It's official: Antarctic glacial basin is a goner

[manimal]

It's amazing so many people are absolutely convinced in their belief that global warming is real or not let alone man made or not. I wonder how many of these people hold an advance degree in the relevant subject areas(should consist of at least chemistry and physics) to be able to offer such confident opinions. Me, I admit I don't understand enough about science to offer up any good opinion regarding this subject
I can only say I hope global warming is not man made.

whats hilarious is people tossing science out the window because its too complex for them to understand. Why not actually try to learn something new instead of living in your own ignorance?

Just because quantum mechanics is too tough for you to understand doesnt mean it doesnt exist.


Evolution and MMCC is as close fact as is our understanding of Gravity. Some of the details are still being worked on but for the entirety of the legitimate scientific community its real.


again this is a dunce identification thread.

How many of you didnt attend grade school?

 

[Paul98]

I'm actually referring to the opinion of the people in this forum and everywhere else I see in general. How can any regular person be so absolutely positive about a subject so mind bogglingly complex to understand as the thermal characteristics of various molecules interacting in a medium as complex as the earth. Just the mere notion that under standard atmospheric pressure a mere 6.02 * 10^23 molecules consisting mostly of space themselves occupying 22 liters of space can have such profound impact on our daily lives makes me realize that my mind is simply not smart enough to understand the complexity of science behind global warming.

I hope it's not man made because if it's natural as many of those who are so darn sure it's caused by sun spots, then it means we are going through a cycle that will eventually correct itself into the iceage.

If it's not man made...will I don't want to live in water world.

Just because you can't understand it in great detail doesn't mean you can't understand the basic science. Just because you don't understand the math of general relativity doesn't mean you shouldn't believe in gravity. Or because you don't have a PHD in evolutionary biology doesn't mean you can't understand the basics of evolution and know that it's real.

 

[Jeff7]

Nope, humans can't do squat to affect the planet on a large scale. Nothing at all.
And really, who doesn't enjoy a good dose of ionizing radiation?

What can 300,000,000 people do about climate change that 2.2 billion people are not doing?


Human beings are too shortsighted greedy and ignorant to reverse the damage. We don't think about the future and we barely remember yesterday, hence we are doomed to repeat past mistakes in perpetuity and drive off cliffs despite the warning signs posted 10 miles back.
The only thing seperating us from the animals is that we can sow the seeds of our own destruction.

The only viable solution at this point is adaptation.

No...not really. We are doing precisely the same thing that any life form on this planet does when it has an excess of easily-usable resources and no major predatory threats: Reproduce at an insane rate. Expand to fill the container. Consume all of the available resources without any kind of long-term plan.
If the population can expand beyond the container of the local environment, whether it be from one lake into a nearby lake, or from one forest to another, now you've got multiple colonies. When the good times end, as they tend to do, and 90% of the population of your species dies off, nature says "That's a bummer, oh well." But now you've got geographic diversification, and that gives your species a better shot at surviving long-term.

Or you might go through that period of rapid breeding and growth, only to find that the next lake is 200 miles away, and you've got no chance of making your way there. Then during next season your food source fails to grow as abundantly as expected, and most of your bloated population dies off. Nature usually doesn't do "slow and steady."

 

[rudder]

So lets see... this area melted 400,000 - 500,000 years ago. Now its back. It has been melting for a while (see reports from 1970's). As the plug melts... in 200 years... it will take 5,000-10,000 years for all the ice in the basin to empty.

 

[gsellis]

If you understood how surface station data is being used to change the temperature while deliberately ignoring the quality of the data (and assuming UHI is a myth); If you understood that the Hockey stick was made by merging proxy data, and when the proxy data disagreed with the desired results, thermometer data replaced it; If you understood that the Hockey stick was designed to not include the Roman Warming period, smooth away the MWP, and then set the LIA as the Zero on the curve; When you understand that proxies that showed cooling were inverted to show warming in the Hockey Stick; When you understand that almost every subsequent release of the US temperature data by GISS has the 1930's get cooler and cooler ever release; When you understand that some of the folks that are the biggest proponents are borderline Luddites (Hansen for example);
Then you too might become a skeptic on what this message was about.

I started to buy into it until Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published a review of how flawed the original hockey stick was. And then when instead of defending the paper like a real scientist, the data, models and formulas where hidden from review, that told me something was afoot. If it is not repeatable and reproducible, it is not science.

 

[Ruptga]

If you understood how surface station data is being used to change the temperature while deliberately ignoring the quality of the data (and assuming UHI is a myth); If you understood that the Hockey stick was made by merging proxy data, and when the proxy data disagreed with the desired results, thermometer data replaced it; If you understood that the Hockey stick was designed to not include the Roman Warming period, smooth away the MWP, and then set the LIA as the Zero on the curve; When you understand that proxies that showed cooling were inverted to show warming in the Hockey Stick; When you understand that almost every subsequent release of the US temperature data by GISS has the 1930's get cooler and cooler ever release; When you understand that some of the folks that are the biggest proponents are borderline Luddites (Hansen for example);
Then you too might become a skeptic on what this message was about.

I started to buy into it until Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published a review of how flawed the original hockey stick was. And then when instead of defending the paper like a real scientist, the data, models and formulas where hidden from review, that told me something was afoot. If it is not repeatable and reproducible, it is not science.

Later in 2003, a paper by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick disputing the data used in MBH98 paper was publicised by the George C. Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In 2004 Hans von Storch published criticism of the statistical techniques as tending to underplay variations in earlier parts of the graph, though this was disputed and he later accepted that the effect was very small. In 2005 McIntyre and McKitrick published criticisms of the principal components analysis methodology as used in MBH98 and MBH99. The analysis therein was subsequently disputed by published papers including Huybers 2005 and Wahl & Ammann 2007 which pointed to errors in the McIntyre and McKitrick methodology. In June 2005 Rep. Joe Barton launched what Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Science Committee, called a "misguided and illegitimate investigation" into the data, methods and personal information of Mann, Bradley and Hughes. At Boehlert's request a panel of scientists convened by the National Research Council was set up, which reported in 2006 supporting Mann's findings with some qualifications, including agreeing that there were some statistical failings but these had little effect on the result. Barton and U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield requested Edward Wegman to set up a team of statisticians to investigate, and they supported McIntyre and McKitrick's view that there were statistical failings, although they did not quantify whether there was any significant effect. They also produced an extensive network analysis which has been discredited by expert opinion and found to have issues of plagiarism. Arguments against the MBH studies were reintroduced as part of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, but dismissed by eight independent investigations.

TL,DR: that's a cool story, bro

 

[TridenT]

lol, so much science ignorance in this thread. Even if people are trolling (and they are), they're still scientifically ignorant. :awe:

 

[Ichinisan]

The first thing I would do if I had absolute power in the USA and wanted to combat climate change...

Would be to impose a $5/gallon tax on gasoline.

That would result in the US car fleet becoming dramatically more efficient.

But of course, the poor would suffer the most in this regime. They would also suffer when I imposed a $1/KWH tax on electricity to keep down superfluous energy consumption.

Conservatives are in denial, and on a whole are much more idiotic than liberals, but at the same time liberals underestimate the amount of sacrifice needed to really make a difference. They act like doing a few things around the edges will solve it, like cap and trade, but in reality it would require broad-based changes in consumption.

...then China uses all the fossil fuel on the planet available to them anyway. What are you going to do? You've severely crippled your country. You'll be lucky if one of the other countries doesn't overthrow yours in your weakened state.

 

[TheSlamma]

...then China uses all the fossil fuel on the planet available to them anyway. What are you going to do? You've severely crippled your country. You'll be lucky if one of the other countries doesn't overthrow yours in your weakened state.

The US is as invade-able as Russia, good luck with that whoever even tries. (and I'm not even a gun nut BTW)

 

[Ichinisan]

The US is as invade-able as Russia, good luck with that whoever even tries. (and I'm not even a gun nut BTW)

Try it when you've weakened the country severely with the restrictions desura suggested. Keep in mind that America consuming less oil makes it cheaper and more plentiful for Russia and China.

 

[IronWing]

Dibs on naming rights!

 

[DrPizza]

I hope it's not man made because if it's natural as many of those who are so darn sure it's caused by sun spots, then it means we are going through a cycle that will eventually correct itself into the iceage. If it's not man made...will I don't want to live in water world.

Sorry to break the news to you, but one of the first sources of the whole "the sun is causing it" was one of the climatology papers. It said something like this: "the sun's variability is having a small effect causing the planet to warm" (That part was seized upon by the deniers who ignore the rest of the document.) "But, by studying the amount of warming on the other planets, it's fairly conclusive that the sun's variability is only responsible for a minor amount of the total warming being observed."

 

[Pocatello]

Most Chinese understand about air pollution, they know it's bad in their country, and bad for them and their children. For the love of clean air and water, don't race with China to see who can pollute more or who has less pollution regulation. The title of "biggest economy" isn't worth it. If the Chinese want to destroy their own environment to surpass the U.S. I say let them win. The Chinese used to say "If we let them have enough rope, the Americans are going hang themselves." To that, we can say touche.

 

[Elixer]

We all know that the giant killer asteroid is going to annihilate everyone long before anything else, so, those that think that man will cause doom to the earth are only fooling themselves.

 

[Ruptga]

False, everyone knows it will be the AI uprising.

 

[Pocatello]

We all know that the giant killer asteroid is going to annihilate everyone long before anything else, so, those that think that man will cause doom to the earth are only fooling themselves.

Man can only doom himself.

 

[Ruptga]

Man can only doom himself.

speak for yourself, man.

 

[BUTCH1]

Sea levels likely to rise by several meters by the end of the century.



But the good news is that we won't have to hear fucked up news stories emanating from Florida anymore.

Fuck you, from sunny Florida!

 

[OverVolt]

That's like saying we only have 100 years of data on the animals that lived on Earth. *cough* fossils *cough*. There are a lot of other sources of data - ice cores, etc., that go back much further than 100 years.

They only plug 100 years or so of data into the climate change simulations I guess because trying to accurately simulate 10,000 years ago or more is a joke but then it would also show how trying to prove 1,000-10,000 years into the future is also a joke. They didn't even get the decade correct and still make 50-100 year predictions. Its a joke. They got the trend correct but anyone with 80 IQ who looks at a chart of global temperature can spot the trend.

I don't pretend to know what the effects of what we are doing to the climate will be (probably bad) but a certain group (climate scientists *cough cough*) sure do alot of pretending and make believe.

We could have $%^&'ed the climate a million years from now or tomorrow. Nobody knows.

 

[Ruptga]

They only plug 100 years or so of data into the climate change simulations I guess because trying to accurately simulate 10,000 years ago or more is a joke but then it would also show how trying to prove 1,000-10,000 years into the future is also a joke. They didn't even get the decade correct and still make 50-100 year predictions. Its a joke. They got the trend correct but anyone with 80 IQ who looks at a chart of global temperature can spot the trend.

I don't pretend to know what the effects of what we are doing to the climate will be (probably bad) but a certain group (climate scientists *cough cough*) sure do alot of pretending and make believe.

We could have $%^&'ed the climate a million years from now or tomorrow. Nobody knows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large-scale_temperature_reconstructions_of_the_last_2,000_years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus#Politicization_of_science

Maybe you were confused by this fact

The instrumental temperature record only covers the last 150 years at a hemispheric or global scale, and reconstructions of earlier periods are based on climate proxies.

But at this point that level of doubt is only in the heads of laymen and lobbyists.

 

[piasabird]

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-ice-loss-earth-miles.html

There are reports that for the last 10 years that the mantle at Antarctica has been rising or doming making the ice want to break up and slide off.

Ice-loss moves the Earth 250 miles down

The question is this: Did the mantle move because there was a melting effect and there was less pressure on the earth's crust, or did the earth heat up from the inside and start moving and caused the ice to melt or is it a little bit of both? In the recent past this kind of doming effect of the earth's mantle has been reported at other locations.

Is this like Yosemite or maybe Greenland?
http://yellowstone.net/geysers/caldera/

At the surface, Antarctica is a motionless and frozen landscape. Yet hundreds of miles down the Earth is moving at a rapid rate, new research has shown.

Previous studies have shown the earth is 'rebounding' due to the overlying ice sheet shrinking in response to climate change. This movement of the land was understood to be due to an instantaneous, elastic response followed by a very slow uplift over thousands of years.

But GPS data collected by the international research team, involving experts from Newcastle University, UK; Durham University; DTU, Denmark; University of Tasmania, Australia; Hamilton College, New York; the University of Colorado and the University of Toulouse, France, has revealed that the land in this region is actually rising at a phenomenal rate of 15mm a year – much greater than can be accounted for by the present-day elastic response alone.

And they have shown for the first time how the mantle below the Earth's crust in the Antarctic Peninsula is flowing much faster than expected, probably due to subtle changes in temperature or chemical composition. This means it can flow more easily and so responds much more quickly to the lightening load hundreds of miles above it, changing the shape of the land.