More Bad News for Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier': It's Disintegrating Faster Than We Predicted (msn.com) 145
The Washington Post reports:
A large glacier in Antarctica that could raise sea levels several feet is disintegrating faster than last predicted, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The Thwaites Glacier — dubbed the "doomsday glacier" because scientists estimate that without it and its supporting ice shelves, sea levels could rise more than 3 to 10 feet — lies in the western part of the continent. After recently mapping it in high-resolution, a group of international researchers found that the glacial expanse experienced a phase of "rapid retreat" sometime in the past two centuries — over a duration of less than six months.
NBC News puts this in context: "About 100 years ago, it retreated faster than it is currently retreating... you could say that's good news because it's not so bad now compared to what it was in the past," Anna WÃ¥hlin, a co-author of the study and a professor of physical oceanography at Sweden's Gothenburg University, told NBC News. "But you can also say that it's bad news, because it could happen again."
But the Washington Post adds this about where we are now: According to a news release accompanying the study, researchers concluded that the glacier had "lost contact with a seabed ridge" and is now retreating at a speed of 1.3 miles per year — a rate double what they predicted between 2011 and 2019.
Unlike some other glaciers that are connected to dry land, Thwaites is grounded in the seabed, making it more vulnerable to warming waters as a result of human-induced climate change.
One of the study's co-authors warns that once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed, "we should expect to see big changes over small time scales in the future — even from one year to the next." The article also notes that Thwaites already accounts for about 4% of the current annual rise in sea levels...
The Thwaites Glacier — dubbed the "doomsday glacier" because scientists estimate that without it and its supporting ice shelves, sea levels could rise more than 3 to 10 feet — lies in the western part of the continent. After recently mapping it in high-resolution, a group of international researchers found that the glacial expanse experienced a phase of "rapid retreat" sometime in the past two centuries — over a duration of less than six months.
NBC News puts this in context: "About 100 years ago, it retreated faster than it is currently retreating... you could say that's good news because it's not so bad now compared to what it was in the past," Anna WÃ¥hlin, a co-author of the study and a professor of physical oceanography at Sweden's Gothenburg University, told NBC News. "But you can also say that it's bad news, because it could happen again."
But the Washington Post adds this about where we are now: According to a news release accompanying the study, researchers concluded that the glacier had "lost contact with a seabed ridge" and is now retreating at a speed of 1.3 miles per year — a rate double what they predicted between 2011 and 2019.
Unlike some other glaciers that are connected to dry land, Thwaites is grounded in the seabed, making it more vulnerable to warming waters as a result of human-induced climate change.
One of the study's co-authors warns that once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed, "we should expect to see big changes over small time scales in the future — even from one year to the next." The article also notes that Thwaites already accounts for about 4% of the current annual rise in sea levels...
Is this going to change how anyone votes? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Is this going to change how anyone votes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dont be silly. Look at Jacksonville. Has a huge portion of the population of the region, but rendered mostly unimportant by gerrymandering.
As long as those with vested interests in headplanting about the issues remain able to just redefine the voting map to marginalize the people impacted, the effective vote will not be changed, and the fuckening will continue and get worse.
Just like the people in Jacksonville are experiencing right now.
Sure, the realization that their suffering is being caused by the melting of the glacier might sink in for some of them, even in the counties that benefit from the gerrymandering, but not enough to be significant.
What will eventually break the status quo, is when the mismanagement has become so systemic, and the damage to the environment so incontrovertable and catastrophic as to endanger all human life. At that time, we will all be doomed, but we can at least be blessed with the knowledge that the naysayers will finally have to eat that dish of crow they have avoided for over a century now.
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I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. Where I am, we are facing a crisis because of lack of gas supply, and increasing electricity costs (caused by the same thing). At the same time we are building several GW of off-shore wind turbines a year and will be for the foreseable future. While some people are responding to the lack of gas by saying "we should pull more out of the North Sea" others are saying "is not dependency on fossil fuels, whether Russian or otherwise, the problem".
I'm not going to tell y
Re: Is this going to change how anyone votes? (Score:2)
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It will at least give us better context in 50 years when our grandchildren take all our stuff and throw our bodies into the bio-recycler.
Re: Is this going to change how anyone votes? (Score:2)
Re: Is this going to change how anyone votes? (Score:2)
Re: Is this going to change how anyone votes? (Score:2)
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Fact is the older generations are in charge
This is not a "generation" thing. It is a "people in power" thing. Speaking of generations and their "quirks" can be useful, but this is about power. It has nothing to do with any particular generation and waiting for new people to take power is not the panacea you think it is. This shit has been going on since societies first formed. Stop thinking in terms of generation.
Deliberate strategy (Score:1)
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Sorry, but there *is* a deliberate conspiracy among climate scientist to understate their conclusions.
The reason, though, is that they were trying to get folks to believe them rather than to just go "O, that won't happen". This was documented during the creation of the IPCC reports, and it is (or was) out there in public for anyone to see who wanted to pay attention. The more extreme projections were deliberately cut out of the report. Then they averaged the more moderate ones.
Re:Deliberate strategy (Score:4, Informative)
The more extreme projections were deliberately cut out of the report. Then they averaged the more moderate ones.
That's not a conspiracy, that's an M-estimator.
Or:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If your stats have more mass in the tails than a Gaussian, then ignoring extreme values will give you more accurate results. If your stats are Gaussian, then it will give the same expected mean, but with higher variance.
There's a bunch of interpretations of what mean, median and all the other estimators mean, and what they do, but they all ultimately amount to the same type of conclusion.
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And if you don't have a Gaussian distribution, and almost all the more extreme projections are at one end, you KNOW what cutting them off is going to do. And when a bunch of people get together to agree to do that, it's a conspiracy. Not all, or even most, conspiracies are illegal.
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And if you don't have a Gaussian distribution, and almost all the more extreme projections are at one end, you KNOW what cutting them off is going to do.
Yes: the smaller the central chunk is, the closer the answer is to the median. What this does to the variance depends on the shape of the distribution, but it can be beneficial. Worst case, it doesn't do much.
Now tell me how the L1 norm is a conspiracy...
Also, [citation fucking needed], bro. This is some weird shit conspiracy theory nonsense you're spewing
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It wouldn't be the first time.
Social Darwinism was accepted scientific fact for the first half of the 20th century. All right-minded people accepted it, and scientists researched it in various ways. Social advocates (like Margaret Sanger) built programs around it. So yes, there can be a conspiracy of thousands of scientists around the world.
That absolutely doesn't mean climate science is a conspiracy. What it means is we shouldn't blindly follow authority (or blindly follow emotional TV personalities for th
Re: Deliberate strategy (Score:2)
Re: Deliberate strategy (Score:2)
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Yeah, it doesn't really matter though. There are two options:
1) It is a conspiracy. In that case, you have to look at the evidence.
2) It is not a conspiracy. In that case, you have to look at the evidence.
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Yeah, it doesn't really matter though. There are two options:
1) It is a conspiracy. In that case, you have to look at the evidence. 2) It is not a conspiracy. In that case, you have to look at the evidence.
Too often I see 3. It's a conspiracy, no need to look at the evidence.
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Well, when you consider over 74M people willingly voted for Trump in 2020 (even more people than in 2016), is it really so hard to believe a few hundred thousand people could cooperate in some absolutely fucking massive other conspiracy?
What part of Trump's election was a secret conspiracy that nobody's supposed to know about?
Re:Deliberate strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Climate scientists have always been sensitive to claims that they're being a bunch of disaster preachers, so they've tended to be conservative in their estimates. Of course, this hasn't saved them from criticism by people with a vested interest in the current situation.
Re:Deliberate strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
The scientists and their reports are conservative. The news media not only are the opposite, they tend to misunderstand the reports before they write their "in laymans terms" translation.
OTOH, I don't think that it's at all accurate to claim climate scientists have EVER made an "end of the world" prediction. Ever. Ever. If you think otherwise, I'd like a link to a scientific report that made the projection...NOT some flashy news site. The National Enquirer has definitely published such predictions, but they've also claimed that we were about to be invaded by a giant chambered nautilus from Mars.
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Bow before my nacred magnificence, undercreature!
Um...sorry. I meant to say that climate scientists have been pretty clear that we're on a path to make parts of the world that are currently OK difficult to live in. Yeah. That was it.
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Yeah, many of them were saying just about exactly that. Others were saying things a bit more extreme. None of them were being as extreme as some of the news media, except that they have error bars saying "and if it works out THIS way, we're beyond the place where our models are calibrated, and that COULD be very bad". And I know of no reason to believe that they are wrong.
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I don't think that it's at all accurate to claim climate scientists have EVER made an "end of the world" prediction. Ever. Ever.
Here's a prediction of the oceans boiling [youtube.com]. Here's a meta-analysis paper [royalsocie...ishing.org].
I await the retraction of your statement, which I expect you will be disingenuous and not produce.
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You also have to realize the science isn't in a vacuum. Motivated politicians and support journalists (go watch Citizen Kane), out for power, happily exaggerate and distort.
I recall, after the Thailand tsunami, that CNN had an "article", whose front page headline was "Climate change sea rise will be like the tsunami!"
Omg, that killed 200,000 people!
Reading the actual article linked, they said it could be as much as 30 feet, the height of the tsunami, but over 100-300 years, not a few sececonds.
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Interesting article.
However, the conclusion reads (in part):
While we make the technical point that these emissions are unlikely to cause a ‘runaway greenhouse’, very severe and dangerous climate change is a real possibility.
Specifically: The meta-analysis paper finds that anthropomorphic climate change is "unlikely" to cause boiling oceans. The video, on the other hand, is concerned that we will cause a "runaway greenhouse effect", causing the oceans to boil away. Which does at least show that
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What if we cause "global warming?
I don't know what this means. We've caused it. Every ounce of CO2 added to the atmosphere cumulatively causes some warming.
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> You may not be old enough to remember but I am; a
> new ice age was coming. Then, no, massive flooding
> and places like NY would be under 15 ft of water.
Well, you may not be old enough to remember; but it was only about a decade ago that hurricane Sandy absolutely wrecked New York and New Jersey. And that was just a piddly little Cat 1 when it hit. Just 20 years before that, a Cat 1 wasn't even worth losing sleep over. I lived in Florida most of the '90s. So I have plenty of hurricane exper
Re:Deliberate strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Sandy wasn't a "superstorm" because climate change made it into a deadly monster... it was a superstorm because, like pre-Andrew Dade County, coastal NJ and NY let its guard down, and allowed developers to build with complete disregard for the eventuality of hurricane-force winds and storm surge.
If a storm exactly as intense as Sandy hit Miami, it would have been no different than a storm like Katrina (which smacked Miami as a category 1 hurricane, and definitely made a mess that lasted a few days, but wouldn't have even been particularly noteworthy if it hadn't been for the levee failure in New Orleans a few days later).
By the same token, if single-family houses in places like Kansas City and St. Louis had to meet post-Andrew Dade County building codes, an EF0 or EF1 tornado would do as little damage there as they do in Dade or Broward County -- basically, throwing lawn furniture and outdoor trampolines onto people's roofs, and crushing cars under falling trees, but otherwise doing very little besides "make a big mess" unless they hit a trailer park. Impact-resistant laminated glass windows DO have their passive-protection perks when something like a little baby tornado touches down.
BTW, most people don't even REALIZE that Florida has the most urban tornadoes per square mile per year of any state in America. Mostly, because when they happen here, they run into buildings that are pre-fortified for Cat3+ hurricanes and don't do much. Throw the same storm at a neighborhood of stapled-together McMansions elsewhere in the US, and the whole neighborhood gets left in ruins.
Today's storms do seem to be a bit more frequent and intense than past storms, but most of the exponential increase in storm damage is just due to the fact that the amount of stuff built in coastal areas has increased exponentially. Per-capita, the impact of a landfalling hurricane in Miami today is probably a FRACTION of what it was a hundred years ago. A century ago, a direct hit by a category 3 hurricane was almost guaranteed to kill hundreds or thousands of people, and leave almost everyone within 10-20 miles of its eye either homeless or a half step short of it.
Before anyone mentions the flooding that occurred in Doral and Sweetwater (two areas in western Miami) after Tropical Storm Irene in 1999... blame the environmentalists who were running SFWMD at the time. See, the Everglades is FLAT... but it's not particularly low-lying. ~125 years ago, there was actually a waterfall & whitewater rapids in the Miami River near present-day Miami International Airport (and a large water control structure built to eliminate the waterfall and rapids).
In the 1960s and 1970s, SFWMD would have prepared for an approaching hurricane by throwing open the floodgates and dumping as much water from the Everglades into Florida Bay as they could, to ensure that when the storm arrived, water levels in the Everglades would be low enough to drain water from neighborhoods in western Miami into the Everglades. Western Miami's natural terrain level was low, but developed neighborhoods inevitably sit on several feet of fill dirt, which ensures that they're high enough to drain into canals that can then "run backwards" and drain into the Everglades. The problem was, sometime in the 80s and early 90s, SFWMD decided "protecting the environment" and "restoring the Everglades" was more important than "keep Miami from flooding". Earlier that summer, SFWMD allowed water levels in the Everglades to rise WAY higher than they'd EVER been allowed to go in the 1960s... then, when it realized Irene was coming, deliberately refused to throw open the floodgates and drain as much as it possibly could, as quickly as possible, because it was "concerned" that Florida Bay's "sensitive ecosystem" would "suffer irreparable harm" if it dumped that much freshwater into it that quickly.
So... Irene arrived, dumped a crapton of water over Miami, and most of it ended up draining into the Miami River. So much, in fact, that SFWMD realized the only way to dr
Re: Deliberate strategy (Score:1)
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Re:Deliberate strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact check says: false.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/an... [carbonbrief.org]
Face it: this has been hashed out to death and the information is more than readily available. To have an opinion enough to post here at this point means you are choosing to be wrong. I do not really comprehend how you believe your emotional state and/or political proclivities will somehow affect reality. The predictions made in 1990 are out there. The temperature measurements are out there.
You have no excuse.
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Fact check says: false.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/an... [carbonbrief.org]
Face it: this has been hashed out to death and the information is more than readily available. To have an opinion enough to post here at this point means you are choosing to be wrong. I do not really comprehend how you believe your emotional state and/or political proclivities will somehow affect reality. The predictions made in 1990 are out there. The temperature measurements are out there.
You have no excuse.
Really? Can you find some mid-2010's ground-level pictures of the Statue of Liberty that show it from sea-level to the above its raised torch, and then find some pictures from the early 1900's from similar vantage points? Compare them and, taking high/low tides into account, tell us how much sea level rise (or fall) is shown?
From what I've seen in similarly-paired pictures is that there is no measurable change in the waterline on the island. What about islands like The Maldives? The Canary Islands?
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Aaah the insane denialists come out in force. And yes insane is the right word. Denying reality is most certainly a form of insanity. And today, your reality denying trick is ... [checks list] ... moving the goalposts!
There is nothing in what you wrote which contradicts my claims that the climate change prediction from 1990 for 2020 have come to pass in 2020.
But you have a new trick up your sleeve:
Can you find some mid-2010's ground-level pictures of the Statue of Liberty that show it from sea-level to the
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This is especially true if you depend on the popular press for your understanding of what they're actually predicting.
If you even read the summary carefully you will notice that they didn't make any particular claim about the future except that it was "concerning" And that there were "possible" dangers. If you want to go beyond that, you need to check what their actual predictions were, and what their error bars were. They did indicate that if certain future events happen, it could lead to rapid changes,
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If you want something more specific, read the actual report. It will be there, and it should be accompanies by error bars and estimates of probability.
Putin (Score:2)
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Well, that would solve global warming.
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"Fast than expected" (Score:1)
The sentence for this century^Wdecade.
Nothing to see here (Score:3)
In the immortal words of George Carlin:
Awesome possum says (Score:2)
You can do it! Don't give up now.
The bad news is for the people, (Score:2)
the glacier doesn't give a damn.
the melt will add weight to the oceans (Score:2)
How many miles (Score:2)
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What YEAR? I guess the first digit will be a 2, and the second digit is unclear. Unlikely to be a 0, however.
Let's Make it Interesting (Score:2)
If anybody wants action on this, I'll take one Bitcoin (Cash chain) payable in 2032 that the seas won't have risen four inches in New York Harbor.
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I'll take one Bitcoin (Cash chain) payable in 2032 that the seas won't have risen four inches in New York Harbor.
Starting from when?
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Does a storm surge count for this rise?
always faster than predicted (Score:1)
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If scientists noticed a cooling trend, they'd be tripping over each other to get their papers on the subject published. Rather, we have scientists looking at trends and deciding, with new data, that the trends are more severe. Now, go get your PhD in physics, do some studies, and then come back with something insightful instead of mouth drool from Fox.
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Oh, how I wish that was the way it was being done. Scientists are using "what-if" models for their predictions. Then when they wait long enough, the actual data catches up to them and show that their models are running just too damn hot. Then (the honest ones) say oops -- as is being done here in this very instance. The media, of course, turn this mistaken prediction based on models into an emotional
The Ball is in Brazil's court (Score:2)
So Now we beg of the Brazil: please elect at least 2/3 of Lula and 1/3 of Bolsonaro.
WE ALL GON DIE!!! (Score:2)
If all the people with the influence REALLY believed this shit, why do they CONTINUE buying property in at-risk flooding zones?
And until they stop with all the performative "Look! We invented a biodegradeable phone case!" crap, and start ACTUALLY working to modernize our power grids, NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN.
So it retreated 100 years ago w/o climate change? (Score:2)
Scientist's Theory Doesn't Pan Out (Score:2)
A more accurate headline.
And Yet... (Score:2)
But NoOne wants to establish a chain of desalinization plants along the USA coastline!
The US Navy has shown that this can be accomplished effectively. Naval personnel have said that their on-ship water comes from the salt water seas that they process for water needs. Why can't the USA do this. The planet is providing the water to meet our needs but nothing is done.
We are wasteful!
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I guarantee that Navin Gruesome has all the water he needs for his winery. Who else matters?
What about the VOLCANO? (Score:2)
You do know that there's a VOLCANO under there, right?
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What does the Volcano have to do with it?
It grew with the volcano before did it not?
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Naw, I will pass on that dog and pony show. It is basically already the premise for the entire fox news channel. It's scripted "Entertainment" there, just as this would be. Same target audience even.
Nope, I will instead make the popcorn for when the sea levels rise, the wealthy financial types in the coastal regions of the world get pushed out by the rising tide caused by their "Externalities" coming home to roost, and their generally being forced to eat a giant dick, due to the fact that collateral damag
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Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:1)
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Re:Just like before (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean, the continuing trend that has been reported at coastal cities since 1900?
https://www.mcny.org/rising-ti... [mcny.org]
Yes. That has remained quite consistent, and why the notion that it is accelerating is worrisome.
Oh wait, you think that just because it wasn't catastrophic bad then, it wont be catastrophic bad now? Oh, my, how silly of you. I suppose you confuse climate with weather too, don't you?
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That is a part of the article which needs better explaining. But just because the explanation-to-laymen is a bit weak doesn't mean the data is wrong. There are always lots of different things going on at the same time, and simple explanations never include all of them. (Actually, even the better models never include all of them, which is why they're occasionally wrong. But that's not the way to bet.)
Re: Just like before (Score:2)
making it more vulnerable to warming waters as a result of human-induced climate change.
No, it's more vulnerable to warming waters regardless of why they are warming.
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"...About 100 years ago, it retreated faster than it is currently retreating..."
Remember about 100 years ago when all the coastal cities were inundated and we had catastrophic flooding worldwide?
Where does it say it completely melted 100 years ago?
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White Christian Internet Snowflakes?
Re: Something bad (or good) happened (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: Something bad (or good) happened (Score:2)
[citations needed]
Re:Are the beach front estates of the wealthy... (Score:4)
Which predictions were wrong? That we would see increasing extreme weather events, so that low lying countries would face increases risks of flooding, that summers would be hotter, resulting in droughts, impacting our our food supplies, winters would be wetter with increased risk of flooding.
All of those happened this year.
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And not just this last year. They've been happening increasingly often.
In the western US one way to track climate change is to track the trees killed by pine beetles. The beetles die off during winter if there's a good freeze.
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Alternately, there could be an increase in owls. They feast on these beetles and their larvae.
Re: Are the beach front estates of the wealthy... (Score:2)
I love in southern California. 3 years ago, owls didn't live here. Now I hear them nightly.
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Which predictions were wrong? That we would see increasing extreme weather events, so that low lying countries would face increases risks of flooding, that summers would be hotter, resulting in droughts, impacting our our food supplies, winters would be wetter with increased risk of flooding.
All of those happened this year.
But I mean - other than that?
Remember though, that droughts will not be universal. Here in PA though, the weather is a lot warmer than usual for this time of year, and has been.
And here's what I think is driving the idiocy of denialism. The idjits just like it warmer. Many humans just have an amazing lack of concern for the future, don't care about others who are suffering now.
But the chickens are coming home to roost, as they say. I believe thatthe effects of methane release were not taken into a
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You're double-counting. Most of the possible methane release is from clathrates, be they within (below) the seabed, or from clathrates in permafrost. Same chemistry (water salinity is a pretty minor factor compared to pressure and temperature), different locations.
As the saleable price of natural gas has improved, the amount deliberately flared has decreased significantly - birds used to
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You're double-counting. Most of the possible methane release is from clathrates, be they within (below) the seabed, or from clathrates in permafrost. Same chemistry (water salinity is a pretty minor factor compared to pressure and temperature), different locations.
Depends on what you mean by double counting. The methane releases in the tundra are underway now. https://www.nps.gov/articles/d... [nps.gov] Some would claim that this is no where near as bad to alarmists might think. Well let's hope.
Oceanic clathrates seem to be staying put so far. I was ringing the alarm about methane before Y2K.
And accidental releases have always been relatively minor (hint : the stuff is fucking dangerous - I used to be paid to detect it, because it's fucking dangerous, to equipment as well as people).
The situation is bad enough that you don't need to double count.
Keeping in mind that my mention was more about timing of release than assigning multiple sources of methane.
Side note mainly of interest - There is a lake a bit north of the Alleghen
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Good work on spotting the potential problems from methane before Y2K. most people didn't.
My pore pressure training course - run by a "Poison Dwarf" called Dave ... whose surname I'm failing to remember now, really nice guy ... in 1990
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Yeah, methane releases are happening in the tundra, right now. But probably most of that, so far, is lake-bottom methane not the much more widespread methane clathrates within the permafrost itself. Essentially the same stuff as you're talking about in your Allegheny PA lake.
Good work on spotting the potential problems from methane before Y2K. most people didn't.
A matter of a bit of being around the right people. I had exposure to a lot of different climate and chemical experts in my career. My own field is electromagnetics, DC to daylight.
I very much enjoyed your post. I just read something that I'm going to research further - first to see if it's true, second to get a non-media reportage of the thing. The MSN report tells us nothing much but the keyword methane caught my eye. https://www.msn.com/en-us/weat... [msn.com]
A bit more intelligent of a report: https://whtc [whtc.com]
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I estimate that as a bit under 200kg/hour. Which would be a screamingly loud leak from a flange - a bit hard to ignore. If it had been from a single well, they'd just have shut that well in. so I infer that it was a leak in an export pipeline, probably downstream from where the process lines merge at the fiducial metering skid. Which then begs (well, to me) the question of what they actually did to break
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FTFA
I estimate that as a bit under 200kg/hour. Which would be a screamingly loud leak from a flange - a bit hard to ignore. If it had been from a single well, they'd just have shut that well in. so I infer that it was a leak in an export pipeline, probably downstream from where the process lines merge at the fiducial metering skid. Which then begs (well, to me) the question of what they actually did to break in the line? Twatted a sample (or pressure) port and fractured the take-off point, I'd guess as most likely. But they should have externally mounted internal patches for that to have it fixed (or taken down to a few kilos/hour) within a few hours. So ... something larger. But what? A large part of the process equipment "up top" is there to take water and corrosive gasses out of the stream (those 36in export pipelines are expensive!), so internal corrosion also indicates an operations problem - a persisting one. Mechanical damage? Well, again, that's why the export lines are on the bottom of the rig - below routine crane activity ( you'd typically need to lift hatches to gain access to the hatches - a PTW operation again).
Are these FPSOs of conventional rigs? Reporting it as an "oil field cluster" sort-of implies conventional construction. Unclear on that point.
Good luck on getting info from Pemex. If there is a Mexican oilfield trade union, I'd say to ask there - they almost certainly have information from the worksite on a daily basis. But I'd also expect the Mexican divisions of Oil.Cos to discourage that at gunpoint - they're anti-union enough in the North Sea.
One inaccuracy :
50 years ago, and onshore, maybe. But most production rigs long ago replaced diesel generators with modified jet engines, fuelled from produced gas, as the prime movers for all the electrical power of the rig - and also burned gas when needed for "process" heating. Surplus gas went to maintaining the "inventory dump" flare (a safety device) and only then to actually flare. A lot of the chemical engineering of the topsides goes to maintaining a steady state in the process plant - and therefore predictable loads on power supply, pipework, and the rocks down hole, which reduces maintenance costs (note emphasis). Sporadic loads - like testing a well after workover - would go through a non-process stream ("test separator", "test KO drum", confusing labels like that) and then into the flare. Until the well's steady state potential has been determined, and the well can be reliably brought into production.
Sounds like a pretty major leak, caused by an operations fuck-up of the first rank. They won't admit that publicly, and the person responsible will be either shot, fired, or sent to work in a horrible punishment posting, depending on how much influence he has. Had.
If we ever meet over a pint, I'll tell you the tale of "Dumb-Fuck Kevin", who was last heard of on a "punishment" posting to offshore Vietnam. His third successive punishment posting - he'd arrived in the North Sea with the "Dunb Fuck" name already firmly in place. Dad was a High Heid'jun, hence the sequential postings.
Oh, that sounds like an interesting story. At least he kept his job. Then again, people who really mess up can often be good employees afterward. A Vietnam posting could be extra torture if he was constantly sent pix of the beautiful women there (that's based on some folks I know who came back from the place with local wives, and a colleague who was stationed there during the conflict. He brought back pictures (all G-Rated for anyone reading) of the locals.
Note, my university uses something similar. A g
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When you're in-country, you're on call 24x7, on a cockroach-infested rig with shit food. You may, if you're lucky, get one night "on the tiles" in town on the way out of country. And that'll be in whatever town is closest to the rig (which moves every couple of months) to minimise helicopter fuel and flying hours.
I had a colleague come back from Vietnam once - 15 hour flight with continuous diarrhoea, which h
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I'm so old I remember how back in May they said we'd probably run out of hurricane names this year due to the climate threat.
Re: Are the beach front estates of the wealthy... (Score:2)
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Not as disastrous as claimed? The deaths from flooding in Pakistan for example, or the flooding risk in the Sunderbans which has already displaced many and has the potential to displace millions more. The drought in Europe with associated wildfires has been bad enough, but as it keeps happening is likely to mean areas of olive trees are likely to fail, probably for the foreseeable future.
I put no words in your mouth. You say that the "predictions have been consistently wrong", but give no examples. It's not
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How's that, exactly?
Re:Are the beach front estates of the wealthy... (Score:5, Informative)
And when someone like me does try to bring a little nuance to the conversation and deny the sky is falling he's automatically a troll because only a troll would have anything to say about this except "we're all doomed". Trying to communicate anything even slightly politicized here is a real black pill.
Re:Are the beach front estates of the wealthy... (Score:5, Informative)
Can't see all of these but:
1) Ozone depletion a great peril to life -- true, partially averted by conserted international agreements
2) Acid Rain kills life in lakes -- don't know about the specific lakes, but acid rain from the UK did indeed cause mass die back of trees -- reverted by legislation
3) "Ice age" -- all predictions based on a geological trends over geological time where we do not understand the mechanism
4) Urban citizens will require gas masks. Became true in many cities (Mumbai, Beijing): partly reverted by legislation
5) Killer bees -- somewhat sensational reporting, and not entirely related to climate change, but one example of many invasive species that have caused massive damage. In terms of climate change, yes, we are seeing migrations here. We have parrots in London now. Mosquitoes are surely not far behind. Averted and mitigated in some specific cases, mostly by government action.
6) Children will not know what snow is: written from a UK perspective, but depending on the age of "children" and where in the UK, yes, this is becoming true. It certainly snows much less.
7) "peak oil" multiple times. Indeed, none of these were true, and the world is a worse place for it.
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Mosquito species that can carry malaria are already endemic in southern Italy. They'll be in the Great Wen within a few years.
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Peak oil estimates were based on usage trends at the time they were made. Previous predictions didn't have foreknowledge of technological changes/adoption like EVs, renewables and fracking. EVs/renewables are mostly good but still stress other limited resources like lithium. Fracking contaminates groundwater and is basically "scraping the barrel" in terms of overall yields. Covid-19 reduced shipping and aviation which will buy a little more time. OPEC have reduced output (increasing prices) as a delaying ta
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Apples and oranges.
It is of note that those so-called failed predictions are generally not accompanied by objectively measurable and irrefutable factual data about the past and present, which the current most popular climate change model utilize. The fact is that we are seeing a completely unprecedented in human history greater frequency and intensity of so-called "extreme weather events". This has been happening for a number of years now, and there is no working theory to explain this other than the
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Obama and Pelosi and Algore have all done just that....