Huge Arctic Ice Shelf Breaks Off 736
knarfling writes "CNN is reporting that a chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic. Just last month 21 square miles of ice broke free from the Markham Ice Shelf. Scientists are saying that Ellesmere Island has now lost more than 10 times the ice that was predicted earlier this summer. How long before the fabled Northwest Passage is a reality?"
1906 (Score:2, Informative)
YES! How long until it is 1906 again?
From TFA... (Score:3, Informative)
Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s. All that is left today are the four much smaller shelves that together cover little more than 299 square miles.
So this is a process that has been going on for ~100 years now? And that means it is indicative of, or news because... ???
;) )
Nothing to see here... (except my dwindling karma...
Re:1906 (Score:5, Informative)
YES! How long until it is 1906 again?
The 'fabled' northwest passage is a shipping route linking east to west, navigable by normal cargo carrying ships.
The northwest passage, which obviously existed since well before it was first crossed in 1906 by Amundsen, and still to this day, is a hazardous journey requiring an expedition and specialist ice breaker ships to cross.
Should enough ice melt that it actually becomes usable as a shipping route, then at least the 'fabled northwest passage' will be reality.
The Northwest Passage is open (Score:5, Informative)
How long before the fabled Northwest Passage is a reality?
From what I read [sciam.com] the other day, it is open now...
Re:From TFA... (Score:3, Informative)
And that means it is indicative of, or news because... ???
It's faster and more extensive than ever before, and faster than expected.
That's pretty much it.
Re:From TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
Martin Jeffries of the U.S. National Science Foundation and University of Alaska Fairbanks said in a statement Tuesday that the summer's ice shelf loss is equivalent to over three times the area of Manhattan, totaling 82 square miles -- losses that have reduced Arctic Ocean ice cover to its second-biggest retreat since satellite measurements began 30 years ago.
"These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present," said Muller.
During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.
"But today, warmer temperatures and a changing climate means there's no hope for regrowth. A scary scenario," said Muller.
Re:The Climate Change Guys Will Have a Field Day.. (Score:3, Informative)
I don't have time to find a source right now, but didn't a linked-to-by-slashdot article one or two weeks ago mention the variations in some ocean currents as the cause? Something about them delaying serious global warming until the next decade or so.
NW passage is open (Score:3, Informative)
I read about it here [slashdot.org].
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1906 (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that before we paid much attention to this stuff, there was ONE real model that predicted a global temperature increase: global warming. It was not ignored before because "the man" was trying to hide science, it was ignored because there was NO effort to show an actual cause and effect relationship.
Spoken like a person who's never read a paper on the subject. The study of climate change is part models and part real-world data gathering and testing. Even among models alone, there are *many different* models, most on particular aspects of climate forcing and impacts, not the more famous global models. There is not one "model". And it wasn't ignored, by any standard; it's been an active ongoing research topic in the scientific community for decades. Peer review is the judge, not public opinion.
This becomes embarressing when things like the carbon retention of the Sahara are studied, as we discussed weaks ago, and suddenly billions of tons of carbon disappear from the air in our models, but the temperature hasn't changed at all.
Waht arr yoo talkng abowt?
The reason this worries me is that, while fighting pollution and emissions is never a bad thing, we could very well be ignoring the elephant in the room, simply because the global warming discussion has become so political, (and that's the activists faults, not the scientists). What if, although our carbon certainly doesn't help, most of this is due to cyclical sun output?
No. Read section 2.7 [ucar.edu], which summarizes pretty much every peer-reviewed paper published on the subject. Not even close. I mean, seriously -- did it never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, we have observatories and satellites studying in detail essentially every thing the sun does, in addition to all kinds of long-term proxy data?
You know what caused the onset of the iceages? North and South America connected at Panama, cutting of the Pacific-Atlantic currents, which cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Ice ages happen regularly, on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, along the lines of Milankovitch cycles. The Isthmus of Panama formed once, three million years ago.
Re:1906 (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo [wikipedia.org]
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
*sigh* It appears that once again, Slashdot has tried to avoid the meta-argument I pose in favor of disecting the randomly posed scenarios which I used to create such an argument.
I believe the phrase is... "Move along, nothing to see here"...
Re:From TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
"can sail around the North of Canada."
nope, they will sail in Canada, not around.
Re:From TFA... (Score:2, Informative)
According to this article it isn't contributing to the melting, but is producing high quantities of CO2
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But Slashdot told me it would all be melted by (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I think the reason the people you identify as the global warming industry don't mention that is because that's not what's changing. Water vapor is not driving global warming if it's happening, the CO2 is.
If 65 degrees is the perfect temperature for you, and you set the thermostat is set for 65 degrees, that's just perfect. If someone comes along and pushes it up 5 more degrees you're going to be hot. If you say "hey why'd you turn it up to 70" and he says "don't blame me, I turned it up only 5 degrees, you did most of it!" you're going to think he's an argumentative asshole who is still responsible for the house being too hot even if he's telling the truth.
CO2 is the problem, the climate was working fine with the water vapor.
Frankly, it would be idiotic to mention the water vapor to the american public as it would only confuse them as you have been confused. The main reason little has been done about climate change is because you can't prove it in ten words or less to the public, it's a more complicated story that is easily obfuscated by throwing in facts like you just did without context.
Re:Never, hopefully. (Score:3, Informative)
Eh, doubt it. China's army shouldn't be taken lightly, but their navy isn't especially impressive.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the water is warming. Most of the current rise in sea level is due to the water warming, and thus expanding rather than to ice melting. That won't be significant until Greenland goes. Floating ice melting doesn't change the sea level, but merely absorbs the heat required to melt it. This is significant for absorbing energy without raising the temperature. But after the floating ice melts, then the seas can raise their temperature without the hindrance of needing to melt ice. (Note that this is also a block the other way to water cooling.)
A given volume of water can hold considerable more thermal energy than the same volume of air at the same temperature. As a result the oceans act as a ballast on the thermal variations...but as they warm, the balance point of the scale shifts. It takes a long time to warm the oceans, and then it takes a long time to cool them. This is important in understanding climate change.
Note also that warmer air can hold more water. This is important as a thermal transport mechanism. (I'm not a climate modeler, so I can't understand why this would turn some places into deserts...but I've seen complex interaction of subroutines, so I'm not surprised that things like this happen.)
But it's not that either the air or the water is warming, they both are. Just at different rates, and with differing stability.
Re:The Climate Change Guys Will Have a Field Day.. (Score:4, Informative)
You understand of course that extra energy in the system causes larger fluctuations right? The global average will increase, but so will the variance. Your colds will be colder, and your hots will be hotter.
That's not a prediction of the IPCC, who gather together and summarise the peer reviewed literature. Climate is variable because there are a lot of things that effect it, from solar influences, to the La Nina/El Nino cycles. Regional variation is greater than global variation. Due to that variation we can still expect extremes to occur: some years are just very cold (for a number of factors not related to anthropogenic warming), and some are hot, and that will continue, regardless of warming. However, as noted in IPCC assessment reports (TAR WGI 9.3.6) [grida.no]:
In other words, individual cold days or years are not evidence against global warming, since they may well be a result of natural variation caused by other factors (and would have simply been even colder without global warming). To count as notable evidence against global warming you would need a significant sustained cold spell (5 to 10 years at this point). However, extreme cold days or years are not predicted effects of global warming. They may well happen, but there isn't any significant evidence that they are caused by global warming.
Re:1906 (Score:2, Informative)
And plz don't embarrass yourself further by trying to claim it all came from the sun as well...
Tinkerbell, it did all come from the sun. Fossil fuels are stored solar energy. Duh.
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
YES! How long until it is 1906 again?
The 'fabled' northwest passage is a shipping route linking east to west, navigable by normal cargo carrying ships.
The northwest passage, which obviously existed since well before it was first crossed in 1906 by Amundsen, and still to this day, is a hazardous journey requiring an expedition and specialist ice breaker ships to cross.
Should enough ice melt that it actually becomes usable as a shipping route, then at least the 'fabled northwest passage' will be reality.
For anyone interested, there's an interesting musical history of the mapping of the Northwest Passage by a now deceased Canadian folk singer named Stan Rogers [stanrogers.net]. The song is aptly called Northwest Passage [wikipedia.org]. (youtube video montage available here [youtube.com])
It's bogus and they know it (Score:4, Informative)
The "ice cover in the arctic is growing" claim is bogus, and they know it (or should). It keeps coming up [slashdot.org] and people point out that even the authors of the claim now say it's bogus (see linked thread) but the same claim keeps coming back, generally worded the same way ("the real inconvenient truth is that the ice cap is growing" or some such).
I used to think it was just cluelessness, but I'm starting to suspect trolls.
--MarkusQ
Re:About weather changes and global warming... (Score:5, Informative)
These are really really rehashes of thoroughly debunked arguments. We already know that solar output effects the energy that the Earth absorbs, we observe the output of the Sun directly, we know exactly how different solar output changes from year to year. We know the variability between solar output during solar output peak and trough -- it's 0.1% The total solar forcing can be calculated directly it's 237 Watts/M^2. So from sunspot peak to trough the forcing changes by .24 watts/M^2. We know the effect of greenhouse gas change (in particular CO2) since pre-industrial times on forcing. It's 2.43 watts/M^2 see for example The 2001 IPCC Report [grida.no].
It is true that solar output is high especially high for the past 80 years see solar variation [wikipedia.org] but even the change between now and the Maunder Minimum (.2%) does not compare to forcing from greenhouse gasses.
Re:1906 (Score:5, Informative)
Many possible reasons, but almost certainly NOT the sun's output... if the sun had that much "immediate and direct" effect on our temperatures, we'd likely not be alive to be discussing it on slashdot (the first "big spike" would throw us up over the boiling point of water)
Also, please, repeat after me: "Local weather and daily temperatures do NOT show ANYTHING useful in Climate Models!". Longer term trends (in weather and temperature - e.g. Climate) are what counts (and even then, you still need to take in to account much larger areas also - your small patch of the world might be 2 degrees colder over the next 10 years, but if the rest of the world is 4 degrees warmer, you're just an interesting data point).
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
No, plastic shopping bags are estimated to take 500-1000 years to decompose under optimal conditions. Some report that they actually never decompose, but end up leaving a plastic "dust" residue.
The only reason paper is better than plastic is that it will decompose after a couple months in decent conditions. But paper bags take significantly more energy to produce than plastic and if they end up in a landfill, they take a very long time to decompose because your typical landfill has very poor conditions for decomposition.
The best shopping bags for the environment is to not use any bags at all, but unless you have a lot of hands, that's not really feasible. Reusable canvas bags are very good, but unfortunately most people are either too lazy or think the bags are only for hippies so they don't bother.
While you may view conservation of resources as someone being bossy and telling you shouldn't do something, others view it as their duty to minimize their impact on the Earth so that future generations may also enjoy Earth's resources and beauty.
Politicians love Global Warming (Score:4, Informative)
Not in the US. Many Republican politicians deny, or belatedly acknowledge, Global Warming. Mike Huckabee, I think but I'm not sure, speaking at the convention intimated Obama wants people to make sure their tires are properly inflated.
Many scientists love it because they finally get some of the spotlight and almost all scientific disciplines can be somehow linked to global warming. Just work GLobal Warming into your research title and it becomes trendy and "important".
That can work both ways, one groups of scientists getting big study grants for saying how bad Global Warming is while another group can get big grants also for disproving Global Warming. I haven't seen many of the later though.
Falcon
Re:1906 (Score:5, Informative)
Intriguing,
Here in SA we had a huge problem with plastic bag litter. So much so that one MP described them as 'our new national flower'.
A law was passed - it didn't ban bags, but it DID require them to be made at least 0.5 microns thick - meaning they are reusable (the older 0.3micron thin ones tended to tear if you use them more than once). This of course, costs money, so they ALLOWED (didn't require but in practise everybody did it) the shops to charge the price difference back to the customers.
That means you pay about R0.40 for bag - but suddenly, people KEEP the bags, and reuse them as many times as possible because those fourty-cent charges add up.
The result it that plastic bag litter has become notably less common in South Africa, they are a valuable commodity now. People tend to be so terrible they won't even avoid littering public parks out of caring for shared resources for the community - but they will damn well do it if it means not throwing away their own personal money.
Sorry - if giving people an economic incentive not to throw their trash in the public park to strangle birds and fish (and yes, human children !) is 'telling them how to live' then I'm all for telling people how to live in some cases.
Note also: I am NOT a fan of my government, my posting history will show how extremely critical I am of them in general - but where a well thought out plan has given a genuine benefit to the entire nation I will also give them fair credit.
PS. Now if only we can find a way to give people an economic incentive not to throw ciggarette-butts, coke-cans, used-condom and broken beer bottles in the parks.
Re:Science is never objective. (Score:3, Informative)
personal carbon credits (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know if you're being, or trying to be, sarcastic but there's a debate going on in the environmental communities on whether carbon credits are good or bad. Some saying are that they can help reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Others say people are just out for a quick buck. Still others say carbon credits are just a "feel good" measure, people can buy credits but then won't adjust their lifestyle to have a smaller carbon footprint.
As I see it, carbon credits can be all of them.
Falcon
CO2 (Score:3, Informative)
If we were to increase the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere to 0.5%, there's no way green plants could handle it
Actually science has shown it works both ways. Some plants grow slower in a CO2 enriched environment whereas others grow faster. For instance Poison ivy [usatoday.com] grows faster and bigger with higher atmospheric levels of CO2.
Falcon
Re:Never, hopefully. (Score:3, Informative)
Charter rates for the largest freight ships can be $40,000 - $70,000 per day [wikipedia.org]. If taking the Northwest Passage can save such a ship 25 days at sea, then even at the lowest daily rates that's saved them a million already. Factor in fuel costs and Canada's apparently exorbitant fee could start looking reasonable.
Re:1906 (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. This meme is very old and very wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
You have been misinformed by the opposing "industry", scientists pretty much ignore water vapour for a very good reason. The atmosphere is saturated with water vapour. That means that the only way to change the amount of water vapour in the air is to change either the temprature or pressure of the atmosphere. In other words water is a feedback in a changing climate.
Now what the anti-GW "industry" never mentions is a little thing called the dew point [wikipedia.org] that explains why dew drops form all over the world every night, even in deserts. In a (globally) stable climate you can pump as much H2O as you like into the atmosphere and all that will happen is that it will fall out as rain/dew over the next few days.
Here is a short list of some other old and tiresome misinformation that is midlessly regurgitated every time GW is mentioned...
Climate change on Mars/Jupiter
Sunspots.
Cosmic rays.
Volcanos emit more CO2 than mankind.
No warming since 1998.
Global cooling was all the rage in the 70's.
There are many more but the point here is that people simply spout off what they read in the opinion pages without having a fucking clue as to what they are talking about and a complete lack of desire to find out. They assume that the thousands of scientists that make up EVERY national science body on the planet are lobotmised fools who haven't got a clue about what they have spent a good portion of their lives studying.
A couple of minutes googling would have busted the ridiculous myth that you are propogating. If you or anyone else reading wants to be treated as a skeptic and not a 'denier', then act like a skeptic. Go and question your own assumption and try and prove yourself wrong. When you fail to do so then you may just be onto something worthwhile and ORIGINAL. Picking out pre-spun factoids that happen to fit your worlview is nothing less than the triumph of politics over science.
Disclaimer: I picked on you because I was looking for the H2O meme and you were the first one I saw. If you are interested in some genuine science I can give you some links but I suspect your mind is made up and firmly closed.
Well that was awfully wrong (Score:2, Informative)
Clouds WILL absorb and reflect and refract incoming energy from the sun. They will also absorb, reflect and refract LW radiation.
Water vapour will mostly only block LW.
But clouds DO block.
The modelling of water vapour is HUGELY modelled. There are radiative specialists trying to work out what the feck is going on. What ISN'T modelled is the formation of CLOUDS.
But since clouds are not water vapour (about the only thing you got right) and they can either cause cooling or warming based on height, their effect is to randomise the measures rather than force a bias upon them.
So they are OK to ignore for climate purposes. No climate forcing: no need to model in a climate model.
But water vapour? Modelled to hell and back.
Epically wrong.
Re:The Northwest Passage open (last year, too) (Score:3, Informative)
You can see the sea ice as it is right now at the above website (or link here [www.socc.ca]).
That said, it was last year that my brother sent me an email showing this, and showing that the NW passage was open at that time.
So how long before the fabled NW passage is open? Last year. Not the ultimate in slashdot old news, but yes... old.
Re:1906 (Score:2, Informative)
Googling for "climate models water vapor" yields 1,750,000 hits. Here's what RealClimate [realclimate.org] says:
Any mainstream scientist present will trot out the standard response that water vapour is indeed an important greenhouse gas, it is included in all climate models, but it is a feedback and not a forcing.
Seems like water vapor is included in the models.
Re:1906 (Score:4, Informative)
Less than 10yrs ago when climate scientists were predicting one such "tipping point" would likely be an ice free summer artic by the end of the century, they were ridiculed in the press, in the halls of power and on slashdot. Yet today even the most conservative of scientists are predicting it will be ice free by mid-century and moderates are predicting "within a decade".
Current modelling says that an ice free artic will speed up the warming in the N. Hemisphere causing drought conditions in the US mid-west and southern Europe, here in Australia we are coming to grips with what is being called a "permenant drought" that has seen our grain harvests halved for the last 10yrs (2005 was the only exception).
"Sometimes I really worry that we've all had it too good for too long and a much grimmer future is just over the horizon..."
I hope your wrong (especially since I'm about to become a grandad) but GW is just one of many signs that we are racing toward a global population crash of biblical proportions.
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
That correlation has been pretty much debunked for quite some time. See: http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warming.html [livescience.com]
While this is true, no other climactic event has had such a change so quickly. And this according to observable fact.
Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
No, there is less. As the graph from the article you site [nsidc.org] shows, the present sea-ice coverage area is very slightly larger than it was this time last year (which was a record low), but the thickness of the ice is steadily decreasing [agu.org], and as a consequence, so is the total amount of ice.
In fact, as the ice melts and breaks up it tends to spread out, temporarily increasing the "sea area with > 15% ice" which is what the graph shows.
--MarkusQ
Re:1906 (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong [bbc.co.uk]. However I would like to know who is propogating that particular bit of misinformation, do you have a link?