Half of Glaciers Will Be Gone By 2100 Even Under Paris 1.5C Accord, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 164
Half the planet's glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if humanity sticks to goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, according to research that finds the scale and impacts of glacial loss are greater than previously thought. At least half of that loss will happen in the next 30 years. From a report: Researchers found 49% of glaciers would disappear under the most optimistic scenario of 1.5C of warming. However, if global heating continued under the current scenario of 2.7C of warming, losses would be more significant, with 68% of glaciers disappearing, according to the paper, published in Science. There would be almost no glaciers left in central Europe, western Canada and the US by the end of the next century if this happened.
This will significantly contribute to sea level rise, threaten the supply of water of up to 2 billion people, and increase the risk of natural hazards such as flooding. The study looked at all glacial land ice except for Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. If temperature increases are limited to 1.5C of warming, average sea levels would increase by 90mm (3.5in) from 2015 to 2100, but with 2.7C of warming, glacial melt would lead to around 115mm of sea level rise. These scenarios are up to 23% more than previous models had estimated.
This will significantly contribute to sea level rise, threaten the supply of water of up to 2 billion people, and increase the risk of natural hazards such as flooding. The study looked at all glacial land ice except for Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. If temperature increases are limited to 1.5C of warming, average sea levels would increase by 90mm (3.5in) from 2015 to 2100, but with 2.7C of warming, glacial melt would lead to around 115mm of sea level rise. These scenarios are up to 23% more than previous models had estimated.
Threaten water supply? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok..I'm puzzled and maybe someone can explain it here.
How will dumping more water from melted glaciers threaten people "supply of water"?
Seems like you're putting more water into the "system", not less?
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If sea level rise occurs as some are predicting (HUGE IF) saline water will contaminate fresh-water reservoirs. The thing about the sea is - water water everywhere but not a drop to drink..
Re:Threaten water supply? (Score:4, Insightful)
Desalination exists therefore your point is irrelevant.
I think you've dramatically exaggerated the ability of third-world nations to pay for desalination plants to be constructed.
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I think he's dramatically exaggerated the ability of first-world nations to pay for desalinization.
Those plants are expensive and take a lot of maintenance. If it were a reasonable approach California wouldn't be having a drought problem.
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There are profits to be made on a scarce resource.
Our local water company is fighting against building the desalination plant that the california coastal commission and PUC have approved -even tho the voters have approved a special tax to pay for the construction costs. Reason stated: "It is not needed". Meanwhile water rates have quadrupled.
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We're talking about needing desalination not only for drinking water supplies but also just to water crops. The increased food costs this would result in alone would be a major problem and betting everything on future tech is a big gamble. Better to not have these problems to begin with by doing our best to limit global warming now.
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Guess which of those we ended up with.
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ATMs were supposed to reduce costs which would get passed onto customers.
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Desalination plants aren't cheap, but they're not horribly expensive either as long as you have the power. Heating water and collecting the steam is a dead simple process.
Desalination is horribly expensive. Not just in electricity costs but also in potential damage to the surrounding environment. If it wasn't difficult then California, whose economy alone ranks just below Germany, wouldn't have drought and drinking water problems.
You cannot just assume that technology will fix everything. We don't really know what areas technology will make strides in. Today we have supercomputers in our pockets, but still don't have flying cars. Desalination on a mass scale may not be econ
Re: Threaten water supply? (Score:2)
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Name two countries that are going to send the US foreign aid money for us to do this?
Re: Threaten water supply? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Threaten water supply? (Score:4, Informative)
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Lake mead, which soon may be too low to supply power or water, is fed by the Colorado river. The river is fed by glaciers in the mountains.
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The river is fed by snow melt and rain, primarily. Yes, there is some glacial melt. Most snowpack doesn't turn into glaciers.
Re:Threaten water supply? (Score:4, Informative)
But the glaciers slow down the snow melting and that is the trick. Without that you get floods in the spring and no water in the summer. Not conductive to survival.
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Dams are already in place for flood control all along the major drainages. Increase capacity or build more or budget the water more carefully. It's a matter of having the storage capacity available in the spring to handle runoff. That might mean larger draw downs in fall and winter under expectation of higher runoff in spring.
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Nope. There are some dams in place to generate electricity and (fewer) as limited water reservoirs. They do not matter in the greater scheme of things for replacing the effects of glaciers. There are wayyyyy too few of them, with too little capacity and, in addition, for most water from melting snow you do not even have places were you reasonably could build a dam to contain it.
So no. Not a feasible solution in almost all places.
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many areas rely on meltwater from accumulated snow/ice for their water supply.
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This is really simple: When the glacier is gone, the natural melting during the summer (replenished in the winter) falls away. This summer-melting keeps water in rivers. If it falls away, no more water in the summer. Oh, and floods in the spring. The thing is the glacier keeps the winter-snow from melting too fast.
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Many (most?) places get their fresh water from things like rivers that ultimately start as snowfall in mountains. You get more water while the glacier is melting, but once it's gone you get less. There's also usually some seasonality involved. For example, in the winter while there's more rain or less runoff (because the water falls as snow), and less agricultural demand, the snow builds up in the mountains. Then it supplies the rivers during the summer.
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Re: Threaten water supply? (Score:2)
Those first two items, separated by a comma, are part of a list and not cause-effect. The loss of drinking water is because there are two billion people on the planet that get their drinking water from glacial runoff. Think Northern India.
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With the cycle of the planet (tilt rotation, etc.), we'll need 900,000 years of data to get an accurate model of climate.
Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of waiting 900,000 years to get all the data you want. We have to work with what we have, and what we have clearly indicates that we are in a period of human-induced warming.
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Ugh... you really think we need hundreds of thousand of years to understand what's happening with global warming?
We know for a fact CO2 traps more heat than other elements of our atmosphere, we can test this in a lab. Skewing our atmosphere to include more CO2 will therefor increase our atmosphere's heat retention. More retained heat means higher overall temperatures. This isnt a hard thing to understand.
I can understand why someone might have problems wrapping their head around the fact that the temperatur
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This isnt a hard thing to understand.
We also know that more clouds increase the albedo of the earth. Some factory pollutants will reflect sunlight. We certainly improved our health outcomes, but did that pollution actually helped us as far as warming? One math equation does not make up an entire system. There's a lot to the entire cycle we simply don't understand. Knowing one single part does not make for an overall model.
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You're asking for more data than necessary, so much so that I'm doubting you have honest motivations in your posts and arent just trying to spread denialism. The data shows the earth is warming and at and ever increasing rate that matches out increased output of pollutants https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/acce... [noaa.gov]. and we know those pollutants retain heat. The model fits reality quite well.
If we waited for the absurd level of certainty you seem to want on anything in this world we'd never accomplish anything.
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... but understanding the basic warming part is something everyone should be able to understand.
The problem with that is that many people actively refuse to understand what is going on. Otherwise they would have to face that they cheered for a species-destroying strategy and, even worse, they may have to change their lifestyle. When faced with such challenges, many people prefer to as small children do and just vehemently claim the problem does not exist. Of course, that makes things much, much worse. If we had started decisive actions when the science was solid (so around 1980) we would be in pretty
Does anyone... (Score:2)
Re: Does anyone... (Score:2)
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I'm happy to not be born in 2100+.
Almost everyone is going to be better off in 80 years than they are today even with 2+C degree increase in temperatures. Not as well off as if our generations step up and prevent drastic climate change, but technology advancements are likely to be astounding. Considering technological change tends to accelerate, in 80 years things we will likely see improvements comparable to the last 100-200 years of advancement. Comparing 2100 to today will be like comparing today to a world without electricity and runnin
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Especially in wartime. I hope it doesn't take one or more major wars during the next 80 years to bring about the advances we'll need. Of course, there's always the fact that the higher temperature will evaporate more seawater and that some of it will condense into rain over land, providing us with more fresh water. How much that will help, I've no idea, but it's something we should be taking into account instead of just assuming that all of the ch
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Are you stupid or what? With a collapsed civilization there will not be any more tech advancements.
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https://www.rferl.org/a/macedonia-fake-news-sites-us-election-conservatives/30906884.html
Not a chance! Between first world deniers hindering much needed change and the third world's ever increasing use of climate harming power supplies there's no way we'll keep it below 1.5C.
Doesn't mean we shouldnt keep trying though
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Thermodynamics says that carbon capture will cost more in energy that you got by releasing the carbon in the first place. So you're ALSO postulating a huge source of more energy than we can use. You might be able to do that with large fields of solar panels, where the carbon capture was in the form of liquid hydrocarbons, and the excess got stored, but I can't imagine that it would never get used. (Possibly, though, it could be used for making plastics, and wouldn't end up in the atmosphere.)
You could do
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Some scientists have really convincing arguments we are already at 2.5C "locked in", i.e. nothing can be done about that anymore. 1.5C is a pipe dream, nothing else, pushed by deniers that do not want to face reality.
Incidentally, civilization collapse is is already possible at 2.5C. But I guess the deniers will only be satisfied if we reach 4C (at which human extinction is a very real possibility) because fighting climate change is "leftie" or "socialism" or "for weaklings" or some such suicidal dysfunctio
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Our great grand children will be asking why we didn't just purge all these people in our way
Do we need to purge people who think they are not part of the problem too?
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That's the problem. Yes, those who think they aren't a part of the problem are a huge part of the problem. But would you trust the government with that kind of power? You *know* that even if they were to use it properly this time, they wouldn't give it up once the emergency was solved.
Actually, I'm not convinced we aren't already committed to a rise of 2, or even 3 degrees. And we should have started dealing with it decades ago, when it became obvious that it *was* a problem. But it's a sort of "traged
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Well, human incapability to deal competently with the problem may well be the end of the human race. Entirely deserved, at least as a group.
Why should I care? (Score:5, Funny)
-- Boomers and other selfish individuals
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lifestyle choices aren't where people should be focused. That is what marketing campaigns try to make us focus on, so companies can keep up business as usual. We need to focus on the politicians each generation is voting for and what changes those politicians are fighting for. That is where real change will happen, and so far the younger generations are the ones pushing this change.
Trying to get people to recycle isn't a plan to save the planet, it is a plan to allow companies to continue making plastics at
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We need to focus on the politicians each generation is voting for...
I don't know how things are where you are, but here in the United States, the Party has almost everyone thinking that "Team Red" and "Team Blue" are their only choices.
Meanwhile, the Party's corporate ownership uses their marketing teams to keep up business as usual.
As always, I invite anyone to prove me wrong.
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They really are two different groups angling for power. It's just that both of them are after power, and both feel that centralizing power in the government is their best choice. So they aren't that different in their basic goals. The Dems are slightly more concerned about avoiding bad press (which is why they concentrate more on various media). The Repubs are a bit more interested in the very wealthy controlling everything. (But only a bit.) And they've got different sponsors, though that changes ove
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the younger generations are the ones pushing this change.
People are saying this at each next generation. Current generation is as dumb as other, dreaming of big cars, eating burgers. Check tiktok, see what is popular there (spoiler: not eco influencers).
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Sorry, living in dense urban areas is less generally destructive than living in a more spread out way. Of course, the real benefit would be to decrease the population, but I'm not volunteering for that, are you?
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It DOES start at home because the reason that almost all industry, manufacturing, mining, farming, forestry, commerce exists is so that people can become consumers and buy the stuff companies produce to make our 21st century lifestyle overly cushy and lazy!
If consumers cut down then there will be reduction all along the manufacturing chain which means less GHG and less pollution. Might not be good for jobs though, but the rich trust fund never-had-to-work-a-day-in-their-life climate activists can't
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Between boomer and the last gen, there are 3 or 4 gens. We didn't do anything either, still driving cars, eating meat and buying more things than needed, like boomers. I bet my lifestyle generates more co2 than the lifestyle of my parents.
Why should I do anything? No one else is, and if I'm the only one doing it, then 1) the effect is too small to do anything, and 2) it just makes my quality of life go down. The only sensible thing for me to do is continue in my own best interest. Having children might change that attitude, but there's no getting around point 1 - you need *billions* of people to do something to make a difference, and being the first to move puts you at a disadvantage over those who wait.
Same thing is more or less true of cou
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It's not like you have a choice (Score:3)
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We didn't do anything either, still driving cars, eating meat and buying more things than needed, like boomers.
I got rid of my car for a few years. It wasn't great. If you need more than two bags of groceries in a single trip, it's actually really bad.
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I'll be long dead by then
-- Boomers and other selfish individuals
Including the economist who is the biggest enabler for inflationary monetary policy - and who had no children - John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead!"
(That's one reason I prefer the likes of Hayek, Friedman, add Adam Smith.)
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âoeIn the long run we are all dead...â
â John Maynard Keynes, the favorite economist of /.ers.
Same as always (Score:2)
These scenarios are up to 23% more than previous models had estimated.
That's the problem with climate modelling - there are so many factors and interactions that we don't know about, and it seems they almost always make even the most dire model-based predictions hopelessly optimistic.
And then there are the unexpected consequences, such as Alaskan waterways becoming acidic and turning orange [wired.com]. So there's yet another way that global warming is messing with the potable water supply.
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Not all the models are hopelessly optimistic. But the IPCC, at least, trims the more pessimistic forecasts from it's predictions.
OTOH, is the orange water undrinkable? If it's really iron oxide, then it shouldn't cause any problem. Iron oxide is not bioavailable, so it should be like drinking water with fine sand particles in it. (Things that live in that water might reasonably have a very different opinion.)
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But the IPCC, at least, trims the more pessimistic forecasts from it's predictions.
To be more precise, the IPCC trims the most unrealistic/unsupported forecasts from its predictions. Those just happen to be the most pessimistic.
Sure they will (Score:2, Informative)
LA Times 2009: "all of Montana's glaciers would be gone in 2020" ,
(The Independent inÂ2000): "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past"
(The Vancouver Sun in 2008) "Snows of Kilimanjaro to Vanish by 2020"
(Lancaster Eagle-Gazette in 2013) "Arctic summers may be ice free by 2020"
1989 Noel Brown, director NY office of the United Nations Environment Program: âoe10ââyear window of opportunity to solveâ global warming or âoeentire nations could be wiped off the face of Earth by risi
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You do realise that newspapers aren't peer reviewed journals, right?
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You do realise that newspapers aren't peer reviewed journals, right?
They are not even peer-reviewed toilet paper in many cases
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Your takehome? "They said they'd all be gone by 2020 and they weren't!!"
Do you not see the real issue here?
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Yeah but if you look at the cycles closely we were basically supposed to enter a new ice age by now. The fact that it's going the other direction it means we're entering uncharted territory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Or for a more anthropocentric (and entertaining) timeline:
https://m.xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
Oh oh a fantasy thread! (Score:2)
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I suppose we would have a lot of time to study it. I have no real idea of when or what actual form an ongoing event like that would entail or how long it would take to reach stability or even the knock-on effects. Just making up a story, based on what I think woul
Soylent Green (Score:2)
Soylent Green will be People, it seems.
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All Glaciers WILL disappear (Score:2)
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Incidentally, should that happen we will have glaciers, but we will not have crops anymore. That is an extinction-level scenario.
Climate change is misunderstood. (Score:2)
Most people don't understand the purpose of climate change activism. It is not to "save the planet" or to stop the climate from changing. It is something much more immediately practical.
Whether or not the warming goals are achieved is entirely secondary to the agenda. The primary purpose is to provide the rationale for Doing Something(TM), where that something is to sequester large sums of money from the public purse into the private bank accounts of corporations.
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Are you stupid, a paid shill or just utterly evil?
I'm way ahead of them (Score:2)
Glacier Melt the new Cheap Reliable Fusion Power (Score:2)
Re: LOL (Score:2, Insightful)
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No one believes the self-anointed High Priests of Global Warming anymore.
Just because maw and paw at the waffle house don't believe AGW is real doesn't mean "no one" does.
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https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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It speaks to the question of the trend over 20K years, yes glaciers have been retreating for a while. This post is not about that last part.
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By Gadd sir, you have discovered Geology!
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That would be true if icebergs had the same salinity as sea water. They don't. Fresh water doesn't have the same density. Result, change in sea levels, although for icebergs it's minute. Glaciers and ice sheets are the problem.
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It's yall that needs to understand what is being discussed. Land based glaciers are not icebergs.
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omg, I love ice-hole fishing; drop in a lil bait, go do something else and come back to see what's for dinner
while always fun, this time I got nothing but on-the-spectrum types; too easy and not tasty at all, throwing all of you back
seriously, is it really a wonder why you don't get invited to parties? and another thing, even if your doctor says it's ok, never read anything from Jonathon Swift
translated to slashdot-ese: WHOOSH!
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No, it will not be. And only people massively lying to themselves can say things like that.
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Why is OK to "think of the children" only a few generations ahead?
Probably because it is nearly impossible to get people to change their behavior on behalf of their grandchildren, let alone people they will never meet.
Simpson's quote says it more humorously B-) (Score:2)
What really distinguishes humans is our capability to adapt. We will need to shift our focus back to mastering and shaping the environment to suit us. Earth is a mother alright, just not the kind hippies think it is, and it will slap us around regardless of what we do to. Living in harmony with the planet is not a long term strategy.
Or, as Charles Montgomery Burns said:
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You are just grasping at straws to find reasons to ignore what is going on. How repulsive.
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If you want to find confidence intervals, look at the original papers rather than at the sensationalistic press. In a very weak sense I agree with you, but since you already know that the popular press almost never includes confidence intervals, the comment seems .. foolish? absurd? Designed to mislead people?
Well, anyway unreasonable.
Unfortunately, when I looked at https://www.science.org/doi/10... [science.org] I found I'd need to subscribe.
The data you are asking for is reasonable, but The Guardian is not a reasona
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I'm more worried about an ice age. How much energy do you think it would take to stave off an ice age? Do you know about milankovitch cycles?
We have a thousand years or more to solve that problem.