issue" that served for temporary talking points.

The "sixties generation" had some beautiful, meme-changing ideas, but the "powers that be", who hated this generation, put them down as "naive", and then came Reagan, and, of course, the Bush cabal, with their "greed is good, environmentalists are bad". Then, those of that generation, who sat out the sixties goodies (a la chimp-in-chief), took power on the coat-tails of the Reagan crowd, and totally phucked-up everything good we had going for us.

That was where "history" made a wrong turn that may well be the end of us all.

:kick:

If the oil runs out there are not enough hands to farm to feed the six billion people. Part of the world must die in order for the rest to survive. Sounds cruel but it's inevitable, unless technology can hit it big.

25-75 years.

Still a microscopic amount of time.

and there are still a thousand people a day moving to the US coast (like the water isn't going to rise and as if there won't be more hurricanes).

In most of the rest of the world, people argue that over-consumption is screwing up the planet more than over-population. Both are problems, but when less than 10% of the population is consuming over 25% of the resources it is hard to argue that there are not two sides to this problem, and frankly the US population has the larger biodiversity squashing footprint.

concerns (and some discount it completely, stating that if you care about "wolves and ivy" then you don't care about people). No habitable environment negates all other issues; civil rights, employment, the economy, the Iraq war, Roe v. Wade...none of it matters if our species has no place to call home. They think that it won't effect them, that it will be another generations problem. They are wrong. Very wrong. It's here now, and it can destroy OUR generation. But many DUers will say with a shrug "the world will continue without us", as if that makes it all OK. A nearly lifeless rock starting from scratch-that's a comforting thought to some here. WTF? Why participate on a political forum if survival itself is boring? If those on the left are disinterested in the environment, then did we ever have any hope?

What IS worth fighting for, if not your very survival?

Between global warming, pollution,the coming energy crises, overpopulation, etc., I sometimes wonder why I should be concerned whether Tom DeLay got indicted, whether Karl Rove will be indicted....

Those are really small stories compared to whether this planet can support all the people on it right now

Many, myself for example, will read this thread without knowing how to reply.

There isn't much else I can say. I tried. And I did my share by doing nothing. I sacrificed. For what. People still don't get it. They don't get that this is only the symptom. The Unspeakable is the real issue. But I waste my breath.

it's like watching a city get levelled and scraped off the face of the world--over and over and over and over and

because it feels like you are the only one pointing and yelling, "Look! It's happening right in front of us!"

20 million morons listening to Rush Limbaugh really believe Global Warming is a hoax.

The rest of America doesn't want to be inconvenienced at all. So they look outside, say, "gonna be chilly tonight", so there must be no such thing as Global Warming.

Idiots.

Who is going to apologize to our grandchildren.

short.

The Amazon rain forest is experiencing a record drought this year. Billions of plants and trees are dying, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere as they decompose.The tundra permafrost is melting, which is having the same effect. The earth's oceans have spreading "dead zones"-the ocean's flora contributes 65% of the world's oxygen. Soon there won't be anything left to breathe.:-(

When the crisis is tangible to the rest of the troglodytes, resources will be marshalled to deal with it.

Many may perish, but the human race will survive.

Now whether they deserve to or not is another question.

And it is only the beginning, which is the worst part of it all. I'm glad I got to Alaska in 1983. And I truly weep for the future.

within the past year, of Inuit in the NWT mentioning 'strange' lights that appear on the horizon. IIRC, they don't necessarily have the 24 hr darkness they used to have in the dead of winter anymore, and it is because of global warming/climate change (something about the southern warmer air reflecting lights, almost like a mirage...temperature inversion?)

I wish I had kept the article.

Unfortunately, the newspaper in which I read it (the Edmonton Journal) doesn't keep any archives on line.

This is all very, very disturbing indeed. :-(

if you argue that global warming is the real deal.
The challenge is to give neocons the evidence in 3 sentences or less.

:toast:

Good to be here.:bounce:

Is that news outlets feel a need to be "fair & balanced" on this issue, so they'll put on one meterologist expert up against some business lobbyist & let them duke it out. The audience is left with the impression that it's 50/50 whether global warming is occuring when almost 100% of scientists agree it is.

It still doesn't matter.

They say, "It snowed in April in DC this year! How is THAT Global Warming?"

-Yes, I really had some moron say that to me.

Then I explained that heat is energy and doesn't always have to be heat. That energy changes the dynamic of a given system that can result in all kinds of anomalies.

She said, "Well obviously you're no meteorologist."
I said, "If you bother to talk to one, they'll tell you I'm absolutely correct."

Then I was kicked off of the board for being a 'liberal'.

-No shit.

Change has been a constant of Earth's history. Just 15,000 years ago, much of Canada and the US Northeast were under a mile of ice. There was no fossil-fuel burning responsible for the global warming that pulled that ice off the continents. There was also no human agency in the Little Ice Age (roughly 1500-1850) that froze the Thames and New York Harbor, and squeezed glaciers out of the Swiss Alps down into valleys, obliterating entire villages. There also was no human agency in the preceding Medieval Climate Optimum, a warm period that allowed Vikings passage through ice-free seas to Greenland, where they were able to establish coastal outposts and grow grapes.

For reference, isotope dating of Sargasso Sea cores show average water temperatures about 1 degree C lower than current norms during the Little Ice Age, and about 1 degree C higher than current norms during the Medieval Climate Optimum. Compare these to what's forecast for the coming century and you'll see why a sense of perspective is healthy in the current debate. BTW, the likely cause of these swings was variability in solar output.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Human activity has clearly contributed to the latest atmospheric warming cycle, but mixing politics with science when figuring out the root causes of the current warming is begging for disaster. Politics (like religion) has a way of causing adherents to ignore, or even denigrate, all evidence that doesn't square with one's beliefs. That's the opposite of science.

There are huge cycles at work in the orbit and revolution of the Earth, in tectonic-driven periods of volcanic emissions and rock weathering due to continental exposures, in the abyssal circulations of the ocean, and in the varying energy output of the Sun, that make climate constancy impossible on Earth. This has been true since the beginning of life on Earth.

There are things we can and must do about the current trend, but we must also accept that even if humans burned nothing, Earth's climate would always be in a state of flux, and we would never like the changes. Like old people, we like things to stay just the way they are.

Peace.

years is a cause for concern? Others do. (See http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/07/21/humans_are_main_cause_of_warming_scientist_says/ )

And there was a recent study countering the claims that increased solar activity could be responsible for the warming. I posted a message about it here, but for some reason it was moved to the environment forum, which has very little activity compared to LBN (I don't understand why some topics on climate change are left here and others are moved). Here's a link to that topic

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x33118

and the article I was posting about

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-1828523,00.html


I'm not saying there hasn't been climate change, lots of it, that wasn't influenced by human activity. But I believe there's evidence the latest climate changes are a result of what we're doing, and the effects on our climate shouldn't be ignored.

So my grandchildren can go live on Mars with the other rich folks.

those were much more gradual.

We're heating up fast. That will not give forests much time to migrate.

Where the changes in earth's climate have historically been a 'slow burn', we have unwittingly engineered an explosion.

For things to change so dramatically in the next 40 years will have disasterous and, I'm quite certain, some highly unpredictable results.

with other disasterous and unpredictable results from the earth's history?

Seriously though, having played a major role in increasing atmospheric CO2, humanity has certainly set itself up for decades of adaptation.

When smaller civilizations dealt with tsunamis, typhoons/hurricanes, flooding, drought etc., they were either wiped out or they learned to adapt.

But with such disparate cultures, the actual damage, though horrific, was isolated to a given geographical location.
The loss of those civilized infrastructures, whether terminal or not, did not impact all of human civilization... at the time.

Now that we have a far more sophisticated civilization, the aggregate damage, the cumulative damage will be greater in terms of impact to the human race by some orders of magnitude.

Coupled with the very quick onset of changes, I expect we are due for a keyhole event... assuming the worst of course.
Best case scenario?

Massive economic collapse, widespread disease and famine, dogs and cats living together... nothing we can't handle as a race.

But it really is going to suck.

I agree that the effect on humanity as a result of global warming will undoubtedly require some adaptation, but I believe the effects of unchecked population growth, in and of itself, will be felt in a much more profound way...and much sooner.

couple that with diminishing energy resources and we're looking at one very ugly century.

We had better get on the Fusion bandwagon sooner than later.

A neighbor was once regularly crapping in my yard. Yep you got it taking a big dump right in my yard. I was told to ignore it as a century ago there were open sewers in this area. And property values, the smell, and the legacy I would leave my children were of no consequence because the sun was going to nova some day anyway, turning the earth into a little ball of ash.

Scientific fact: Global warming is being accelerated by human activity.

If unchecked global warming will greatly affect the global distribution of plants and animals, which will cause increased human caused extinctions of species. We're not sure if there is a threshold loss of biodiversity, beyond which life as we know it changes dramatically.

We do know that the legacy we will leave our children will be much less wild, much less biologically diverse, and frankly less interesting. But hey the sun will nova some day, so what does it really matter.

Peace indeed.

You're right out of Central Casting.

From the wildly irrelevant neighbor-shitting-in-my-yard analogy, to your somehow missing in my post that we completely agree that human activity is contributing to global warming, to the requisite snarky closing, you are the best demonstration of what I said about the dangers of mixing politics and science that I could have hoped for, so I can only say...thank you. Really. :-)

Someone further up the thread said we need to be able to reduce global warming to three sentences so we can beat wingnuts over the head easily and irrefutably. Yup. While we're at it, let's reduce relations between men and women (a nearly infinitely less complex system than weather) to three sentences, too. It would also be nice to reduce the machinations of the stock market to three sentences while we're at it. You've got the neighbor-shitting-in-your-yard thing down to four sentences. Just a little more compaction(!) and you'll be there.

(For those who would like a great read about the unpredictability of complex systems such as weather and stock markets and traffic jams and neural connections, James Gleick's book Chaos: Making A New Science is hard to beat.)

Now, this is for the other flamers who also don't bother to read what someone actually says before huffin' and puffin' and blowing a post down: I *already said* that human activity *is* involved in global warming. My point was/is that science can't yet say whether it's the only cause, one of a few prime causes, or simply part of a larger phenomenon. We could stop all CO2 emissions tomorrow and, at this point, the warming trend would probably continue unabated, regardless of whether human-generated CO2 is the culprit. That's why I said we better get right with the idea of change, because it is coming, Kyoto or no Kyoto. If you read (omigod!) the links I posted, you'll see that the Earth underwent climate swings (just like we are undergoing now) in the recent past, not a million years ago, but within the past thousand years. Both a warming trend and a cooling trend, both of which came and went with startling speed, and both were larger swings than we've seen so far in our time.

Follow the link; it leads to one more piece of a jigsaw puzzle that's vastly larger than the politically-driven on either the right or the left realize.



"The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment."
- Bertrand Russell

to reject global warming, especially with this terrifying evidence. ice melt occurs as a state-change, which is at a sharp threshold in temperature. it's not a linear or smooth thing... it happens very suddenly at a specific point and unless there's a limit on the available energy it proceeds very quckly. in this case, we've got a bunch of ice sitting on a bunch of water, and that water is too warm and the air around it is too warm to support the ice's existence, and we've just crossed that temperature threshold where the ice switches to water... so it's going to be a historic, damning piece of evidence of utter carelessness and a shocking black mark on bush's so-called legacy.

because "we'll all be dead".

after the election, I didn't watch tv for weeks. When I finally turned it on, I watched C-Span (one or two, don't recall) and saw an environmental report about the Artic. It was horrible, all the changes that were happening ... and I remember, some stupid reporter got up and asked a question of the four panelists about how this melting could be exploited. I was sickened by that way of thinking.

government is being about climate change.

They had a National Climate Change Conference a couple of weeks ago. I was going to post a topic here about it, but after two other messages I'd posted on climate change had just been moved to the environment forum (for reasons I still don't understand, since other topics on climate change had been left here), I temporarily gave up on trying to post about climate change here and posted a topic about the news article there. Here's the link to that topic

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x33143

and the article I'd posted about

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=14&art_id=vn20051016093320221C495875

The article quotes a scientist from the University of Cape Town saying there's nothing we can do to mitigate the effects of climate change for this generation, and we'll have to adapt -- and I'm afraid he's right about that and we are going to be facing lots of changes we won't like, many of which will be very difficult to adapt to. But perhaps, if enough people understand what changes have to be made, we can mitigate effects for later generations.

By the way, I posted a message in GD last week about what could be a truly revolutionary source of electrical power, portable wind/solar energy units being produced by a US company, SkyBuilt, which was in the news because the CIA's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, was investing in it. That topic is at

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5101048

with links to the CS Monitor article at http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1018/p02s01-sten.html

and press releases at

http://www.primezone.com/newsroom/news.html?d=87993

and

http://www.skybuilt.com/pr.htm


I found the article on this too late to post about it here in LBN, though it hadn't been mentioned here. These small power stations could have a huge impact, if enough could be produced; they could greatly reduce the demand for oil, coal and firewood. (They could have so much impact that I hope the CIA isn't investing in this firm to prevent it from having that wider impact, the way large corporations will often buy out smaller firms they find threatening.)

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- Greenland's ice cap has thickened slightly in recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming, a team of scientists said on Thursday.

The 9,842-feet thick ice cap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 meters. And a runaway thaw might slow the Gulf Stream that keeps the North Atlantic region warm.

But satellite measurements showed that more snow was falling and thickening the ice cap, especially at high altitudes, according to the report in the journal Science.

Link

No kidding, this was an actual NY Times headline a couple weeks ago. The story was about how gold is more accessible in the Arctic now thanks to the melting polar ice caps. Thank you, Bush administration!

Quick, get him back to testify in Congress that the ice is still there!

that keep many parts of the world relatively temperate. I don't have a link handy, but research has shown that at times in the distant past when the world was warmer, these great currents basically shut down. This makes weather more extreme - for example the UK's warming by the Gulf Stream would stop. It also makes the oceans more stagnant, so there is less upwelling and stirring and so most likely less productivity of the kinds of living resources that humans want. Rainfall patterns would also be affected. If the lower latitudes became still hotter, that would also affect hurricane formation. And on and on. It's all interconnected and in delicate balance.

Shutting down the ocean currents could happen at any time. It's another of those "tipping point" situations, one with profound consequences for the entire world, and it can't be undone.

Admnistration's non-response to it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/global-warming-outrages-_2346.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1692695

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1530709

http://www.globalnewsmatrix.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1442

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19269-1761195,00.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1784855

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2107126 (This one is on how Clark sees global warming as a national security issue)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1811373

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1845987

:

Says all this weather is just a common occurrence that happens every so often.

Thats the guy everyone sees and respects. When he says this on the news people buy it.

So what if global warming is real.

Our President feels it will cost too much to deal with it.

Yeah, it's going to be so much cheaper to let it go on unabated and raise the coastline levels a few feet. Letting it go and cause all these future disasters is sooo much cheaper. Thanks, George!

-85%

To :) today, its really all we ever have. Peace

the rise in sea levels due to the thawing then wipes out towns and cities with storm surges. Time for wind and solar and leave the Fossil Fuel Age behind.

I never dreamed I would see something like this happen in my lifetime.;(

not before. The melting of all arctic ice could just be a natural cycle or something.

:sarcasm: